Hello everyone, welcome back to second growth podcast. I'm Sydney and I'm joined with Sam and we are gonna talk about events So events are back they've in person events specifically are back let's focus the event the topic here and I don't know about you obviously I'm a marketer so I'm getting marketed to a lot of marketing conferences right now I'm certain other industries. It's gonna be very similar with like the core big industry trade shows those core things are back And a lot of people are investing in them a lot of people also are getting really creative with events So that's we're gonna focus on for this this topic of the episode. So First and foremost, let's talk about Thinking in events in a new way.
So in order to think about events in a new way We can break down with the old ways Just to make sure everyone's clear here So Sam like give a quick synopsis of like the traditional event marketing shtick here I was looking around my desk to see if I have any swag from an event and spoiler alert I don't so the usual Both maybe so what as I was also looking down to make sure I wasn't wearing like a BB software shirt No, I mean the usual thing is okay How do we bait as many people to come over to our booth and then try to get them to turn into a lead and be interested in talking to us? So we'll we'll bring people over with a really crappy t-shirt Pen that doubles as hand sanitizer as a USB stick as I got knows what else like these little trinkets to try to get people to come over Right and then we convince ourselves that they're generally interested in the product when and reality they're carrying around this Giant trash bag full of stuff that's all they really interested in so the I think But it started with good intentions to get people to come here with to have a conversation I just slowly got carried away with how do we get more people to come with it's the same concept of the leads That's the meaning of a lead to get more of them over to sales their goals So you've all gone down that a lot, but yeah, I mean that's kind of how I think of the old school events Is just like how do we get people to come over with pretend to be interested in this? What do you think? Yeah, I agree and you know that again, that's it's not bad that it used to be like that It was used to be like that for a reason right because people couldn't connect with peers Could learn about brands can like actually like watch demos of a product on the internet They would literally have to go to the conference and like go to the booth and check it out and get pamphlets and get flyers and all that kind of stuff So it makes sense like why it was like that or like not knocking on that But I think what we're kind of saying is like evolve your thinking about it Just like how we preach a lot about about the vault you're thinking about paid advertising involved You're thinking about leading him off like that's really what we want to talk about today so You've got a point about swag so I'm just gonna hit on this because this is a it's not it's not a hot topic on LinkedIn lately Like there's been a lot of LinkedIn posts that I've been seeing Someone posted an article from Fast Company.
I was like can can we finally kill off cheap disposable conference swag and We've even talked about it before on like other things is should you actually be buying stuff that your customers don't want It's for you know, it could be for direct mail or no prevents I think are the two the two channels that could get this a lot but So I would definitely we'll talk about maybe how to stop using swag and maybe approach events differently, but Let's talk about how to think about events differently. So the old way is I'm gonna pay a bunch of money I'm gonna call it brand awareness and then oh because we're there we're just gonna get 10,000 or 5,000 scans and that's how we're gonna justify like a cost per lead and then we're gonna say okay we're gonna figure out how to get meetings and From tracking a lot of SAS data spoiler alert that doesn't work out to a great investment If you think about events like that and measure events like that so before we get in there So about a new way to think about and approach events. So what have you seen some? Tactics people doing that is like a new way to think about events You could be a paid sponsorship or could just be going to events organically to getting value.
Yeah I say look at it as a production record Every excuse me record everything take a camera and have someone following you I mean you this is the time when you can go and talk to your customers see what your competitors are doing Just get a general vibe on how is the industry doing in itself and use that as a content production wheelhouse I mean you can record those conversations you can Have just more genuine interaction because I think that's also the nice thing about how far so many companies have gone in just over Indexing on the swag where you're just sitting on a booth sitting down It's that you have like a coffee maker be like hey, I'm gonna chat for 15 minutes I love to hear about what you're going through how I can help so it's almost like no one gives out value What those anymore and people are so used to just like I'm scanning let me scan you We're not gonna have a conversation I'm gonna get you to talk to sales rep is just gonna pitch you like I just want to help you from a consultative approach 15 minutes My time if you're the beefy of a company or you know someone who genuinely knows the market That's if you want try to buy that as a consultation beef not company that charges thousands of dollars So you have that up for free. I think that's a great way to build trust build awareness and then again record it I've got that for a podcast or your social for anything you'd want to do with it. So what else would you do? I love that.
So thinking of more of like content production and in relationships. We Say you get you can just put a piggyback on that and I'll throw out another idea I'm you can set up like customer meetings to and you could you know use it more to engage with your customers get customer insights record All of that as well. Um, you can also use it to connect with other industry thought leaders For your content strategy, whatever you have rolling there So even if you didn't invest in a booth you could fly to the conference I've actually seen a lot of content creators doing this is they fly to the conference They don't even get a ticket, but they're they're producing and engaging with so many people So that's probably a better ROI and I also think who you send to the conference should change too Do you need to send 10 cells reps to the conference? Probably not.
Maybe you send a couple of subject matter experts Maybe send a couple executives maybe production team or production person if you don't have a team So that that's a way to like really do it without even paying for the conference at all But still being there because you're capitalizing on everybody else in your industry being there. So Okay, I like that thought we're going with it Yeah So like what would you do if you get out instead of swag? I don't first I have this thought this came up about a year ago in a conversation with Chris where we landed it I guarantee you good will has more B2B swag than anywhere else in the world and if you go in especially your own San Francisco or something I bet they've just got like straight up departments full of like B2B sass or this or that like just the crappy t-shirts But sorry end of the war and I know that's something that we all just look and feel on cringe I think I've used those shirts for milling along Bedtime shirts. Yeah, they're sleep shirts Going out to like you know walk around town is a billboard for them.
It's a rack at the end of the day So is that we want your brand's connotation to be I have seen Again a couple people post-nailing dinner like doing donations or doing charitable stuff instead to kind of still drive people to engage with them but being more Conscious about that money and spend I've actually tried that before at a previous conference like if you came over and you Like did something then you would like if you entered our thing you would or donate X to whatever charity it was The sentiment is a lot better from people like they're like oh, this is really cool Hey, it's different be it's a charitable and you're not like wasting resources or plastic or whatever Someone wants to freak out about But it's the same action is still the same intent of getting someone over for an exchange for like a lead So I challenge that of like you're still doing the same thing and it's maybe a nice nicer tactic What draws you to just go talk to a stranger at the end of the day right like trying to think about if you were At a restaurant waiting for dinner something and you strike up a conversation What can you just do from a human level make people interested in you do you like I know Maybe this is just me because I'm always needing to do something like if I saw you know Those little basketball games that it's just like you go and compete against someone if someone had that set up I would play that all day I would talk to them about whatever they want to talk about but it also bridges that like I'm all here about Business it's all I want to talk about but when you forget what it was there was some book a number of years ago talking about just like play and Relationships and the people that would involve that in their corporate settings So what it's just like going for a walk together grab a phrase being go up for 15 minutes and just kind of like talk about a problem That they're solving for I think there's other ways that are less awkward than trying to bait with a gift card trying to Sometimes it's just awkward is across the table from someone that you don't really know and have a fourth conversation So it just it brings the guard down so I don't have a specific answer for it challenge someone to come up with a great idea I'm sure there's something to it, but finally just like things like fun interactive and like that's what we're drawn to the Today is how can you just have a good time with someone you don't know But you're all are clearly there trying to solve some type of problem Or else you would be there and that kind of is a good point like if you don't know of the brand and you've never heard of the brand Like the trade show is not the time to like give people to come over to your logo against all these other logos Like maybe it makes sense if you've been creating demand and you've been like growing your following and you're starting to get traction Then maybe it does make sense that you have boots on the ground you've got people wearing, you know, you know Your team there that's why you're sure sure sure so, you know, they do recognize your brand They're like, oh, hey, I want to talk to you. I have a question about X Y or Z That makes a little bit more sense than just we're gonna unveil our very expensive booth here The other couple of tactics that I've seen People doing is they won't have a booth and but they'll host events and meetups around the same time that the conference is going on And so I do think that is smart and they're still investing and they're still being present at the event But they're maybe you know doing it in a different way and not being like forced to pay the conference and There's a lot of guidelines what you can and cannot do when you sponsor conferences and things like that So I've seen a couple companies recently doing doing that And so what are you thoughts about that? How would you get people to kind of engage in your event around that conference? Yeah, I mean if you're doing something fun different talk about standing out from the crowd instead of paying $25,000 for a 10 by 10 to give out even more money's worth a swag You went and invested $25,000 into phenomenal dinner or prospects customers both I would rather see you spend I don't have no problem writing off $300 per person for an incredible dinner where you have three hours of their time It's good conversation.
You're getting to know them develop that relationship versus a booth that people are gonna come in and out of So I like that approach I'm gonna do a couple of those and especially when you have from your company the leadership the faces of your company that goes a really long way And talk about like lifetime value of a customer because if you talk to two different people one who knows your CEO and one who doesn't the one who knows Will feel much more strongly about your company about your brand because they have that connection so more you're able to develop that I know I swear I keep coming back to relationships not intentionally, but you're gonna have this time I make the most of it Maybe we should label this episode like relationships not event booths I Leave that up to the to the marketing team I have seen two where you know depending on your level of investment and what you're comfortable with and also like just your strategy You may do just a super small like I'm gonna bring in a subject matter expert I'm gonna do an invite only super targeted 50% thing and that's what makes most sense for our Strategy for this event or you might do hey We're gonna rent out a bowling alley and we're gonna do like a vent there But then you've got you know food and drinks and all that you know cost associated with it So it's gonna probably cost a little bit more But you can also invite more people and do more of an open invite of course you can send those targeted hey We really want you to come here But you could a lot of companies are doing this right now because I'm getting a lot of random invites I'm like I'm not even going to this conference, but if I was I have like three parties I can attend So there's different types of events you could do both you have got the budget you could do smaller ones I think it just comes down to like how does this fit into your Demand and revenue strategy and also like from a budgeting perspective How much are you willing to spend and then what are you gonna get out of that spend or investment post event as well? I think that's what people miss a lot Which is to your point your time about relationships and filming and how do we get all the post production out of that work? So what have you seen done pretty well or what would you recommend to then after you get content event? What do you do with it next?
Hope you have a great video scene like we've got yeah, yeah you have people just know how to Break down the content and then think of all the different formats that you wanted in But also just where you know you should know your market and you know Where they spending their time how do you get it into the format that's appropriate for that channel? And I would also if you're recording customer interviews I would be sending those full videos and snippets for them to also embrace to share themselves because they would probably love to share A lot of that content with their networks and the crowd of it and have something that they can send internally I remember when we used to go to conferences I asked him maybe I had to provide a full write up to report out to the entire marketing team and a monthly meeting I would tell like what did you learn? What was the benefit all that and if I could have a company just make that video for me that shows you're gonna be like Hey, here's what I did I would take that head over shoulders anytime But yeah, I think that there's just a long life span like a long tail that can come off of it that not if people utilize They think of the event is just this one consolidated moment that once 12 o'clock hits It's done whereas reality is you can have so much video so much great content educational material that could last you all the way up until your next event If you I mean that'd be a lot of content, but hypothetically you can make it last a lot longer than most people do I think that they just limit themselves to thinking okay All I have is this one hour video. That's all we've got instead of there are 45 different insights in here We can break out in the individual videos We can then take those videos and write out blog post for it We can write out linked in post for it.
We can do XYZ So it just comes down to how you do you view it as a very finite amount or something to to grow and expand off of what would you do? Yeah, I think I would definitely take the long tail approach because Of being like we're gonna pay a hundred grand and we're gonna go do this and we're gonna expect pipeline the next month from this I think it's the wrong way to look at it's like hey, we're gonna spend I don't know whatever it is. Maybe still spend that hundred grand you spend it differently maybe then whatever I mean to host some of these dinners and parties like if you post it if you run out of bowling alley It's gonna be 25 k. Well, you have very many appetizers and drinks people So, you know like some of these yeah the restaurants and events and I know that there's events going on they're not giving you any discounts here but You could say I'm gonna take this a hundred thousand and we're gonna do all of these things But then I'm gonna produce all of this content that's gonna fuel all of my marketing and revenue programs for the next three months and that's gonna be not only are It's also like your content creation strategy And then you can look at of course you can measure like traditional like how many did we get any engagement?
Did we have actually any sales meetings at the conference? Sure? You also want to track that but then what happened post conference with all of that content? How many views did you get you could you know if people really want to see like what was the impact of the conference right?
You could you know if you have self-report attribution and three months later someone comes in and they say oh, yeah I heard about you From this event or I heard about you from this podcast or this piece of content that was from that event I think that's how you kind of look at it more holistically and with I don't know with measurements you definitely need to take a different approach than the legacy approach And I think you need to kind of draw a line in the sand of like we're gonna invest this This is what the point is. This is what we're expecting from it Here's when we're expecting from it or maybe this is just we're not expecting any percent from this amount is pure content creation So yeah, it's an interesting point is yeah, though justifying our eye event, right? There's always a fun conversation, but thinking over to Similar like if you think of an event is not a lightning strike But a very singular event think about other startups when they announce their series be there series either series D There is a massive uptick often in interest you get a lot of hand raisers during that time, right? So what do you think about when you go to an event or after it and you see that influx like when you have that series raised You're quickly just like say oh, there's no ad direct attribution But we know it's because of the series it's like well What about that two weeks after the event or that long tail of all the content that you produce that you didn't use to have For some reason leadership never wants to accept that you can attribute it back to like that time investment that you made then so Just a fun little I don't know because direct and organic spiked are conversions the post month after but I don't really think that was because of that I think it was because of xy like that's what you hear you know people arguing about it's like just yeah Yeah, all the fun that comes ROI so that is a conversation for another time.
I do not want to embark on that one with you here I feel like herself in the circles Awesome. Yeah, I mean I think to recap there's a bunch of things you can do that are low-cost I'll give you some examples We have a team right now at inbound and we have Carl our sales rep there He's already set up meetings and he's just networking with people if people are there he already has meetings with great curses there and he's filming content with a bunch of different other creators and We don't have a booth. We don't have anything, but that's how we're approaching it again. That's one approach That's probably more of the like content creator low-cost approach But I think there's a lot of ideas people can take from this episode to change their mindset on events and like just get creative Yeah, can't make you see all this content we get afterwards though.
Don't you worry. Yeah, you'll see it on LinkedIn. Don't worry Yeah, see you later for another episode