Should You Sponsor Conferences or Not? | Ep. #405

In Episode #405, Eric and Neil discuss whether should you consider sponsoring conferences or not. Tune in to learn the ROI that you can get from sponsoring a conference and why Eric prefers to invest in small events.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: Should You Sponsor Conferences or Not?
  • 00:38 – There’s an ROI from sponsoring events
  • 00:43 – You have to find the right events
  • 00:48 – Sponsoring an event is great for branding
    • 00:51 – You will know who attended the conference and the event’s marketing team will send an email blast to the audience dedicated to you
  • 01:22 – If you sponsor a conference, make sure you have a speaking slot
  • 01:35 – What matters to Eric during conferences is the people that he meets
  • 02:00 – Eric just got an invitation to a conference
  • 02:27 – If you have $12K, Eric suggests spending it on a dinner or small event rather than a conference
  • 02:45 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool
  • 03:41 – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

  1. In sponsoring a conference, find the right event for your brand.
  2. When you sponsor a conference, make sure you get a speaking slot and a list of all the attendees.
  3. If you have the money to invest, maybe you should consider holding your own small event rather than sponsoring a conference.

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Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sui.

Neil: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric: And today we're going to talk about if you should actually sponsor conferences or not. Neil, what are your thoughts around this? Have you done this before?

Neil: I have. No.

Eric: It's really that simple. All right, so yeah, you can make money from sponsoring conferences. I found them to be hit or miss. You got to find the right events. But what I have found to work really well is it's great branding and work out where you just get a list of everyone who's attended of the conference and the organizer themselves has to send a dedicated email blast with whatever you want on there. That's the best way to generate revenue from the sponsorship.

Neil: I haven't found the [inaudible 00:01:03] and stuff like that to be as much of a success, compared to doing basic things like making the conference, organizer do an email blast and making them give you an amazing speaking spot and making them put your logos everywhere, right? Those are the basic things that I found that convert the best when you sponsor an event.

Eric: Yeah. I agree. I mean, if you're going to sponsor something, you should at least have a speaker slot and then getting the emails and the dedicated email blast would be nice for sure. Actually when I think about it, when I think about the conferences that I have been a part of, that we sponsored before in different companies, they didn't really do that much. It's really the people that I meet or like dinners that happen, things like that. That's where the business happens. When I think about, and I got to tons of conferences a year, when I go to [inaudible 00:01:48], I don't actually really do business with- I don't think I've ever done business with anyone from a [inaudible 00:01:52] before.
Again, there has to be good [outside 00:01:56] for you and one conference that we have that's coming up that I'm supposed to speak at but I just found out I'll be in Japan that time, but they're like, "Okay, we'll give you a speaking slot." A lot of our ideal client profiles are there, they'll put us in a prime position and all that. Get the emails and they would do a dedicated email blast and you pay 12 grand or something like. Logically, you might argue that if you can get one client from, let's say a client to us is worth, minimum 30 thousand dollars, you just get one client from it, it pays for itself. You can try to make the argument for it, but for me, spending that 12 grand, it's best to invest it in maybe other dinners or things like that where I know there's a higher ROI from it.

Neil: So you got your answer and hopefully now you're not wasting too much money sponsoring conferences.

Eric: Yup. That's it for today. But before we go, we have a one-year annual subscription of Crazy Egg that we would like to give to you. That is worth close to $1,200 and before I give you details, Neil, what is Crazy Egg?

Neil: Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool. You have visitors come into your website, some of them may buy if you're lucky, maybe two out of a hundred are buying, maybe three. Crazy Egg will help you increase that number. It's a visual analytics tool that shows you what people are clicking on, what they're not, where they're getting stuck, why people are dropping off on your lead forms or your checkout pages, or throughout your whole funnel. You can make changes to your marketing site from a design perspective, a copy perspective or pretty much anything through the Crazy Egg [inaudible 00:03:18] editor and you can even run AB tests to ensure that your changes are generating you more leads, sales and revenue.

Eric: Great. So if you want to get in on this, all you need to do is go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. We're giving away one of these every single week for the next year. So just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and by the way, you can get more entries so just go there to learn more and we will see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. Don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.

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