1. Drive For Success:
Getting Attendance at
Your Next Meeting
Presented by Linda Chreno, CAE, IOM
@lindachreno
#EdDay25
October 17, 2012
2. Presentation Takeaways
Create the appropriate blend of new and legacy
marketing initiatives every year
Identify new marketing methods to drive
conference attendance
Understand why marketing pieces must include
memorable images, a clear message, and a
reason to attend
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
3. Conference Marketing
• Outstanding Speakers
• Wonderful Location
• Attendees????
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
4. Marketing 101: The 4 P’s
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
5. Communication Model: AIDA
Attention Interest Desire ACTION
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
6. A–I–D–A
Attention: you only have a few seconds – Grab Their
Attention!
Interest: show the need (reason) your member has for
your association
Desire: show how your association can solve their
problem
Action: Ask for immediate action – tell them exactly
what you want them to do and provide enough
information for them to take the next step. Make the
action as easy as possible!
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
7. I was thinking a lot about
what makes people really
want/crave/anticipate live
events. Yes, it’s the
networking and the
opportunity for education,
the oft-cited reasons given
by event organizers. But, I
felt there was more to it
Michelle Bruno: Posted on
than that. After all, we can
forkintheroadblog.com: network and get information
The Attendee Hierarchy of Needs: A online.
Framework for Making Better Event
Planning Decisions
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno
#EdDay25
8. Awareness Strategy
Need to establish YOUR conference in
the mind of potential attendees
Share of Database
Unrealized Awareness Accessible Awareness
Share of Aware
Mind
Conference Awareness Mutual Awareness Not
Aware
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno
#EdDay25
9. trade show organizers can begin to think about new
ways to market their events and build their communities
by becoming content curators, viewing their exhibitors
as content producers, and positioning the live event as
the “product” being offered for sale.
Michelle Bruno commenting on Jeff Hurt’s blog Midcourse
Correction’s discussion of leveraging content
marketing; her comments are at forkintheroadblog.com
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno
#EdDay25
10. What’s The Most Important?
The List
The Offer
The Format
The Follow-Up
The Analysis
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
11. How Have YOU Been
Reaching Your Audience?
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
12. IDEAS
Speaker Blogs
Past Attendee Blogs
Testimonials
Direct Mail
Twitter
Hashtag Discussion
YouTube
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
13. How About Some
Different Ideas?
Viral Marketing – Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Use of Humor or Cuteness
Include the YOU word
Target buyers of products & services
Add tag line to email from staff – but you need to create
it for them
Offer Coupons – 10% off purchase of association
product
PURLS and QR codes
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
14. More Ideas:
List who is already registered for event by area or name
Ask a speaker to create a 30 second beginning of their
presentation and post on YouTube with link from you
Reward those who tweet, Facebook, or LinkedIn your conference
Use a reminder as part of your shopping cart
Post your event on CVB and Chamber pages – ask them to help
promote.
Request a letter from the Mayor or Governor
ASK sponsors and exhibitors to include information on their web
site and calendar
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
16. How About A Few More:
Staff post meeting on their social media sites – you
never know who they might reach – but make it easy
for them by providing the information and hyperlink
already created
Board and conference planning committee should
promote on their social media sites and websites
Provide chapters with easy to implement promotional
material
FAX and mail are still effective promotional tools
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
17. Use a TAG CLOUD
on your website
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
18. Want to Create A Cloud?
Tagxedo turns words - famous speeches, news articles,
slogans and themes, even your love letters - into a
visually stunning word cloud.
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
19. Build Your Social Strategy
Use everything.
YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, etc
Be a resource
Be genuine
Build community
Peer Promotion
Key Influencers
Posted by Donna on http://www.engage365.org/2012/10/09/event-attendance-promotion-and-social-channels/
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
20. Fiverr.com:
Hilarious and Fun!
Create a simple banner ad
Write a customized limerick
Make a tough decision for you
Tweet your message to thousands of followers
Record a voice over in a native British accent
Add music to your video
Create a QR Code
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
21. Laura Fitton,
aka @pistachio
tweet it out, encourage others to tweet that they are
attending when they register.
provide an official #hashtag to use, and then mention it –
repeatedly – on stage, in conference emails, etc.
have large display screens throughout the event facility
displaying all tweets that use the official #hashtag. many
great apps for this.
explain they can text “join to 40404” to start a Twitter acct –
they can even “fast follow” any Twitter acct by texting
“followlindachreno” to 40404
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
22. MOBILE APPS:
Are they the solution?
Whom Do You Serve?
What Do Attendees Want In Their Conference App?
The Road to Monetization
Your Mobile App Roll-Out & Marketing Plan
Driving Downloads & Raving Fans
Shifting Eyeballs and Ad Revenues from Print to
Digital
Free ebook from CrowdCompass http://www.crowdcompass.com/
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
25. New Real-time Marketing
Work Cycle
http://blog.hubspot.com/
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
26. Set Achievable
Goals for Event
MUST BE MEASURABLE
Increase traffic to your event website by 25% in a 30 day
period
Grow event community adoption rates from 70% to 80%
over a two year period
Increase the number of session feedback survey completion
by 15%
Increase event marketing email open rate by 1% per email
Tara Barnes (@PathableTara) is the Marketing Director for Pathable, Inc
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
27. BOTTOM LINE:
How Do You Convince the Potential
Attendee that they MUST attend your
conference?
Show them the Value
Show them theCostif they
don’t attend
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
28. Good Websites or Apps
Animoto: Turn your photos, video clips, and music into
stunning video masterpieces to share with everyone.
Fast, free, and shockingly easy!
Signupgenius: FREE online tool for creating and
managing group sign up lists and forms. Create public
or private sign up sheets to schedule events
Issuu: mission to empower individuals, companies, and
institutions to publish their documents across all digital
platforms.
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12
29. QUESTIONS?????
What is it you really want to know?
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno 10/15/12 #EdDay25
30. Thank you for
attending my session!
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM
Follow me on Twitter @lindachreno
Lchreno@me.com
#EdDay25
Linda S. Chreno, CAE, IOM @lindachreno
Editor's Notes
Great content has been planned; outstanding speakers have been lined up; a wonderful locations has been selected. Sounds like a successful conference-yes, but only if you have attendees! A critical part of any conference is the marketing or promotion of the conference. Conference marketing cannot be done the same way year after year – new and innovative methods need to be tried. To reach potential attendance, a clear message, memorable images, and a reason to attend must be provided.
Product strategies. How will you design, package and add value to the product. When an organization introduces a conference into a market they must ask themselves a number of questions. Who is the conference aimed at? What benefit will customers expect? How does the association plan to position the conference within the market? What differential advantage will the conference offer over their competitors?Promotion:Where and when can you get across your marketing messages to your target market? Promotion has four distinct elements: advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion. A certain amount of crossover occurs when promotion uses the four principal elements together, which is common. Advertising covers any communication that is paid for, from commercials, radio and Internet adverts through print media and billboards. Public relations are where the communication is not directly paid for and includes press releases, sponsorship deals, exhibitions, conferences, seminars or trade fairs and events. Word of mouth is any apparently informal communication about the product by ordinary individuals, satisfied customers or people specifically engaged to create word of mouth momentum
AIDA is a communication model which can be used by associations to aid in selling their conference or products. AIDA is an Acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.. When a conference is launched the first goal is to grab attention. Think, how can an organization use its skills to do this? Use well-known personalities or members to promote the conference? Once you grab attention how can you hold Interest, through promoting features, clearly stating the benefit the conference has to offer? The third stage is desire, how can you make the conference desirable to the potential attendee – a must attend event? By demonstrating it? The final stage is the purchase action, if the association has been successful with its strategy then the target customer should register for the event.
Utility—the basic tools needed to navigate and participate in the event including food and beverage, registration, signage, charging stations, Wi-Fi, maps, transportation, exhibitor directories, conference agendas, floor plans, or ADA accommodations. Justification—the information needed to justify the ROI of time and resources expended to attend the show including QR codes, digital tote bags, session speakers, programming, show features, content capture devices, and post-show content accessConnection—the human and digital connection needed to communicate and share the experience with others through such channels as matchmaking applications, social media, sporting events (golf tournaments, fun runs, etc.), alternative conference architectures (unconferences, Conferences that Work, etc.) and games (trivia, SCVNGR hunts, opportunities to win badges). Recognition— Attendees want to be heard and recognized. When you give them that opportunity, they will want to attend AGAIN.Understanding—This is not about business. It’s about self. If you give them something that changes their lives, they will definitely want to attend AGAIN.The Takeaway: If you select programming, event features, and technology that fulfills attendees’ needs at each level (technology such as mobile could compete at several levels simultaneously), they will feel as if they have fully experienced your event
Create an online (accessible, searchable) resource library of exhibitor white papers, ebooks, case studies, how-to articles, and video tutorials.Appoint a content marketing officer to sift through exhibitor content and re-shape the resources to meet the needs of the audience.Make all of the content shareable on social media channels.Stop selling the event and start sharing the information.Create a steady (daily) flow of content accessible through one portal—the organization’s blog.Offer excellent content.Ask exhibitors to guest blog.Develop an editorial calendar that covers content from all of the market segments the show covers.Send frequent emails of curated exhibitor content (links back to the show blog) to an opt-in list of recipients.Highlight and promote content that exhibitors have created and posted on their own websites through the show blog.Take the content marketing to the trade show floor, as Jeff Hurt suggests, by asking exhibitors to demonstrate how they are innovators and providing more informal education on site.
MicrositesFor those unfamiliar with the term, a microsite is simply a small website, containing only about five to 10 pages. Events management is a great example of when to use microsites because it can be quite niche and specific.Microsites allow you to gather all the information about a particular event in one place, away from other news and information. You can direct your delegates to one location, where they can find all your promotional materials (flyers, posters, emails, etc.).A microsite also gives you the opportunity to manage your entire event. You can integrate ticket-buying and delegate-management systems into your site. The site can be used to post news, information, comments, and testimonials during and following the event.However, building and maintaining effective microsites take time and effort. You need to make sure that you've got quality content on there that will engage your audience. You also need to ensure that you update the microsite leading up to your event. Don't just build it and hope they will come.You also need to consider search engine optimization (SEO). Ideally, you'd like your microsite to rank well in search engines; however, because it's a new, small site, it will be going up against much larger, older sites.If you've got the time to devote to building and maintaining one, a microsite can be a great means of promoting your event. But if all your time is taken up by organizing the event itself, you might want to try a promotional channel that is slightly less demanding and less time-consuming, such as building a promotional page on your website.
A tag cloud (word cloud, or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites, or to visualize free form text. Tags are usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color.[1] This format is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term alphabetically to determine its relative prominence. When used as website navigation aids, the terms are hyperlinked to items associated with the tag.
As with much technology related, the explosion of social media options for promoting events is nearly overwhelming. It’s not like when I started 20+ years ago and a mailed brochure was all it took. Today you have to like it, pin it, tweet it and post it – just to get started. But while you’re building your social strategy – by whatever channels are best for your audience – keep these thoughts in mind. Be a resource. Social media is not like a direct mail promotion. Ideally, you want to be contributing to a conversation, not hawking your wares. Offer tips from speakers as a way to help your audience and promote your event at the same time.Be genuine. Don’t try to disguise your promotion. If you really believe I’ll benefit from your event, tell me about it. But don’t lure me to your site with a headline and have me find it’s the headline to a sales brochure.Build community. Building year-round communities makes event promotion a year-round activity – and a great way to crowdsource content, too.Peer promotion. Nothing spreads the word about an event faster than a social network. Tweeters, bloggers and industry evangelists become your unpaid marketing team. Use this to your advantage with the planned release of key pieces of event information. (But remember points 1 and 2 above.)Key influencers. Most social networks are very influenced by handful of “rock stars.” What these people do and say matters. It’s important for you to know and involve these rock stars in your event.Use everything. YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, etc. It gives potential attendees the feeling that there are dynamic, interesting things about your event happening all the time, everywhere.
tweet it out, encourage others to tweet that they are attending when they register.share content from and by the panelists and speakers who will be at the event.talk about attendees who will be coming and where they are coming from.provide an official #hashtag to use, and then mention it – repeatedly – on stage.have large display screens throughout the event facility displaying all tweets that use the official #hashtag. many great apps for this.explain they can text “join to 40404” to start a Twitter acct – they can even“fast follow” any Twitter acct by texting “follow pistachio” to 40404thank attendees, connect them to each other as much as possible, and keep the channel open.good ideas for content between events – link to stuff being done byattendees or speakers, RT attendees, write about progress towards nextyear, tweet out photos, videos & blog coverage of the eventthank people for coming, send out links to the videos and presentations fromthe event, keep folks engaged between events with good blog contentremind people about staying in touch with each other, etc.
Real-time marketing demonstrably works -- not just in social channels, but across the marketing spectrum. A recent GolinHarris study finds real-time not only positively impacts standard marketing goals -- word-of-mouth, attention, preference, likelihood to try or buy -- but it also turbocharges other marketing initiatives, including paid and owned media effectiveness.
The key word in that last sentence is measurable. Numbers tell us a concrete story. What exactly are you measuring? In what increments? During what time period? While you may think “I want my attendees to interact with my speakers more,” how will you judge if this is happening, and if it is happening successfully?Here’s an example of the importance of measurable, concrete goals: Let’s say that you want to increase the open rate on your event marketing emails. If you increased your email open rate by 0.005%, would that feel like you’d really met your goal? Creating realistic and measurable goals has to be a top priority for your event and organization.While the goals for every event will be different, I wanted to help you get started with four of our favorite attendee engagement goals.1. Increase traffic to your event website by 25% in a 30-day time period – You can’t measure this without knowing your starting point, so if you’re not currently tracking website statistics, hop to it! Google Analytics is a powerful, free tool.2. Grow event community adoption rates from 70%-80% over a two year period – We recommend comparing a community for the same event. As you approach year two, be sure to note what you’re doing differently to try and grow those numbers.3. Increase the number of session feedback survey completions by 15% – This can be slightly harder to measure if you’re gathering data from paper surveys. A tool like Survey Monkey can simplify the recording and measurement process.4. Increase your event marketing email open rate by 1% per email – Again, tracking is essential here. Consider sending your marketing emails through a program like MailChimp that allows you to easily segment, target, A/B test and track things like open and click through rates.The above are simply meant to be suggestions and ideas as you shape your own event’s attendee engagement goals. Remember to measure! I touched briefly on some tools above but stay tuned for a follow up post on more suggested tools for attendee engagement throughout your event’s life cycle.Reprinted with permission from the Regonline Product Blog.What are you measuring? Did you have a strategy in place that you’re measuring against, or are you just looking for “improvement?” Would love to see some ideas here.Tara Barnes (@PathableTara) is the Marketing Director for Pathable, Inc. In addition to a background in event planning/management, Tara has extensive experience in marketing, social media, communications and public relations strategy.
