You Ask, I Answer: Driving Leads Without Conferences?

In today's episode, Stephanie asks, the pandemic has led to the cancellation of many conferences. If in-person events are a cornerstone touch point for a brand, how should marketers pivot? What can they do now to drive pipeline activity? So that's a good question. The answer depends on how you got pipeline from shows.

Uh so for example, if you are a like a silver or gold or platinum or whatever sponsor of a conference, uh, you may get a portion or all of the attendee registration list, right? So your pipeline essentially came from the conference gathering up uh names and emails for you and uh handing them over in exchange for a big pile of money. Uh if you got uh leads from the stage, you had one or more speakers either paid to have them uh be up on stage, uh, or uh they were just good enough speakers that they merited on their own, then uh that's a different mechanism where there's some call to action from a an educational benefit uh to your users, to your audience. Uh if it was private parties and dinners, you know, the ability to take uh ten prospects out to uh an expensive steak dinner somewhere, uh that's a a different level of engagement. Once you understand the mechanism by which a conference fed you uh pipeline, uh you can find analogs for the the world as it is now in in of a inside the pandemic.

So let's think about this. If your thing was the steak dinner, right? Um, what are some things that you can do uh to replicate a part of that experience? The the whole point of a steak dinner kind of environment is it gives you and a handful of prospects the ability to have a a discussion for a long time. There may or may not be a guest speaker of some kind.

Probably will actually cost you less than the steak dinner, because steak dinners, you know, so you'll run easily a hundred bucks a person. Um get uh two or three bottles of wine and then get them all shipped out, and you can meet the same uh essentially cost. Um and you can replicate a lot of the discussion part of the experience. You know, you have your subject matter expert, maybe a guest speaker of some kind, um, and through the the tasting, you you kind of hang out for the hour or whatever. Uh if you are getting uh leads from the stage itself, again, that one's a fairly obvious one to replicate, you do uh webinars, and instead of uh you know, just large scale webinars, maybe you have a a very focused webinar, maybe you uh do some innovative advertising to drive attention to it.

But the webinar one is pretty straightforward. There's there's uh almost a one to one replacement from speaking from the stage in a webinar. If you are having trouble attracting people to your webinars because your brand is not well known, um and or uh you have not had the greatest track record of of webinars, you again may want to bring in uh a guest speaker a panelist um somebody that can uh bring some of their own audience and eyeballs uh with them to the event uh expect to pay for that expect and depending on the the size of the audience expect to pay more for that the larger the audience gets but it's a way to access the same crowd that you would access i if it was an event because when you're at an event particularly for the larger speakers uh or speakers who are known for a topic people are in that room to s to see that person talk um and to hear what they have to say so uh when you see somebody like Ann Hanley on stage you are there to listen to Ann talk about you know writing right if you see somebody like Crystal Washington on stage you are there to learn about uh tech futurism and so uh if you engage those speakers uh in your webinar um there's a good chance they will bring some of their audience with them and that's what you want you want net new audience you don't want it to be just the audience you currently have although there's there's nothing wrong with nurturing them if you're trying to build a new pipeline you need to bring in some of the audience. When it comes to just big lists um that is a little bit tougher but not not insurmountable. Essentially at that point you start looking at co-registration.

So co-registration on white papers, on ebooks, on on webinars or other events, um newsletters uh whatever the case may be sponsoring a newsletter uh would be a a great way to do that because again you're gonna be trying to get a large number of uh registrations that you can then put into your marketing automation system. So if you uh as an example um I did a uh a paper with Talk Walker uh my company Trust Insights and Talk Walker collaborated we uh worked out a a a an arrangement and uh we had a uh custom built piece of research that we did and published and generated you know about twelve hundred uh leads for for for them and so that was a for a you know reasonable investment a a good way to draw a lot of uh new pipeline for them to work with now is it all qualified no but neither is you know everybody who attends a conference whatever the mechanism is that the conference delivers for you you can find digital versions of that now it's just you have to get away from the idea of thinking that it's going to function exactly like a conference you have to look at the techniques that are available and say which techniques map to the uh the the benefit we used to get from the event um are there other things that you are missing yes there's always that absence of serendipity right uh no matter how good a virtual event is it just it's cannot seem to replicate that you know randomly bumping into somebody in in the hallway or you know hanging out of somebody's booth and meeting a a new friend that's very difficult to do digitally and I've not seen anything that comes close to that other than curated communities. So for example if they're uh join a Slack instance about a specific topic. Um you can meet new people there in a in a conversation. Um, but running up and building a community like that is not something you can just stand up for an event and then let go.

I mean you can do it, but it's it's kind of tacky. Um you have to invest the time in that community to make it work. Um we've been running the Analytics for Marketers community. If you go to trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. We've been running that for well over a year, and only recently passed about a thousand new people in there.

Um it's one of those things that it takes time to build and grow and nurture a community, and you have to put a lot more into it uh upfront than you're gonna get out of it a lot more. Um, but that can replicate that serendipity experience if you're trying to attract people who might not otherwise want your newsletter or attend your webinar uh or hang out on a Zoom call with you. Um and they can get to know you in a way that is not less threatening, but I guess less they perceive they will perceive it as less likely to for you to try and sell them something immediately. Um and they know they can, you know, uh punch out if if it if things are are there's no benefit for them. So think about the the benefits you got.

Map them to digital analogs, that's a terrible catchphrase. Match them to their digital equivalents now, and you can replicate most of the benefits of a conference. But remember that unlike a real conference, you're breaking them into different pieces, so you'll get less of a synergistic effect than you would in a real world event. But you can still do it, you can still meet your deadlines, you can still meet your goals for events for the year. Just think differently about what those tactics look like to achieve the same strategic goal.

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