Run Your Own Conference to Scale Your Company This Fall

Getting your brand noticed and building credibility as a thought leader in your industry takes more than having a blog and social media profiles. It’s important to combine these online strategies with offline tactics that provide a personalized approach. Creating your own conference also offers a way to meet and interact with your audience, building further credibility and engagement that can stimulate company growth.

However, for many organizations, event marketing and live speaking engagements can prove to be a huge waste of money if not done correctly. Planning events is not only time consuming, but it also requires an enormous amount of resources and planning for the effort to pay off.

The best way to make a lasting impact with company events of all kinds are to keep it local so more attendees have the opportunity to try your product or service. You also want to ensure that your strategies move attendees through the sales funnel before, during, and after the event. Here are tips on how to deliver a successful conference this fall:

Start with the goal.

Establishing the ultimate end goal of your event before you even start is the key to a successful event. Your goal might be to increase leads or grow your overall revenue. It might be to further enhance your thought leadership position.

Choose the type of event that will work with that exact goal in mind. For example, an industry conference might be more ideal for finding talent, investors, and strategic partners while a product launch event will be the best approach for more leads. Offer a seminar or training session for your customers to raise the bar on your thought leadership status.

Create an engaging sales cycle.

According to LiveMarketing, 83 percent of brands say that increasing sales is their number one reason for event participation. To leverage the opportunities for leads from your event, it’s important to think how the entire sales cycle can support your efforts.

Event and sales experts Mike Vega and Joe Gnapp of Unfair Advantage Events specialize in logistics and maximizing sales at events. With a combined 25 years of sales and events experience, they know what works when deploying effective sales funnels for multiple events. “Anyone can create the atmosphere to make a sale, but if you can’t deliver, it means nothing,” Mike explains.

Creating that atmosphere involves positioning your product mix so that it…