Attracting & Engaging High-Po’s April 16, 2025 by Dave Lutz 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing
Know Thy Customer June 5, 2024 by Dave Lutz 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing
Do’s and Don’ts: Six Tips to Help Justify Attendance at Your Event November 30, 2022 by Dave Lutz 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Conference Education, Experience Design Tagged With: , attendee marketing, business case, Education, event business case, justification for attendance, workforce challenges
Top Trends for Your Event’s Social Influencer Campaign April 12, 2022 by Betsy Bair 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing Tagged With: , attendee marketing, registration, social influencer, Social Media, trends
2022 Conference Registration Pacing April 5, 2022 by Dave Lutz 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Business Model Tagged With: , marketing in covid, pacing models, registration pacing, worry-free cancellation
Do You Really Have Them at Hello? Rethinking Your First-Timer Strategy November 6, 2019 by Sarah Michel 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Conference Networking, Experience Design Tagged With: , connections, connexity networking, first-timer, first-timer event, onboarding, solo attendee
If You Build It, Will Teams Come? May 28, 2019 by Sarah Michel 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Business Model Tagged With: , conference learning, design for teams, group discounts, group strategies, team learning
Leveraging Team Learning at Conferences May 22, 2019 by Betsy Bair 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Experience Design Tagged With: , collaboration, design for teams, leverage teams, organizational learning, team discounts, teamwork
Your Conference Needs a Hub To Entice Customers and Prospects October 12, 2018 by Dave Lutz 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Experience Design Tagged With: , conference blog, conference marketing, conference narrative, home base, hub and spoke, hub and spoke marketing, inbound marketing, outbound marketing, outposts, pull strategy, push strategy
Your Conference Content Has Magnetic Pull July 23, 2018 by Dave Lutz 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…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing Tagged With: , Attendance Acquisition, attendance marketing, conference best practices, content marketing, Education, Education & Adult Learning, marketing, meeting planning best practices, Session Marketing
