Getting Attendees Wrong: The Age Of Discontinuity September 28, 2015 by Jeff Hurt Some conference planning teams get their attendees wrong! So why do we get it so wrong? It has everything to do with the rapid pace of change—the age of discontinuity as Drucker called it—and our default thinking. The heart of our current organizational challenges is that we rarely diverge from our default thinking. We assume … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, attracting attendees, conference audiences, conference best practices, conference planning team, Qualitative measures
Three Marketing Flubs That Cause Conference YES Decision Skids October 2, 2014 by Donna Kastner Your email marketing blast generated plenty of clicks. But the registration needle hardly moved. What’s up with that? Conference Registration Frustrations For every smooth registration journey, there are many other frustrating moments that cause people to bail. You worked hard to earn that maybe click. Now they’re skidding and losing interest. Three Marketing Roadblocks Here … [Read more…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, Conference email marketing, conference marketing, registration
Your Conference Needs A Customer Vision Statement July 17, 2014 by Jeff Hurt What is your vision for your conference customer? In case you are confused by the term conference customer, I mean your paying attendee or registrant. What is your vision for your conference customer, the paying attendee? How do you hope to help your paying attendee to grow, evolve or transform? What traits and characteristics do … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, attendee growth, attracting attendees, conference audiences, conference best practices, customers, Innovation
Designing Conference Customers, Not Just Traditional Conferences July 16, 2014 by Jeff Hurt We are thinking about conference innovation from the wrong perspective. We usually think about conference innovation as something we create for our paying attendees. Or we think about innovation as something we design with attendees through crowdsourcing. We need to make a critical leap. Conference innovation is a way to design attendees! Innovation should be … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, attendee growth, attracting attendees, conference audiences, conference best practices, customers, Innovation
Measuring What Matters To Your Conference July 11, 2014 by Jeff Hurt If the only conference numbers you care about are attendance, exhibitors, revenue and profits, you will never be able to understand why those numbers fluctuate. You’re only guessing and planning conference programming through a shot-gun approach if you don’t get serious about measurement. It’s time to stop relying on your gut. Or your volunteer conference … [Read more…] Filed Under: Business Model, Event Planning Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, conference best practices, conferences, empathy mapping, measurement, target market
What Do You Want Your Conference Customers To Become? July 9, 2014 by Jeff Hurt “It’s not the attendees’ job to know what they want,” paraphrase of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. “Larry [Page] is into making people what he wants them to be—which is a little smarter,” former Google Executive (from author’s private correspondence).” So who do you want your conference customers to become? Adopting The Ask In Conference Design … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, attracting attendees, conference best practices, transformation
Your Conference Needs To Go On An Education Session Diet February 7, 2014 by Jeff Hurt Your conference attendees and prospects are less satisfied with an extensive list of education offerings than a narrow one. Too much information overwhelms them. And they walk away without any action. Ultimately, confused customers don’t buy anything. The Paradox Of Choice Yes, it’s true that when given a choice between a small and large assortment, … [Read more…] Filed Under: Conference Education, Event Planning Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, conference education, conference marketing, marketing, target market
Stop Trying To Offer Conference Content To Everyone January 8, 2014 by Jeff Hurt As a conference organizer, you want everyone to become a registrant, right? Male, female, young, old and everyone in between. So you try to attract as many people as possible with your programming. And you try to reach as many people as possible with your marketing. You are willing to take money from anyone willing … [Read more…] Filed Under: Conference Education Tagged With: , adult education, Attendee Acquisition, conference education, conferences, event marketing, target market
Time To Reboot Your Conference And Event Marketing December 16, 2013 by Dave Lutz Is your event and conference marketing like this… We’d love for you to attend our open house. There will be 99 dishes, 15 colors of napkins, seating for 75, and two buffet tables. Five speakers will present 15 minutes each while you watch in amazement. I bet you can’t wait! If yes, it’s time to … [Read more…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, conference marketing, event marketing, target market
Communicating Your Conference Value Proposition To A Short Attention Span World October 28, 2013 by Donna Kastner As the digital wheel accelerates, we find ourselves buried in a tsunami of information… emails, texts, blog posts, newsletters, whitepapers, podcasts, apps. All this noise is making it harder to spot the greatest hits. Now think about your conference audience. They’re in the same predicament, yet what do we do? We bombard them repeatedly with … [Read more…] Filed Under: Attendance Marketing, Business Model Tagged With: , Attendee Acquisition, conference marketing, Conference Value Proposition
