Marketing is your responsibility
Of all the people involved in your conference project you are the one who spends most time with the core delegate market as you produce the conference.
This, of course, exposes you to an incredible amount of marketing opportunities:
- Competing events – with delegate and sponsor lists
- Websites, magazines, newspapers - local, regional, international
- Associations and communities – with data lists
- Market intelligence – databases relating to competitors, vendors
With the right attitude to your event’s success and being tuned into these possibilities you can collect a lot of very useful data and intelligence by asking just one more question. Excellent Conference Managers are totally pro-active about marketing.
The more effort you put into marketing the more profitable your events will be. It’s that simple. Active interest and achievement in marketing is a necessary condition for your advancement in the company.
Contact lists
In producing a conference our contact and research list should contain at least 300 records. This is the core data set for our Direct Marketing campaign. You have an obligation to forward this to your Marketing Manager in a timely manner. This is one of your KPIs.
Copy writing
Fresh and dynamic copy is required, continually, for all stages of our marketing campaign: Launch, Sponsor Promotion, Delegate Promotion.
Your research and contact with the market puts you in a unique position to collect issues, needs, ideas and language. Your conference agenda must reflect this and reflect it in a dynamic sense. This industry folklore must be translated into the copy we write for every part of the campaign.
The big tip is to collect, collect, collect – so that when you get down to writing you have an abundance of ideas for really exciting copy that connects you and helps sell your proposition. Another tip – if you have done a good job of the business plan at the beginning, a lot of your copy will fall out of this.
Content quality and Word of Mouth Marketing
In the narrow global communities in which IMAPAC operates there are profound connections between most of our potential customers. More or less, most of these gals know each other or are not far removed. So conference quality becomes a huge part of the marketing equation.
Word of Mouth Marketing goes something like this:
- If you do a fantastic program with great speakers we could do no marketing and get a fantastic response.
- If you do an average program with average speakers you will get no WOMM advantage – when was the last time you heard someone effusive about a really average film they have just seen?
- If you do an awful program with awful speakers you will get people slagging your event with huge negative impact on delegate numbers.