Conventions can be fertile ground to meet customers and partners, make new connections, and stay up to date on developments in your industry. They can be quite an investment, however, so making the most of your time and effort at these conferences is a good idea.
We’ve attended many conventions, and we routinely help clients prepare for these events. We have developed a useful checklist to help you organize your time and ensure your materials and outreach are all coordinated to the best effect.
Communication is Key
Convention marketing is a series of strategic, creative communications designed to generate excitement and spur people to connect in person. These can help you strengthen existing relationships or garner a whole new audience. Since people attend conventions precisely because they want to meet personally, proper communication can help you capitalize on that momentum.
Throughout the whole timeline of the convention, keep in touch with your customers, colleagues and attendees. Apprise them of your plans, arrange meetings, promote your brand, and bolster relationships to take full advantage of every opportunity.
Convention Marketing Before the Event
Depending on your time and capability, you want to book your travel plans and sponsorship opportunities up to a year in advance. This allows plenty of time to choose staff who will attend, plan networking events, and even begin to design the look and feel of your booth. Once a convention is booked, you can also add it to your website.
About six months in advance is the time to start thinking about your collateral and swag. Do you need a tablecloth, signs, or promotional items? Six months may seem like a long time in advance, but those materials all have to be designed, approved, made and sent to a printer. Most of all, you want them to be a clear representation of your brand, so you don’t want to rush the details. Allowing the right amount of time will ensure your materials have the look you want.
Promoting Your Attendance
A month before the event, you can begin to ramp up your email campaign and social posts.
Reach out to your active and prospect lists, groups, and subscribers to make sure they know you are attending. If you send out a newsletter to your regular subscribers, you could use that to talk up your attendance and generate interest by mentioning issues in your industry that the convention may address.
Most conferences now offer a conference app experience. Make sure your app is downloaded on your phone and ready to go before the conference. Oftentimes you have the ability to set up a detailed profile and add links and other resources to increase your visibility. There are convenient chat/inbox functions to prospect and connect with potential clients.
If you are attending and you are also a sponsor, understand what your sponsorship offers. You may be getting an email list of all attendees so that you can do early outreach, and you should also be able to nurture those leads throughout the process and afterward.
If you are speaking on a panel or hosting a social event, make sure to send a save-the-date email. Think about different ways to create opportunities — perhaps you can partner with a local business for a cocktail hour at the end of the day, host an after-hours outing, or a pre-conference coffee meeting. Include a Calendly link and make a personal invitation to book time one-on-one at the show.
Have Fun with Social Posts
Start promoting your attendance and mention related special events on all your social channels about a month beforehand, and keep it going regularly all the way through the end of the convention. It is the ideal way to keep people updated on schedule changes, speakers, or events that may be of interest to your audience. You can promote demos or giveaways at your booth. As the days of the conference get closer, you can build excitement by posing questions, “Did you know that …?” or introducing the staff who will be greeting them at your booth.
Have a Plan “B”
Conventions have many moving parts. Speakers cancel or get rescheduled, travel plans change, and promotional items get delayed in the mail. Despite all the careful planning you have done, you may be forced to rethink a few things on your feet! It’s important to be prepared, but also be ready with alternatives.
Using your social channels will help you keep everyone informed and allow you to publicize any changes to scheduling or events.
Convention Marketing at the Show
Keep the communication going! Take photos of your team or colleagues to share on social media in real time at the show. Share with partners on LinkedIn or other channels. Perhaps some of those people are at the show but never got your emails. They may reach out and connect when they see your post.
Check your conference app, your social media accounts and emails regularly. If someone is trying to reach you, but you’re not checking in, you could miss them. Trade shows can get busy and chaotic, so you need to check in often.
Think of creative ways to engage attendees: make a podcast or webinar from your booth, send a staff member around to collect testimonials about your organization, or take an onsite survey whose answers will be available in exchange for their email address.
Post Convention Marketing
Following the convention, send follow-up emailswith a definite call to action and a personal connection. Think about content that can serve as an icebreaker and flows naturally out of the activities at the convention.
- Share something of value that you learned, or a moment in a session that affected you, or some news that may be of interest to your audience.
- Start a conversation about something that was discussed., i.e, “Bob Smith’s ideas on insurance liability were really innovative and we have some thoughts on that too…”
- Consider inviting the prospect to another special upcoming event.
- If you missed the chance to meet in person, include a Calendly link to book an online meeting or make a sales appointment after the fact.
Geofencing at a Convention
When so many of your leads and customers are gathered in one location, geofencing can be a powerful way to target that audience. A geofencing app takes a given location and a slight radius around it and counts the devices in that space on that day (provided those users have opted in to receive ads, which most users usually have). You can tailor the size of your desired location to as targeted as a small hotel ballroom. All the determined devices will get served ads while they are in the area. The devices are even tracked back to their homes, so you can also send a follow-up printed mailer to the user’s home location, and the tracked device will interact with their other devices in the home, showing ads on those as well.
Leverage Look-alike Lists
If you have access to event attendees, you can upload the list to your digital ad accounts and propagate a “look-alike” list of contacts: these will be organizations with the same basic profiles. You can then create targeted ads that will reach that audience.
Convention Marketing is All in the Timing
If you need help preparing for and making the most of your next convention, reach out to Trillion. From collateral to booth design to after-event outreach, our designers and marketers can provide you with everything you need to maximize your convention ROI efforts.
