10Stories Blog Why We Spend So Much On Conferences

When you're laying out your budget for the year, everything looks so simple. Pick a couple channels, make sure they're supported with content and design, and divide up the money so you don't have all your eggs in one basket. Maybe it looks like this:Digital display ads: $someSyndicated content: $a bit moreSocial media promoted content: $enough to testConferences: AN ARM, A LEG, AND YOUR FIRSTBORN CHILDAnd worse yet, nobody questions it. I've never talked to a marketer who's happy with the cost of conferences, but I've also never talked to anybody successful that opted out entirely. Instead of falling into the trap where we all wave our hands and mumble "brand awareness" and "legitimacy", let's find the places you can look to see how well your conferences are working.New LeadsThis is the easy one. If you come back from a conference with a couple hundred leads, at least a few of them should turn into deals in short order. They're expensive, but because conference-goers are in a mode to learn, you'll almost always find a few that want to buy your product.This is where you should look to cover your costs. As a rule of thumb, most marketing programs should produce 10X the revenue they spend. This is where a lot of organizations get frustrated, because if you're getting $30k worth of deals out of your new leads at a conference that cost $30k, you're doing relatively well. It doesn't hold a candle to a successful Google Adwords program, though. To understand why, there are two other places to look for success.Mid-Funnel MagicThe first time you go to a conference, nobody will know who you are. Every other time, you'll run into people who are already in your marketing DB. Duplicates, right? Ugh.No way! This is some of the most powerful magic at conferences. Unlike the new leads, these people already know the elevator pitch. If they want to come talk to you, it's because they want to go deeper. Great! This is why it's so crucial to have a product marketing / management around, or if you're small, convince your CTO to hang around the booth for an afternoon. These conversations build real rapport with the product and your vision. They introduce the best people on your team to that lead. If it works, everybody walks away feeling great in a way that never happens after a webex demo.The hard part about tracking this is that it looks like Just Another Touch between getting their name and signing the contract. It's easy to lose in the noise, but if you're bringing your A-game to the event, these leads WILL close. Look closely at what happens to leads and opportunities that dropped by at a conference, and you'll see how much faster they move than everybody else.Up-sell / Cross-sell into your Big CustomersIf you're lucky, you'll talk to people who already bought your product. But what now?One of the biggest problems any business has is that it has to evolve. By definition, this is how opportunities are created, whether it means new products or simply selling an existing product to a new type of customer. Unfortunately, it's easy to leave customers behind. They might have deployed in a way that you've since improved, or maybe they haven't even looked at that new product you rolled out last summer.Meeting your customers in person is a great way to bring them up to speed on the latest and greatest without asking for any immediate commitment. When I was at AppNeta, we had different products for 2 main roles within a company. Naturally, when the engineering team visited us, they'd ask about TraceView and what was new. What I didn't expect is that they'd then ask what we're doing for IT. Initially, I was confused; this wasn't something they cared about, so why are they listening to my demo and asking questions? It turned out that they liked us so much that they wanted everybody in their company to use AppNeta software, so they were doing research for their IT department. I didn't hear the conversation after they went home, but more often than I'd expect, we'd get an inbound from IT in that same company. Since we tracked success at the account level, I could see that impact of that conference as word got around. (Bonus: the original group is even less likely to churn when they know you're building new product!)So add all 3 of these sources up, and you may find that conferences aren't the money pit they appear to be. They're complex, multi-faceted, and yes, expensive events, so it's important to make sure you're making the biggest splash you possibly can.