What are you getting out of that conference you're attending?
I love attending live events because it's a physical collection of smart people conversing on like-minded subjects. And while people talk about the boon of social media, nothing beats face-to-face communications. That's how we begin and forward our relationships and our education.
Sponsoring an event is a great way to get your brand associated with an event. But after you pony up the money, it's up to you to create the greatest value out of that. How many times have you been at a conference and you've experienced one if not all of the following:
- Frustrated that no one was coming to your table.
- Got your time monopolized by people that weren't going to buy or write about your product.
- Didn't get any press or bloggers to come to your table or write about your company.
- Few people came to your booth because they were attending sessions and talking with each other.
- You're exhausted because you can only talk to so many people in a given day.
- Your booth signage didn't attract people to come talk to you.
- Boredom.
The reason for all of these negative experiences is because just sponsoring an event has its limitations. When you sponsor an event, you're only connecting with people who walk up to your table. And even if you have a really successful booth, you still only reached all the people you could physically touch during the show.
You can't count on press, and if you do, then you probably had to hire and pay some PR reps to wander the floor to wrangle some journalists to your booth, hoping they write about you. Big events, like CES, are swarming with journalists and they write about everything. But most events are not like CES. If you're sponsoring a small user conference there won't be any journalists. Smaller industry conferences may have a few trade journalists there and they'll write one or maybe two articles about the entire event. You'll never get a feature story about you. At most, you'll have to settle for a line or two in that one article.
You can avoid all of these limitations, connect with key people and influencers, and be seen as a voice in your industry if you simply just report, from your company voice, at the event.
