📂 Events create memorable experiences with potential customers

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

Events

For hundreds of years now, businesses have been giving potential customers “an experience to remember.”

Big meals, golf trips, suited drivers, nice cars, champagne – all the stuff in the movies. While they feel good for those in it for the ride, they have raised an eyebrow for those on the sidelines, hitting budgets hard and producing ambiguous business results.

Well-executed events can attract, convert, educate, nurture and delight your audience, depending on how strategic and thorough you’re willing to get.

No matter what stage your business is in, events are hard to justify. They cost a lot when money is tight and they’re difficult to measure even when money is readily available.

While they’re near impossible to measure ROI, it doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing.

Similarly to blogging, the ROI may not be clear at first, but it’s critical to building brand and gaining traction long-term.

The strongest relationships are made in person

Your business relies on having customers that are going to last, so relationships matter. And the strongest relationships are made in person. Being able to create and control an entire experience for potential customers is both an incredible opportunity and a delicate risk.

Talking to, entertaining, and facilitating the activities for your event-goers is immeasurably harder than writing blog posts in your cozy office. So of course it’s going to be hard, uncomfortable, and even scary.

Trade Shows

Trade shows are a mixed bag. In general, trade shows are losing intrigue with a decline in content quality, experience, and networking opportunities.

With the wrong mindset or context, a conference will take your money and leave you hungry.

It’s not a conference’s job to do a good job for you. It’s your job to buy their audience and do something with it.

Don’t spend your precious early dollars on them and don’t spend your last ­— you won’t get them back.

Start spending big money on conferences only when they allow you to be specific, aggressive or competitive. That’s impossible when you’re small.

If you’re going to have an impact at trade shows, you have to go big — host your own mini-events, be the biggest sponsor, buy the speaking slots, break the rules.

Otherwise, attend and network.

Pros:

• Face time with potential customers
• GETTING NOTICED
• New to a particular market? Trade shows and conferences are a quick way to get noticed and build a database of new prospects.

Cons:

• Expensive. Let’s face it—exhibiting at trade shows isn’t cheap. In fact, trade shows are usually the largest budget expense for marketing.
• Leads aren’t always qualified. Many companies have scaled back on participating because the quality of leads aren’t happening. Companies don’t always send key decision makers to regional trade shows.
• Unless you’re in the top four or five competing companies within your industry, chances are you may have a smaller booth. If this is the case, it becomes increasingly harder to get people to notice you. It is important to identify your differentiating value and get creative with the distribution of your message in this ocean of over stimulation.

Summits

Hosting your own events can be the best way to get started.

The more you own, the more you control the success or failure of it.

The easiest way to ensure success is to partner up and get more companies involved. Share the effort, the creative and the expense with another company or meetup group that you respect and want to be seen with.

Use tools you already have. Your office can be your venue, your team can be your thought leaders and your customers your first audience.

Creating your own events gives you a tremendous opportunity to create a truly different experience and wow your potential customers. Think about what you respect, what’s missing, the things you don’t like and what you can do that no one else can.

There’s so much out there waiting for somebody to grab it.

And most importantly, spend time with the people that matter: your audience, your opportunities. Sit with them, talk with them, eat with them, have fun with them.

A great example of a well-executed owned event is Drift’s Hypergrowth. Only a couple years in business, Drift decided to take on hosting their very own event.

Everything about Hypergrowth was unconventional: Non-business speakers, no badges or exhibitors, a fun and loose atmosphere, and innovative networking experiences. It was the un-conference.

1,000 people packed the venue, shattering previous records for first-year company events. Hypergrowth was fun, motivational, and personal. It was real — human. 100% unconventional.

And Dave Gerhardt and David Cancel will openly talk about how there was no tangible ROI from the event.

It’s not about the data, it’s about the experience. It’s about the brand.

Pros:

• Complete control over the experience
• Lead quality

Cons:

• Expensive.
• Difficult to pull off
• Hard to promote

Meetups

Meetups are another great way to connect with your prospects, customers, partners, and influencers.

The Meetups.com platform is very straightforward to use and I’ve found that there’s a lot of organic traffic that comes just through the website itself.

Like Google, users often have a very high search intent when using the platform. Users will often join a group, subscribe for updates, and RSVP for an event without hesitation.

Meetups could range from 5 people to 50, or even past 100. But the beauty in a meetup is in sharing common interests. Most meetups are organized categorically by interests, like someone’s job, industry, love of pets, hobbies, political affiliation, or even fanbase.

For SaaS, meetups are a very attractive option because it’s a great way to break into owned events without investing in a ton of infrastructure, time, commitment, or even branding.

Try to structure your meetups around your target audience, using the demographic, firmographic, and customer intel you have to create something magical for them, and only them.

Meetups can be a great way to get started in events because you don’t even necessarily have to have any content. It could be as simple as “Meet other like you!” Go to a bar, a wine tasting, or even a co-working space.

Pros:

• Location-based targeting
• Target based on interest
• Quick and easy to start
• Can be free or (very) low cost

Cons:

• Attendee quality
• Hard to attract more senior level audience.

Speaking Engagements

“Do any event, get on stage, where you can speak to 50+ high quality folks. This always pays off, at least for me.” Jason Lemkin, entrepreneur, investor, and founder of SaaStr

If you’re recognized as an expert in what you do, you might get invited to speak at other people’s events or you can pitch yourself as a speaker once you hear about an event being put together.

If you don’t have a reputation, then you can start by speaking at events for free and then putting recordings of the talk online. Over time, your reputation from small events can move you up to local events, and then to regional events, and then to the large national premiere events where you’ll get the most publicity.

When you’re speaking, it’s critical to not pitch your company or products. Mentioning it is fine, but it should never be about your product.

In my experience, the most effective speeches focus on what your customers are doing or what your customers can do, and then end with “if you’re interested in learning more about how they’re doing this, come talk to me afterwards or email me at .”

But that should be the extent of your pitch for your company.

This can be especially useful for enterprise software companies who are looking for a few big sales. Some of your best prospects might be in the room.

Pros:

• Control over the message and story you tell
• Great for thought-leadership and brand awareness

Cons:

• Hard to measure ROI
• Time intensive
• Expensive to travel

Online conferences and summits

What can you do live that goes above and beyond what you can do on another medium like a podcast, YouTube stream, or webinar?

Counter-intuitive:

• No recordings
• Live panels/roundtables
• Interactive sessions and Q&A

An audience isn’t captive, you have to captivate them.

The big question is: How do you get people to the end?

Easy: One track, one day.

Hard: Multi track, multi day.

“Simulive” — like Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Free vs paid.

Why show up live vs get the recording later?

—Corey

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