– My favorite type of marketing. If you had to guess, what do you think my favorite type of marketing is? Come on, take a guess. Maybe SEO, PPC, creating social content, email marketing, push notifications, or is it podcasting?
Believe it or not, it’s in-person events. I found nothing beats seeing and meeting people directly in person. Why? Because you build a deeper connection. You’ll find that deals also happen faster than you do them in person.
But there is a lot of type of in-person events that you can go to. From conferences to meetups to local city events and the list goes on and on. I found that the most effective in-person events tend to be conferences that are ideally around your industry that have your ideal customers. And if you want to get the most out of these events, you need to be a speaker.
See, speaking puts you in a different light. And if you give a fantastic talk, people come up to you after and they’ll want to work with you. It’s a great source for generating revenue because when people come up to you, you’ll find out that it’s easier to close a deal. On top of that, when I go to these in-person events like to hold workshops after my speech.
For example,
we were at the Collision conference that I was in Toronto where I spoke and we had an in-person workshop and had people from our team walking around, meeting with clients and even potential clients. I wish we also had a booth, but we weren’t able to make that work.
Also, if you speak at events, instead of charging for speaking that some events pay, you can trade that money for a booth space and also advertising perks which get your brand out there more and produce a much better ROI than charging for speeches.
Now, just like any form of marketing, you can’t rely on just one channel such as in-person events. You have to take an omnichannel approach. What’s great is when you partake on social media, blogging, podcasting, even SEO, and all the other channels, you’ll find that they help each other out. I learned this from Expedia.
A few years ago, I was up in Canada at one of their offices and I was talking to one of their team members. And Expedia is an old company. They’ve been publicly traded for ages now. They’re a multi-billion dollar organization. And their team shed some light on a marketing set that shocked me. When Expedia takes an omnichannel approach, they find that their customer acquisition costs on all channels go down by roughly 10%because people are continually seeing their brand and hearing about them.
What’s funny about this is people already know what Expedia is. They were founded in 1996. So most people in the travel industry or who travel already know about them at least have heard of one of their brands like hotels.com, but still, by taking an omnichannel approach, their costs have gone down.
So even though I love conferences, I don’t rely on them as my sole marketing channel. Take an omnichannel approach just like Expedia and it’ll help all your channels do better.
Thank you for reading.