Increasing Conference Customers Through Social Media, Reach And Yield

Where do new conference customers come from?

Do you know the cost of acquiring your next customer?

Those are the magic questions many conference organizers want answered.

Incorporating The FRY Method

Author Olivier Blanchard talks about using the FRY method with social media to increase customers in his book Social Media ROI.

The FRY Method separates the sales process into three categories:

1. Frequency – convince people already buying from you to buy more often.
2. Reach – convince more people to buy from you.
3. Yield – convince people already buying from you to spend more with you every time they buy.

Reach – Acquiring New Customers

Of the three FRY categories, reach is the most commonly understood, pursued and used. Reach is simply how many people you can touch. Traditional media measures the impressions of an ad, how many times people might see it. Social media can measure reach by how many people might participate in discussion with you, read your blog post or subscribe to your updates.

The premise behind reach is that increasing the number of people who see your message should increase your number of new customers. Social media is the funnel that helps you build the pipeline. If growth is an objective of your conference, then increasing and measuring reach is imperative.

The ROI of reach is the ratio of net transacting customers to noncustomers who have been touched either by your marketing, word-of-mouth or social media. Effective reach has a 100% conversion rate but that is extremely rare.

Social media can help you increase the potential size of your reach and your pipeline. Your ability to increase your pipeline lies in your ability to acquire social media fans, followers, and subscribers and to convert them into customers. Then your next step is to develop these customers to become loyal brand advocates and evangelists. Thousands of enthusiastic customers can help you connect with their networks.

Understanding how much it cost to get a new customer helps you understand how effective or ineffective your current reach strategy is. How effectively are you converting impressions, engagement or touches into paying customers?

Yield – Getting Existing Customers To Spend More With You When They Buy

The third category of FRY is yield. Yield is simply the average dollar value of a transaction.

If you can’t get any new customers for your conference because you’ve already captured the majority of your market, and you can’t increase the frequency they buy from you, then you are left with convincing customers to spend more money with you when they purchase something.

There are three primary ways to increase yield:

1. Raise your conference registration, exhibitor fees and sponsorship levels.
2. Develop add-on products or services for up-selling.
3. Identify and develop customer segments that can spend more with you.

Increasing yield isn’t easy, especially for conference customers. However, it can be done by making the value of an upgrade difficult to resist. Build value, remove the upgrade barrier and provide your customers with the irresistible offer.

For conference attendees, you could offer a VIP package where they might get an exclusive private meeting with your keynote speaker or a special roundtable lunch with industry influencers. Or you might offer a series of follow-up webinars after the conference that is extends the conference content and experience and bundle it with registration for a special price.

Social media can help you create awareness of the upgrade or bundled packages. Encouraging customers with positive upgrade experiences to share their enthusiasm helps with horizontal, peer engagement.

In social media, yield could also be measured in terms of engagement. Some of your followers might go from sporadic sharing of your conference content to deep discussions. Moving from being a spectator to being a partner of your experience is another example of yield.

What are some other ways social media can be used to increase reach or yield? What have you seen other conferences do to increase the amount of money their registrants spend with them?