Blog Archives
Time to wake up and smell the coffee chaps…
While rummaging through my email inbox this morning I stopped and read the one from the professional insti
tute of which I am a member.
It’s compelling, and beautifully written, as it ought to be and it was asking me very nicely to attend the annual conference. And offering me a discount. What’s not to like about that?
What caught my eye though was that the early booking discount was £200 + vat. If that’s the discount I thought, how much is the conference? A mighty £445 + vat no less. Which means that if I don’t book before the early bird discount runs out I’ll have to fork at a eye-watering £645 + vat to attend a conference run by the association I pay to be a member of. Wow.
Possibly not for the right reasons, the organisation now had my full attention. Surely this must be a two day event I thought… but no, this was for a one day 09:00 to 17:30 affair (with an hour and forty minutes of break time; you’ll be relieved to hear that lunch was provided) where I could attend ten sessions (if I had the fortitude to get through it all) of which there were some of only marginal interest.
The marketing line what smaller companies can learn from the “big boys” illicited a wry chortle. Because at that price how many small businesses are actually likely to attend. The HMRC definition of a small company is if your turnover is £5.6million or less or have fewer than 50 employees. In reality many small, and very dynamic, businesses fall well below these thresholds. In the Marketing Week/Ball & Hoolahan marketing salary survey for 2012 the salary for a marketing manager is somewhere in the region of £36,000. If you extrapolate down from this you can work out that this conference organiser is potentially asking a company to pay a quarter of an employee’s monthly take home pay to attend a one day conference from which there is marginal company-wide return on investment.
You don’t need to absorb much media in the UK to work out that these are straitened economic times. There is many a managing director trying to work out whether they should pay the wage bill or the suppliers, and telling their employees that “we’re very sorry but there will be no wage increases this year”. Training budgets may survive, just, but spending on expensive conference days out (we haven’t factored in travel and accommodation/lost productivity costs in all of this have we?) isn’t a priority for many. And what about those who have embraced redundancy and become freelance marketers… if you take the cost of the conference and the loss of a day’s earnings why on earth would you even consider booking a place.
And conference organisers wonder why their attendance rates are down… Discriminating against large sectors of the audience by virtue of price isn’t going to help much is it? And membership organisations are more at risk than ever because we’re not even sure we need you any more guys.
It is in times like these that great innovation often occurs. Exhibition and live event organisers have recognised for years the need to add more and more value to their offerings, creating environments where visitors can get information or experiences that they just can’t get elsewhere. It’s time that conference organisers did the same. There is no point telling a potential attendee that they will learn new things and network with their peers, because they can do this via LinkedIn without spending a bean or having to get up at 6:15am to get to the venue, and a day full of plenary sessions with tiny comfort breaks (because the programme is crammed to make it look like it is value for money) doesn’t deliver for many people.
So dear conference organisers I challenge you to do three things differently this year:
- Start your pricing strategy from how much you think your conference is worth and how much your delegate is willing to pay rather than from how much money you need to cover your venue costs. If the answer is £99+vat then find a solution that fits.
- Stop trying to cram too much into a programme to justify the huge sum of money you are asking for. Remember how exhausting it was to sit in a lecture theatre for a couple of hours as a student and ask yourself why you think people can endure it for eight hours or more now that they are older.
- Embrace some new technology to deliver to your audiences and members in a different, more inclusive and accessible way. Get out of that traditionalist box right now.
At present most conference organisers (associations included) attract on average less than 5% of their target audiences to their events. Which means that for every delegate you get there could be another 19 waiting to engage with your organisation. Time to go get them.
hellen @missioncontrol
Why ‘must’ I ‘attend’ your event?
Your brochure is finished. The design is great (though you haven’t left a lot of white space because you’ve got to keep on giving those punters reasons to attend) and you think the copy covers all the bases.
Bet I can guess what phrase you have used to describe your conference/awards/expo?
… is the Must Attend Event for … professionals/lovers of jazz music etc. etc.
Oh how I wish I had a penny for every time that phrase is used. Why not a pound? I hear you ask. That’s because I am so confident of the number of times it has been used that I think I will still benefit financially. And indeed I am proved correct: a Google search on the phrase ‘must attend event’ yields no fewer than 6,580,000 results! Even if I narrow the search criteria down to the last twelve months it yields 403,000 results.
It’s a facetious point well made. Why do marketers describe their events in such hackneyed terms?
And is it marketing’s problem, or is it something more fundamental to do with the way we create events, particularly large scale exhibitions, multi-streamed conferences and awards ceremonies?
Probably a bit of both if the truth be told.
It’s easy(ish) to market a rock concert. You know which band is playing, you tell their fans where and when and hopefully they will buy tickets. Simple, single stage sell. But how do you get 5,000 people to a medical device exhibition or 100 delegates to attend a conference on social networking? You could tell them what’s on offer, but you’ll need to present the message differently to each of your audience sectors, and that causes problems because you might not be able to offer them all the same super attractive package. And then of course you might be the only marketer trying to cover off a number of events and your creative juices are spread too thinly.
So the easy option is to describe your product as the must attend event for ‘anyone involved in the medical device industry’ or ‘anyone who wants to use social networking to leverage their business’. Phew – got all the potential audience covered - can sign off on the copy.
Stop and look again though. Instead of trying to find phrases that fit all, remember what motivates people to come to events. There will be a core of people who attend because they come every year; the health services that buy medical devices perhaps, and they make up 40% of your audience. You can clearly identify another 40%. So why not create copy that talks to these people? Because I will miss the other 20% you reply. But what makes that other 20% come along every year… they seek you out. And it wasn’t because you kept harping on about the fact that you are the must attend event for… it’s because they were looking for something and they found it in your copy/online content etc. and subsequently your event.
Be brave. Stop trying to talk to everyone at once. Create a series of miniture marketing pieces within your main message. Create multiple calls to action (and if you are asking someone to spend £750 on a conference place please don’t use Book Now) that drive individuals to yet more compelling and targetted content. Tell a small business in Irving why embracing Facebook could transform their sales performance; explain to a manufacturer what installing a clean-room could do to their business; encourage an advertising agency in Coventry to enter an industry award.
Then, and only then, will your event be truly must attend.
hellen @purerocketscience
Stop snacking… time to start eating properly again
Something unusual has been happening in the office over the last couple of months. After years of seeing the volumes of free-circulation business press dwindle to almost nothing we have begun hearing the thud of magazines more frequently once again.
It started with Print Power, a publication produced by Lateral Group. The blurb at the front says that it is a European initiative dedicated to strengthening the position of print media in a multi-media world. That’s as may be, but what actually hit the desk was an extremely well thought out, beautifully designed and, most importantly, well written publication that not only made it out of the poly bag (got to open it to separate the recycling) but is still here for reference.
And then, starting the new year with a bang, along came the January issue of B2B marketing. I haven’t seen a hard copy of this magazine for a while, which is a pity because it’s a smasher. Lots of varied content, once again well written, great layout and a tone which didn’t make the reader feel like they were on the periphary of a rather exclusive club, or reading something fresh out of the mouth of a PR assistant.
So, this got me thinking about two things: how important it is for B2B magazines that they are written properly; and secondly how we need to find time to sit, absorb and process information.
Many business magazine operations (and one of the above is not innocent of the offence) have embraced technology and decided that the way to keep their readers and consequently their circulations is to develop regular email newsletters. And then send them out to their database. Every Day. Event magazine went even further and sent out two email bulletins a day. Thank goodness they have stopped that. It seemed like a great plan at the time, but it forgot something very fundamental about human behaviour: that if you give us snacks we will graze rather than engage; and that most people switch off when they feel they are being nagged.
What’s more, readers don’t even have to let on that they have stopped engaging. While the email administrator always ensures that the unsubscribe information is included, all the recipient has to do is to classify the message as unwanted and it will forever be consigned to the junk folder.
In creating this constant stream of bitesize snippets we have created a culture of having to write something to a timetable rather than to an editorial plan. In doing so, we resemble budgerigars: saying anything for the sake of it, not because we believe it is something that will interest the recipient or even that they will make time to read it. So they lose interest, stop reading, and they are off to find someone who they think will give them what they want. Our marketing messages become bland, our products uninviting.
As consumers of information we are not without blame either. This veritable cornucopia of new media has us flitting from place to place searching out the information we think we need. But, time to ‘fess up: it’s exhausting isnt’ it? There’s a reason why hummingbirds drink pure sugar…
If we want to make good business/marketing/communications decisions, then we must pause to nourish ourselves with high quality information devoured slowly and with relish. We must create time to sit down and consider what is in front of us without constant interruption from screen based applications, or the pressure of having to tell an audience of disinterested individuals streams of minutiae. And noone is better placed to provide this michelin-starred content than the quality end of the B2B press.
So come on chaps… put the chips away and start cooking up some roasties.
hellen @missioncontrol
So you think you own me?
The previous post You’ve got to deliver what the audience really wants has provoked discussion in a number of forums and the responses have made for interesting reading, not least because of the seeming inability to move on from old arguments.
So let’s look at the topic from a different angle, by considering two industries closely related to producing live events; so closely related in fact that you would consider them siblings; i.e. publishing and broadcasting.
In both of these industries, the key players are referred to as Media Owners. Because they own the medium through which the content is broadcast. And for years this is exactly what they have done; decided when, where and what information and entertainment their audiences or readerships were going to consume. They have made and broken many a star, politician or company profit, simply through the editorial decisions they have taken which have influenced the masses.
Conference and exhibition organisers, be they commercial operations, industry bodies or associations, continue to believe that they must operate in a similar way. Developing programmes of content that they perceive the audience wants, choosing speakers and selecting participating exhibitors (via an economic filter it is true) and presenting a finished product to the visitors at a time, date and venue over which the latter has no control.
Then along came the Internet and social media and the shift in power from owner to audience was seismic.
Because the concept of expertise ownership by a few large corporations doesn’t fit any more. You can’t tell me what I should be watching, what information I need, or who I should be networking with. You can’t stop me finding organisations who can’t afford to exhibit at your event or who haven’t got a charismatic speaker, because if their Search and SM strategies are good I can do this on my own. And, you can’t stop me telling people, a lot of people, about the experience your organisation offers me, within minutes if I so choose.
So let’s bin the argument about virtual not replacing face-to-face; because we all know it won’t. Let’s stop finding fault with virtual technologies, because frankly some of them are pretty amazing. And let’s stop pretending that we still own audiences and industries because of the events we produce because we don’t. Let’s embrace the new to enhance the old rather than dismissing it as a fad that has nothing to do with us.
What we need to be doing, with or without the help of virtual technologies, is to work out how we build and maintain relationships with our communities; how we facilitate communication and collaboration between individuals both through a single live day and an online presence; and how we use the unfettered enthusiasm of our audiences to create a profitable business model for the future.
hellen @missioncontrol
Better service and cost reduction are not mutually exclusive…
Sometimes, if you say something often enough you can convince yourself it is the truth. Like accepting there is only one way of doing things, and it costs X.
Ingrained in a workforce or population’s psyche, these points of view become corrosive, strangling innovation and stifling original though. It takes a brave person to become the tall poppy and disrupt the status quo.
It shouldn’t be this difficult. Cultures change, needs evolve and skills develop. Humanity’s greatest asset is its ability to adapt to challenges and circumstances, to create something new and build an exciting future.
But knocking your house down with the goal of constructing a brand new habitat is hugely unsettling, not least because for a time you are displaced from your home environment, surrounded by strange things and feeling anchorless. Your plans get buffetted from all sides: critiqued by other individuals; slowed by delivery days; and affected by the great unknown – the weather.
Some people don’t stay the course, moving back to something more familiar, throw in the towel in a fit of pique or simply become exhausted by the effort of dragging so many others with them on their epic adventure. However, if no one had ever taken the plunge, we would probably all still be living in tree-houses.
And so it is with our current working practises. We already have the technology to deliver collaborative, two-way communication between large and small workforces. We can deliver cost-effective, instantaneous training to government organisations that will reduce travel and accommodation budgets to practically nothing. This budget cut will do nothing to affect service delivery, in fact the efficient dissemination of information and intelligence and the network of collaboration could make it better than ever.
It’s time we got connected.
