Annual conferences can be a valuable platform for helping your attendees — and their organizations — develop and retain future leaders, aka “hi-po’s.” According to the Forbes Human Resources Council Expert Panel, a modern high-po (high-potential) workforce strategy involves more than having a list of candidates for succession planning. “It is about having actively engaging … [Read more…]
I’ve been a big fan of Customer Centricity, a book written by Wharton’s Peter Fader for quite some time. Fader advocates that “in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers … and then there is pretty much everybody else.” He recommends focusing and investing in retaining the former, while not ignoring the latter. … [Read more…]
As we progress through the event industry’s recovery to 2019 levels, conference organizers must have a laser focus on helping potential attendees make their business case for attending their events. The best path for helping them get approval to attend is to ensure that the majority of your education program is aligned to advance business … [Read more…]
The great resignation, coupled by increases in unsubscribes, have made it more difficult than ever to reach the inbox of potential attendees and conference participants. The events community can learn a lot from the B2C social landscape as we navigate the ins and outs of best practices and trends for moving fence-sitters to paying registrants. … [Read more…]
Before March of 2020, pacing data was a useful tool for predicting final attendance and revenue. If you were pacing behind, you could make midcourse corrections. As we come out of the pandemic, we need a different playbook to drive attendance and earlier commitment. Use these five tips to develop a plan for optimizing registration … [Read more…]
One of my biggest pet peeves is the way some conferences approach first-time attendees. Being intentional and having a plan for how you welcome someone who is experiencing your conference for the first time is not only the right thing to do, it’s also a smart attendee acquisition strategy. It’s a pivotal time to onboard … [Read more…]
This is the second installment of a two-part blog on team learning. In the first, we looked at why it’s a smart conference strategy. In this post, we’ll explore how to design, promote and execute it for your next conference. Since our work culture is mostly team-based, it’s about time we reflected it in our … [Read more…]
Traditionally teams from organizations attend a conference with a divide-and-conquer game plan, as they split up and attend as many different sessions as they can. The challenge with that strategy is that it’s very unlikely any real change will occur when the one team member who experienced the learning returns to work. Will they share … [Read more…]
At a recent conference consultation with a client, a millennial made me think that I wasn’t keeping up with the times. We were discussing their marketing and communication strategies for their event. I voiced my strong opinion that conference organizers should embrace inbound marketing (pull) over traditional outbound marketing (push). I explained that a blog … [Read more…]
Content marketing has grown by leaps and bounds during the past five years. Unfortunately, too few event organizers fully embrace the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing. Likewise, many conference professionals have no idea what embracing the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing even means. It’s a foreign concept to them. Most marketing and communications … [Read more…]
