Conferences: are you taking advantage of these two simple ways to market your event?

Let’s face it. The goal in the marketing of any conference is to increase awareness and thereby, grow attendance. The more people that come to your show, the more money it makes. 

There are plenty of ways to increase attendance like developing mailing lists and direct mail campaigns; advertising in industry-related trade magazines or getting press coverage from journalists that cover your sector.

I'd like to share two inbound marketing strategies that worked great for me.

A few years back I worked with an industry b2b conference. I used these two inbound strategies which ended up being amazingly cost efficient and successful in accomplishing the above two goals: building awareness & attendance.  

While they both require a hands-on resource to manage the campaigns, they cost virtually nothing to implement. I am fairly certain that your conference’s marketing department could handle the additional workload without stressing anyone out, especially, if you have a dedicated social media person.

#1 - LinkedIn Group

The first idea was to create a LinkedIn group for the industry the conference served. Importantly though, I chose not to brand the group around the conference. 

The reason for this was twofold. One, to allow us to monitor who was out there – getting a bird’s eye perspective on what the industry was talking about, and two, to have the group not made up of only conference attendees who might join the group simply because they attend the conference. I wanted to attract prospects we never heard of and those who never heard of us!

We knew anyway that as the season rolled along and we started gearing up for the event that there would be plenty of opportunities to market the show to the group. But the great thing about the LinkedIn group was we could mine it to target specific group members directly based on their relevance and decision making status just by checking their LinkedIn profile. 

In other words, the group provided us with a clean, screened and obviously very interested database/mailing list to market to and mine.

Of course, as with any inbound marketing/social media channel, we were careful not to abuse our relationship and position. 

As the conference and also a group member (not the group manager) we would post relevant industry stories, tips and seminars. This served to get our name out, position us as an industry authority and drive traffic to the conference’s website. We could also slip in important dates here and there. But again, as a group member, we adhered to the 10% rule for self promotion. 

As the group’s manager, we were able to promote and support the conversation. Even talk about the conference as a third party or allow rival conferences go get in on the forum. And as the group’s manager, we could always warn rivals not to use the group as just an advertising platform. Being king does have its privileges.

The result is the group is still growing. In fact it is almost as large now as the conference in size - with only about 50% of group members actually made up of conference attendees.  

In essence, we have reached professionals from our industry from around the world: Prospects that we may never have discovered or found us. And despite these past few years of doom and gloom economy, conference attendance has remained steady and/or grown depending on the year, basically due to the new blood that now attends. 

If your sector is not already served by a LinkedIn group or even if it is, I highly recommend creating your own targeted group to the types of individual/companies your conference benefits. In fact I suggest you drill down your LinkedIn group to your targeted attendee’s sector as much as possible. For example, form a LinkedIn group for “dog walkers specializing in poodles” rather than just “dog walkers,” even if your conference is for dog walkers.

#2 - Industry News Blog – flattery will get you everywhere

The second initiative I created was to make an industry news blog.  The idea behind this was obvious, to make the blog/conference website, the place to go for industry professionals looking for the latest industry-related news.

The results were bigger and better than we could have hoped for.

Using a content collator we picked and published industry news/stories daily.  

Now I need to backtrack for a minute. At the time we created the blog (4-5 years ago), I was new to blogging and didn’t realize that it was bad manners to just clip and paste posts, not to mention copyright infringement. In my defense, I did link to the original stories. 

My ignorance resulted in some of the publishers (newsletters and bloggers) writing me to complain and quickly set me straight. This was actually a blessing in disguise. All of a sudden I was building relationships (albeit off the wrong foot) with some of the leading journalist that covered our industry.     

They now started covering and even wanting to ATTEND our conference for the first time in the conference’s history. 

I also discovered that by just excerpting their stories (as I should have in the first place) and linking back to the full story on their site I accomplished the very same result. 

Through analytics, they knew who was publishing their content and wanted to learn more about us, which again, lead to them wanting to cover us. 

In other words, by publishing others’ content you get their attention and in most cases, favor. Flattery does get you everywhere.    

Now back to our original intention for the blog: be the #1 resource for industry related news.

This happened, and it happened quickly. Within six months we ranked #1 on Google when you searched for X industry news. 

The conference’s website visits grew and conference buzz improved significantly.      

Obviously the blog’s popularity also greatly influenced our SEO results when searching for anything to do with our industry and not just news about it. We jumped to the top of the Google heap. You can credit content creation marketing. 

Today

Since these initiatives were first put in place, the conference changed ownership and headquarters location. 

I kept the LinkedIn group and gave it to a leading consultant serving the industry. She now uses it as a platform to successfully promote her own business and serve the industry.

The blog, they got lazy and stopped updating the content and broke the 10% rule. It’s slowly dropping down the Google charts.

Interestingly, the conference’s marketing manager that took my spot when it switched owners and moved, left her position and is now using my ideas for a rival conference. She is currently creating a new LinkedIn Group and industry news blog. 

I’m flattered. 

It would be great if you can use these ideas to help grow your conference. They work!

If you do, please write and tell me if they are as successful for you as they were for us.  

About Andrew Singer
I provide communications and inbound marketing services to a wide variety of international companies, ranging from hi-tech firms like Siemens and TrackMan to more mainstream clients like Carlsberg, Coloplast, Novo Nordisk and the World Youth and Student Travel Conference. Check out examples of my work in the categories to your right or on my website www.andrewsinger.dk.