DMS was approached by the Iran House of Innovation and Tech to help them promote a B2B event, for Armenian and Iranian companies, and generate leads with our digital marketing expertise.
The Iran-Armenia B2B event was a joint project designated to connecting different businesses from the two countries with one another. Around 30 companies were planning to visit Armenia for business meetings with Armenian companies. The project's end goal was to create a stronger relationship between the countries and helping the businesses find partners for upstream and downstream collaboration. Hence, for the project to be successful, many businesses from the predefined fields had to participate in it.
You can read more about the event in the article wrote by IFP News, which is a media with an official license from Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
The biggest problem we faced while dealing with this project was time or the lack of it. The organizers approached us one week before the event with almost no hope of salvation since they were having trouble with the registration process, specifically businesses interested in the project. Additionally, generating Lead customers for a B2B project is much more difficult than generating B2C clients, thus, thus we had to deal with even higher levels of difficulty.
We had only one week to find 40 potential businesses with our promotional activities. The businesses had to be from the following fields:
Additionally, for the meetings to be productive and bear fruits, the businesses also had to be compatible with one another. For instance, a business that produces sanitizer sprays in Armenia wanted to meet with a company that wants a production facility to lease the facility when it is unutilized. And the other critical point was the fact that we had to make sure each company had at least three meetings for their field connections.
We took two approaches initially to do A/B testing and determine which approach worked best in this case. The first approach was using Lead Generation Ads and the second one was using a link to the Landing page of the event.
In terms of the placement of the Ads we decided upon the followings. One part of the ads was placed on Instagram and Facebook. For this version, we targeted people based on their profession and occupation. For instance, we targeted executive level managers from the predefined fields of business.
The second approach that we took for the ad placements was Google Display. Here, we did not target individuals but chose to display the ads on those websites that would normally get higher engagement and traffic from the target field professionals, e.g., Banks.am, News.am, B4B.am, B24.am, etc.
After the initial test, we found that our first approach, the Lead Generation Ads, worked significantly better; thus, we used those Ads for the rest of the promotional period. To increase the efficiency of our Ads, we then retargeted those people from the initial group who visited the page but did not register. The reason behind this is that you narrow down the pool to people who were interested in the project during the first round, but for some reason, did not register despite the interest.
Our promotional efforts brought vast results. Overall the campaign reached 3804 views. The initial request that we received was registering 40 real businesses, which corresponded to the criteria for the project's B2B meetings. Nonetheless, we were able to register over 80 companies (100% increase), and 61 of them visited the event.
Altogether, over 150 meetings took place, which was greater than the amount that was expected by the Iranian organizers.
The most significant achievement that we would like to note was the relationships that were created through the meetings and the business prospects that it opened for many Armenian companies looking for partners to strengthen their position in the market.