[Playbook] How to just absolutely crush your conference marketing 🔥
conferences don't have to be a waste of money
Conferences can cost a LOT of money. 👀
Let’s say you go for the cheapest possible booth (which alone might cost you $5k for the space); you’ll likely have to pay another $5k for the booth design/construction, maybe $1k for lighting, and then you need to fly your team out there, pay for hotels for multiple nights, plane tickets, food, etc.
Showing up for even the cheapest conference might end up in the $10k-$20k range for a multi-day event.
If you don’t execute correctly, a conference can quickly become a money-fueled dumpster fire.
But if you DO execute them correctly, they can be one of the absolute most impactful things your business does. Especially if you have a high ticket price B2B product.
Here is everything you need to know about how to maximize the impact of conferences.
Rule #1: The most important part of a conference, is standing out
Walk through a busy conference hall and it’s a barrage on your senses. Vendors stopping you to talk about their products, attendees rushing past booths, some announcement is blaring on the speakers.
The trick to conferences is standing out in this environment.
The absolute worst thing you can do is blend into the chaos of the vendor hall. The returns of conferences are drastically skewed to those who are able to stand out.
This plays out really heavily in the “package” you pick to show up.
Most events will have some kind of “bronze / silver / gold” deal going on.
[bronze] tiny booth $5k, no promotions
[silver] medium booth $10k, some promotions
[gold] big booth $25k, lots of promotions
What most organizations do is they start with the tiny booth. They think to themselves, “oh we’ll just try out this event and see if it works for us”. The problem is that the ROI on a tiny booth is like .5x, and the ROI on the big booth is 4x.
The tiny booth blends into the chaos, the big booth stands out. The returns of upgrading don’t scale 1:1, they are exponentially greater.
After you pick your booth, you need to do everything you can to make sure your booth stands out. This feels extremely obvious but it’s actually insanely tricky because the same booth design company makes all of the booths.
For Rupa Health, we show up as astronauts.
Our team goes to big stuffy medical conferences where everyone is in a suite a tie, and we wear sparkly space suits. There is music blasting, we are dancing, we walk through the halls, and everyone says, “whoa why are there astronauts here?”
Our design theme is visually disruptive, it literally has nothing to do with our branding. 🧑🚀
Rule #2: It’s not just about showing up, it’s about HOW you show up
If you’re a tiny booth stuck in the far back, it almost hurts your brand to show up to a conference. Even if the booth was free and your tickets + hotel were comped, it can actually be a damaging experience to show up in the wrong way.
Conferences are like a giant concert, you want your company to be headlining the event … because if you’re not headlining the event, then you’re not headlining the event.
These things can have an insane impact on how people view your brand, especially if you’re a digital product/service.
How you show up at a conference is how those users are going to think about you for the rest of the year. It’s the anchor about how those users are going to talk about you to their friends.
Showing up well:
Big booth
Amazing design that stands out
“Headliner” promotions
Book signing with industry leader
Social proof from other attendees
NOT showing up well:
Tiny booth, stuck in the back
Poor design that blends in
No event promotions
“Empty restaurant effect”, negative social proof
It’s not just about collecting 20 leads vs 200 leads, it’s about what those people think of your product & brand after they talk to you. You want to leave people with an insanely strong and powerful impression, it will create a drastically higher ROI.
Rule #3: Deeply understand where your ROI is going to come from before you show up
Conferences are super powerful for B2B products that have a high ticket price, but the ROI of these things goes way beyond basic lead generation.
You can think of conferences as one of the most powerful brand impressions you can buy. If there are 1,000 people at a conference and it costs you $100,000 to show up, your CPM is about $100,000.
That’s REALLY expensive vs Facebook or Google ads.
But it gives you the chance to have an insanely strong impact on a critical handful of people. If you can close a single deal worth $100,000 & can do 5-10 of these at an event, all of a sudden, conferences start to make a LOT of sense.
Basic math to make $100k on an event work:
100 deals worth $1,000
10 deals worth $10,000
1 deal worth $100,000
If you’re selling $100 widgets, these things just aren’t going to work for you.
Conferences work for Rupa Health because an average practitioner will spend tens of thousands (if not hundreds) on lab testing every year. We show up to an event, bring on 100 new users, and that is easy ROI.
Add in the fact that we’re a 3-sided marketplace which means our lab partners are a critical piece of our revenue (THEY show up to the same conferences too), and the ROI of these events becomes exponential.
But in addition to all of the direct sales - there is a lot of insanely intangible benefits to having our team come to conferences.
Rupa is a remote company and we rarely get the chance to see our users in real life. At almost every big event, we bring key members from our product team who get to talk with our users IRL & watch them use our product. Multiple times this alone has led to an ROI that pays for the event by giving us deeply meaningful product insight.
Conferences are also super powerful for team morale & hiring. Do these things well, and all the other vendors/attendees start thinking to themselves, “damn, I want to work for that company.”
The ROI from conferences comes not just from being able to sell high ticket price products, but from being able to talk to your users IRL, and recruiting/HR benefits as well.
Rule #4: The most profitable perks, aren’t on the menu
Most people only show up to the events and don’t look at the organization as a whole. The menu that these events hand you are designed to get you to spend as much money as possible at the event.
Some of the items are worth it. Some aren’t. The BEST items aren’t on the menu.
I’ve found that, almost always, getting the event to send out a dedicated email about our product to their newsletter can result in anywhere between 50-100% of the signups we get from simply showing up to the event.
These organizations can’t send out 100 dedicated emails about each of the vendors, but they’ll do it if you’re their #1 sponsor.
The big conferences we go to are rarely negotiated as “just the conference” but rather part of a much larger package that goes far beyond the event.
We want to be a headliner for the event, but we also want to sponsor all of their digital inventory, email lists, social pages, etc. We want to work together on content, to bring their organization onto our platform, and a ton more, depending on the exact organization.
If you’re simply showing up to an event, you’re likely not thinking big enough about how to effectively optimize the partnership.
The most effective and highest ROI ways for someone to promote you, they won’t be able to offer to everyone - which means if it’s on some menu/media kit, you should dig deeper into what’s being held back.
Rule #5: Give them swag that needs to be carried, and brought home
Swag is a pretty critical piece of conference marketing; done right, and your logo saturates the event, done poorly and it ends up in the trash (again, bad for brand).
When people go to events, they usually want to bring something home for someone they care about. Kids, spouses, etc.
Swag that makes good gifts has been pretty universally effective. For Rupa we use little “Rupanauts” stuffed bears in astronaut costumes. People duel to the death for these things and then carry them around all over the conference (too big for a backpack).
I think RevenueCat does a good job with their cat socks, and there’s a company I can’t remember (but I remember their swag) that had amazing sloth plushies.
Big, cute, bulky swag designed to be a gift, tends to do pretty well.
Things that DON’T do well are smaller and easily hidden. T-shirts, stickers, pens, fliers, etc, all end up in the trash on the way home from the event.
Show UP, stand out, make money, find perks, & gift swag
I hope this helps, it’s the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of thousands spent on a LOT of conferences, and millions of dollars in ROI. If there’s only one thing that you take away from this article, let it be rule #1 - you must stand out.
Flash mobs, astronaut suites, pop-up concerts, puppy play pit, celebrity drive-by, cosplay squad, strobe lights … figure it out. 🔥
If you find yourself “almost” getting kicked out of the event, you’re likely doing it right. Conferences can be one of the most impactful things your business does, especially if you’re in the B2B space with the potential for high ticket value sales - execute correctly and watch your ROI skyrocket. 📈
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