Many associations struggle with the right strategy for involving students in their organization and events. Some attract students to join and participate in the organization’s programs and services while still in college. They offer significant membership and registration discounts as well as ample presentation opportunities. They usually have a “get them while they’re young” and “let’s put the kids in the show” mindset. They invest in these young professionals with the hope that doing so … [Read more...]
Exhibitor Priority Points System that Rewards Loyalty
Your Points System Should Influence Current Spend Decisions Like any storefront business, exhibitor booth selection is heavily influence by three factors: location, location, location. Most trade-show organizers use a priority-points system to help determine the order of booth-space selection for next year’s expo and their system has been in place for quite a while. Over the past couple of years, we’ve studied dozens of priority-point models to formulate best practices for progressive expos. … [Read more...]
Why Your Conference Needs To Focus On Building A Loyal Proprietary Audience
Quick: What is the most important asset of your conference today? Sponsors? Exhibitors? Your brand? Your events team? Your history? The venue? Your vendors? The content? Your speakers? Your technology? Yeah, all of these are likely responses. However, there’s one asset that most conference organizers and hosts constantly miss when responding to this question: audiences. [Note: Author Jeffrey Rohrs drives home the importance of audiences to any business in his book Audience: Marketing In … [Read more...]
Attendee Satisfaction Or Delight Does Not Lead To Conference Loyalty
Organizations tend to overestimate the loyalty they get from exceeding customer expectations and customer satisfaction says new research from CEB. So what does this mean to conferences? Satisfaction of a conference experience is not a predictor of loyalty to the conference or organization. “…We found no statistical relationship between how a customer rates a company on a satisfaction survey and their future customer loyalty,” says authors Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi in The … [Read more...]
Turning Attendees Into Repeat Loyal Customers
Most conference organizers focus on meeting their paid attendee goals for their upcoming annual event. They are so focused on that one event that they rarely take time to step back and think about the sustainability of the event for the next several years. They concentrate all of their energy, time and resources on meeting that year's event goals only. What they fail to recognize is that if they were to focus on creating loyal customers, who wanted to attend every year, they could then focus … [Read more...]
Exceeding Conference Attendee Expectations
What would it take for your conference attendees to call your annual meeting the greatest event on the Earth? Animal acts? High wire tightrope acrobatics? Clowns? Three rings of ongoing entertainment? A live band? It's challenging to keep annual meetings fresh and exciting while maintaining integrity. Yet it's very easy to duplicate last year's event and only make a few tweaks to the speakers and content. Often, that's just not enough! Your Conference: The Greatest Event On Earth? Adapting a … [Read more...]
Are You Using Up Your Event Customers?
The scarcest resource you have is a customer. You can't manufacture them. You can't outsource them. You can duplicate them. You can't make them from a recipe. Your conference and event attendees are the scarcest resource you have. Money Or Customers? Which Do You Need? Which do you need more to have a successful event? Money or customers? Well, you probably said money. One of the basic flaws with the metric return on investment (ROI) is an assumption that money is in short supply. ROI … [Read more...]
Measuring The Value Of Your Conference Attendee
One of the purposes of a business to business event is to build and strengthen customer relationships. Just as one of the purposes of a trade association's annual meeting is to build and strengthen member relationships. So how do you quantify the value this brings to your organization? How do you quantify the value of an event when the goal is to maintain and increase loyalty? Alphabet Metrics In the past decade, we've heard a lot about return on investment (ROI) and return on objectives (ROO) … [Read more...]
