Office Hours: Instantly Upgrade Your Events and Webinars

This guy. So my goal today, is to help build better events of all kinds, digital, virtual, live, in person, recorded, all of that stuff for your audiences. And to do that, we need to gain a deep understanding of what works for those audiences. I wanna be clear. I’m not a professional event manager, but I have run many events of many kinds and and built several, over my career and obviously spoken and participated primarily in the marketing universe. But, thankfully, I’ve I’ve had lots of opportunities to speak outside of that in in sort of government and NGO stuff and, in a number of industry too. Let’s, kick it off. Alright. So I think this is this is one of the frustrating things that you have to deal with as an event marketer, or an event creator of any kind, which is supply and demand do not match in this field. So this is a search for digital marketing events, and and digital marketing conferences. And then marketing events, which is, right, this is search demand for actual events. This one is searching search demand for learning how to market events. So event marketing and and marketing events. And, yeah, that’s that’s tough. What about, what about webinars? Webinars on marketing or SEO or sales or CRM or emotional intelligence or anything you can think of. The demand, my friends, unfortunately, is not there. There are not people seeking out the thing that we are all creating, whether that’s webinars or live streams or in person conferences. It’s just hard, right? It really is tough to be in this field. You have to generate demand. You can’t just serve existing demand by being present in these places. And even more infuriating than the demand side is the supply side is huge. It doesn’t matter what region you’re in, you can search for. Google’s got this nice event search engine now. If you search for an event in your area, or any other area, you will see massive numbers of both offline and online events, all competing for your time, usually multiple per day. If you scroll down here, you’ll see tons of them, just in July and August, just in the Seattle area, just focused on digital marketing. That’s that is hard. And so, you know, if we’re gonna do well at this, right, we need great answers to questions like why? Why should someone pay money or sacrifice their time to attend this event? What is in it for them? This is obviously a question we have to answer with every edition of office hours that we do. Why this event instead of hundreds of other options out there? These have to be ludicrously clear as well as having great answers. Right? You can have great answers that are hidden and then people won’t know about them. The only way you’re gonna do this successfully is if you actually sell and market the answers to these questions publicly. And then the third one, of course, really tough is how are you going to reach the right audiences with those messages, with the pitch for your event? So this is what I’m gonna spend some time on diving into today. I I made a, a little chart just to sort of illustrate what I think works well for for those of you who are doing in person events or or considering them for the future for next year. And and those of you doing virtual still, which obviously we are, this is sort of how I think about it. If it’s small and in person, it’s all about the networking. It is really about who is coming. Can I meet them? I wanna spend time with them. Do they wanna spend time with me? And this is why I think the invitation set and the the focus around the event experience, and the quality of the networking that you’re enabling is crucial. If it’s virtual and small, it’s the opposite. This is all about content. It is not some folks are trying to do virtual networking stuff. I think during COVID, there was an opportunity. I suspect that window is is really closing. I haven’t seen those be as successful since. If you’re large and in person, it’s a little bit less networking. In fact, I would argue that it’s maybe half and half. It’s networking, but it’s also the experience of a combination of education and entertainment. And and that’s why I’m saying like edutainment. If you think about very large events that you might go to, a a Dreamforce or an, an inbound, know, back in the day, the giant, SES conferences, CES, right, in Vegas, those types of things are really the, yeah, I’m there to learn a little and to have a great experience. The travel is part of it. And finally, large and virtual oh, sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no. There’s that that’s a great point about the networking and edutainment sort of aspect of large events. Just that maybe it’s it’s like they’re so massive massive that I don’t know that people really truly expect to just do a ton of great brand new networking. I feel like it’s more of the type of event where you’re like where you reach out to your peers in the industry or your existing friends and you say, hey. Are you attending inbound? Let’s, like, let’s go together or, like, let’s watch Obama together. Yes. And then you go for that whole the the experience as a whole. Yeah. I like, half the reason I went to Dreamforce in San Francisco years ago is because Bill Clinton was speaking there and Geraldine was like, oh, I I would really like to see him speak. That sounds really interesting. We we we went with some friends, industry friends, and yeah, had a mean, Bill Clinton is a very problematic human being, but a fascinatingly talented speaker and ludicrously charismatic even even though he didn’t prepare. It was obvious he had done no preparation. Oh, wow. He said as much, and then he just got up there and was like, oh my god. I’m hanging on your every word. I see how you got elected even in I think he was the the governor of Arkansas. Right? That’s not a state where you expect to Yeah. Do well. And then and then large and virtual, which is something actually we we’re we’re about to announce Amanda and I are about to announce SparkToro’s first ever virtual conference, which we hope in years to come will actually turn into a full scale event. We don’t have a name yet or all the details, but this is something we’re working Sorry? Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Yes. Yeah. No name and nothing to pitch quite yet, but we will have it soon. But in my opinion, these these large virtual conferences when I’ve seen them be successful and I participated in a few, they are kind of a fifty fifty, not edutainment networking, but content and hype. So people essentially get excited about it because other people are excited about it. And you have to create that excitement through primarily content. Content speakers, kind of the the the hype of the event, the positioning of the event. Okay. So let’s try to spend some time in those. I do wanna jump in, actually. I’m curious Oh, yeah. Please. What people think in the chat. What do people actually think about networking opportunities for virtual events? Uh-oh. I don’t disagree with you, but I wanna see if anyone has any reactions here to, like, do you would you like to see some kind of creative virtual way to network online during an event or no? Like, do you I mean, like, Rand and I think that it is really mostly about the content. Right? You gotta have great content. What’s interesting about to me about virtual events is that attendees are uniquely positioned to take notes because you’re already on your computer. So I think you want awesome content. But the networking, I don’t know. What do people think? So let’s look in the chat. That’s fair. I will not bias with my opinion yet. Okay. But I’m just gonna say that Erin and I share some thoughts. Yeah. All right. So I’m gonna ask try and answer these two questions. Oh, man. Look at you all just jumping in with your answers. Really Amanda, we have the we have the kindest friends in our audience. It’s just great. So let let’s try and do those two first two questions. What’s in it for my audience? Why this event? I think this this is the hardest thing. It doesn’t matter. Webinars, virtual events, live streams, a podcast, a YouTube recording, a small networking event. Right? Like I know a lot of agencies do that. So what what is it that makes for a great event? And I’ve been talking to a number of event organizers around this and trying to research it, talking to folks that I really like and respect in this field. And basically these four, you can fit almost every other sub item that you might think of under these four. Programming, right? So format, speakers, content focus, sponsorships, the post event follow-up, the logistics. Virtual is has their own logistics. Right? That’s certainly like the software and and timing and all that kind of stuff. And then in person has tons more. The audience that you attract, so that includes kind of the size of event you’re trying to do, diversity, and inclusiveness, and diversity of of all the kinds out there. Right? I I mean, in terms of diversity of the, job titles and roles, diversity of where they’re coming from geographically, diversity obviously of, you know, whatever ethnicity and gender and and, all those other things too. And then management, which is kind of the event tech, or on on-site or offline, sorry, on-site or online, health safety, etcetera, etcetera issues. And there there’s kinda three jobs here. Sometimes I suspect many of you who are doing events for your companies or doing them for your clients’ companies, you are doing all three of these. But when we you know, when you’re running a big event, like when we ran Boscon, it was sort of three jobs. So my job was the strategy, choosing the right audience to serve and the event positioning. In in fact, in a way that’s still sort of what I’m doing at SparkToro with things like office hours and this upcoming conference. Right? I mean, Amanda and I are tag teaming on both of these, but the organizer’s job. Right? So this would be like, you know, for Mazcono, someone like Charlene, but you know, event organizers, the the folks who put those together, it’s really creating that product and events are a product. You can everything that you can think of that you might do for a software product or a physical real world product, You do those same types of things, design, creation, marketing, thoughtfulness in the event itself. And then finally, the marketers job, which is to promote that event to the right audiences with the right message in the places they already pay attention. I mean, you can kinda take this slide and say like, alright, that’s the job. That’s what I have to do. It is much easier said than done. But if you don’t get one of these right, like if you just start marketing an event and you don’t have the strategy and you don’t have the right product and it doesn’t all align, you’re gonna be in a very bad place, friends. And I have seen a lot of events. I have been to and spoken at a lot of events that did not nail this. And so there was miss expectations from the organizers, there were miss expectations from the speakers, there were missed expectations from the audience. It was really clear when that through line exists from all of these, you can do amazing things. It won’t guarantee it, but but it will enable it. So let’s let’s imagine that we’re in the, packaging design universe, which many folks are like, oh my god, that’s a boring industry. Like packaging design, it’s it’s a relatively small niche industry. I was helping a SparkToro customer who’s who’s in this field and, specifically in the EU. And it was like, okay, well, let let’s do a an event for packaging design professionals. This is a terrible strategy. Awful. This is not a strategy. That it contains none of the aspects. And so if you hear this, right, if you say to your boss or your client or your team, hey, tell me what kind of you know, what’s our event strategy? Well, we wanna be the best event for x y z professionals. Awful. Why? Why is this so bad? This audience is way too broad. Packaging design professionals, it’s it’s even though it’s a niche audience, it is too broad for a starting event. If this was a ten year old conference and event or or what event series and it had been running for forever and had a hundred thousand people already paying attention to it and on the email list and, you know, a thousand attendees every year, fine. Right? Then it’s still not a strategy, but the audience is okay. Otherwise, if you are starting out with an event, if you only have a few hundred people in your audience so far for that event, this audience is way too broad. Best is entirely subjective. It’s meaningless. It’s like saying create great content. Like, stop. That is I I hate that phrase. It there’s no less meaningful phrase in the marketing universe than create great content. Ugh, kills me. Pointless. And finally, there’s no unique value proposition here or any competitive advantage. There’s nothing saying as compared to other people who make event, you know, events for packaging design professionals, we are going to fill in the blank. Where is that? It’s totally missing. Not a strategy. Alright. Here we go. If we were gonna plan a theoretical event in the packaging field, like say we were trying to compete with someone like the American Packaging Summit, which look, I no offense. The if you go into the sub pages, the stuff that they do and talk about is way cooler than what’s on this page. So but but because the American Packaging Summit has been around for decades and has, built up an audience, all they really have to say is we’re doing our event again. And this I think is one of the primary biasing challenges. Folks will look at successful events and then say, oh, well they do it this way. So therefore probably I can copy that and you cannot because the brand reputation that they’ve built from the history of growing the event is such a powerful driver of next year’s event. Right? It’s, oh, well, four years ago, you know, I went to the American Packaging Summit and I met my future boss and that’s how I got this job. So I’m gonna go every year for forever. And you multiply that times ten years and, you know, fifty thousand people who’ve been to the event, completely different story. So this is this is what I I might do if we were if we were trying to build this. And this is Amanda, what you and I have been doing, right, with the SparkToro event that’s coming up. So, this is way too text heavy dense slide. Right? But I’m I’m just gonna show you kind of the thought process here, but right. It’s it so you’d say we’re gonna prioritize our audience subgroups. So we’re looking at SMBs and new entrants to the field. That’s who matters. We are looking less at people who have lots of experience in the field or people who are outside of our field. We are looking less at serving, sponsors and and promoters, which many events do. Right? Many events are primarily designed for sponsors and then it’s the audience is the product for them and it’s it’s, it’s built around them. You wanna make the positioning crystal clear. By positioning, right, I really mean go read April Dunford’s obviously awesome, but also, you wanna say something like we are the gold standard in x for y. So tactical education focused online events for packaging design professionals. Okay. Good. A narrow audience, narrow focus. That’s what we’re gonna be the absolute best at. We’re not trying to be everything to everyone. So it’s not the entire packaging design field. It’s only only the pros in that field. And then, tactical education focused, very different from we want to be edutainment focused. Right? So you can think of something like, know, Spark Toro hours versus a an inbound. Two completely different things to serving similar ish audiences, but not, very different positioning. And then you wanna show why people should choose this event over the other ones. Right? So single day of content with exactly what pros need to know for the year ahead delivered by the best in the business at a low price. Okay. Alright. Now we have a strategy. Right? Now we we are all on the same page about who we’re targeting, why we’re targeting them, how we’re gonna reach them. This is this is like how I build a strategy. I’m not saying this is the perfect one for a packaging design professional who’s who’s building an event series, but this is how I would think about it rather than, right, this. Don’t don’t do that. Alright. So in terms of event organization, when when we get to this process, there’s sort of these three semi overlapping. I’ve tried to illustrate the semi overlap programming management and logistics. Like that’s what an event organizer is is working on. And oftentimes I think you get lost in the my job is to organize the event and you forget about the goal, which the goals are twofold. It’s engagement. Engagement is the value that attendees get during and just after the event. And I say attendees, but I also mean, you know, whatever speakers and staff and and people are participating in the event from the the the logistics side too. So don’t don’t ignore them. I think when you serve audiences well, you tend to serve whatever speakers and presenters well, but just note that. And resonance. Resonance is essentially what tells you this event won’t just be successful one time. It is building a brand for the future. This event now has be is becoming memorable, high status, and amplified in terms of its reach. It’s the kind of event where people will say, did you go to it? Will you go next year? Did you hear about it? Versus, you know, sort of the the quiet under the radar events. This is ludicrously hard with virtual, generally much easier with in person. I think that’s just a a state of how human beings are rather than, something you can totally control with marketing. Sorry. I want to like Yeah, yeah, please. I’m interested in the high status thing because I do think that is important and I think people want to feel high status, special, whatever when they attend an event. I’m curious how we engineer that for a virtual event. So I think there’s a, let’s see. The easiest way I can say it is if I were doing it in our field, the high status comes from I shared the virtual stage with other high status well known people, even though I myself was not necessarily high status well known. And or I participated in an event where it was clear that the, you know, there was a projection of high status onto the people who were part of the event. There was special things that they got access to. Right? Maybe it’s maybe it’s like, oh, they got these free access to an early version of some new tool or system. They got invited to something else. They got a they got something physical delivered to their house that made them feel special for the day. Sales folks tend to do this really well because they make their target feel high status and special. And yes, like Norman said, exclusivity. If it’s invite only, you have to you you can’t just sign up, you have to get invited. That that does it too. That does it too. Although I wonder for virtual events, if then it’s is it high status that you need to go for or is it or is it specialness? Because it’s a little bit different. Because one thing I think So I think these are two yeah. They’re both they’re different ways to achieve resonance. So high status is one way and then kind of the edutainment, you know, big production, or or like this is a really big event. Lots and lots of people attend it. Lots of people talk about it. It gets tons of play on social, all that kind of stuff. Everybody’s, you know, whatever slides and videos get clipped from it. That, that also makes it a special event or high resonance anyway. When it comes to engagement, I’m not gonna blather on about this and I am not an expert in it. So, I do actually really like this article from Hopin. I thought they did, one of the best jobs, possibly the best job out there of of recent pieces I’ve seen about engagement that you can earn through events. The sad news is when it comes to resonance, for whatever reason I feel I trolled through like all of Google’s results. I’ve been looking for years for someone who’s written something good about this. I have never found a single article that I like enough to recommend to you on how to make events memorable after the fact. If someone who’s on this webinar would like to write that piece and be like, oh, I got you Rand. Like please, yeah, hit me up. Like that would that would be great. I’d love to share something with folks. I do have a few quick pieces of advice on this from the from the high level strategy stuff. My best advice, right? Basically, get someone you trust who doesn’t work for you or or the event to go talk to your attendees about your event versus others. When I ran Mazcon, I never got honest feedback. Not in person anyway. Right? I could hear through the grapevine. I could talk to people who talk to people, but I could not get honest feedback. And I suspect the same is true with Spark Toro hours. Like as lovely and honest as I believe all of you who are listening to this presentation right now are, I suspect you would give a different answer to someone who is not me or Amanda than you would give to me. And that’s just because human beings are wired to be kind to each other, which is wonderful. Like and I never want that to stop. But it also means it’s really tough to get on Varnished feedback. So I would go talk to those other folks and they will tell you what resonated and didn’t and why they remember it and what’s memorable and they’ll tell you about other events, all of that. Resonance, friends, it’s different in different industries. You cannot I shouldn’t say you cannot, sometimes you can, but you shouldn’t assume that you can copy and paste a great marketing event into real estate or travel or packaging design or the inverse. So if you’ve seen something that works really well, can take inspiration from it, but it is not a copy and paste process. I’ve been to plenty of events that have tried to do that. You know, they’ve taken the the travel world, I went to an event, was it TBEX? Maybe it was something else. A travel event that I went to in Vancouver a few years ago and they were sort of trying to replicate the experience of a big conference that they had done that the organizers had put together in another field, which I think was, like it was the food and beverage industry. And even though you think there’d be overlap, it it does not go well. It was not great. There were lots of things that were awkward about it. They tried to do a million breakouts, which does work well in food and beverage because people are so specific to the things they’re interested in, but less on travel. And finally, number three, new is really powerful. Brand is also extremely powerful. And the third one is stories. So if your event tells a new story from or about a brand that people already know and like recall, which is what leads to resonance goes way up. This is that that would that would be where I’d suggest. Okay. How are gonna reach that right audience? This is the third question. Last one. So Amanda and I sort of put put together this this giant layout. I’m not gonna go through any every one of these, but you can kinda use it as a, oh, when I’m marketing my event online or offline, small or big, there’s your existing audience. That’s people like who’s on your email list already, who already follows you on social, who is reading your blog, etcetera, etcetera. There’s digital advertising. Unless you are unless you have a very large budget, or a lot of money to blow for some reason, I am not a huge fan of this for most events. There are exceptions, but most events, I’m not. If you’re, you know, if you’re trying to sell out a Bruce Springsteen concert, which I don’t think there’s any demand side problems there, it’s supply, then, you know, digital advertising might work. But, you know, if you’re trying to sell whatever, a real estate conference to real estate professionals. Right. Or the packaging example, like I’m sure there are a lot of or a handful of trade publications where it is worth getting a full page ad for your event. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Especially if you would prefer to just pay rather than do the kind of creative how could we work together thing. Which you can do both, right? Yeah. Do a sponsorship and do yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. Other people’s audiences. So speaking of trade publications, you can find folks who are influential on social in this field. You can go find email lists that reach them. You can find speakers’ channels. Reach out to your speakers and be like, hey, here’s something for whatever, Twitter, your YouTube, your Facebook, your LinkedIn, your TikTok, your etcetera, etcetera. Other events, especially online events, if you are doing in real life stuff, promoting your in real life thing being part of online events, not a bad way to go. And last but not least, PR and media. There’s lots of options here as well. So you’ve got a big set of options. Your job as an event marketer, right, is to kind of choose which one of these to invest in, prioritize them, figure out what’s gonna work for you in your field with your audience. I am gonna give the same advice that I give around a lot of content marketing stuff in the event marketing field, which is to not assume customers of your product and event attendees are the same. Many folks do this, especially those of you in b to b. We have this problem where we think of our audience as people who are gonna buy our product. That’s not the audience. Event audience falls into these four groups. Current customers, people who bought from you already. Potential customers, people who hopefully will buy your product or service. The amplifiers, those sources of influence, and then the broader community, that’s your potential attendees in event world. And they may be people who consume content sources, but are not actually influential themselves and would never buy your product or service. And so you’re not used to speaking to them and reaching them. This gets a little tougher. Right? If you ignore these people, put all your energy into those, you can have a tough time with event marketing. At least you’re not gonna reach the audience who could. Yeah. Or like, this to me is also the difference between a user conference and a bigger conference. Right? The difference between a user conference, like what? I think Slack has one, the Frontiers conference. They still have that. That’s their user conference. But and that’s fine. Right? That that that is specifically for customers or potential cost customers of the software. But then you have, like, a Dreamforce or inbound where it’s for the potential amplifiers and the broader community. A lot of value with that. And then when you think about, you know, influential tech conferences, those are the ones that you think about. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, so what’s really interesting so Shane, in the comments is is saying like, I really remember the events where I came home with new ideas I could put to use. And I have a weird theory that many people remember those events where they got new tactics, new tools, new tips, much less than the ones where they were edutained and then as you point out Shane, had great networking. That that’s not to say it’s just that resonance is harder with tactical tips and useful actionable content than it is with I saw Bill Clinton speak, I saw Obama speak, I saw, you know, whatever. Dwayne The Rock Johnson was at one of you know, like that kind of thing. It’s just a it’s different. Right? There’s there’s the the memorability aspect and then the got professional value from the event. And those don’t always overlap. So just be aware. I think this is really how this is why inbound is twenty thousand people and know, MozCon got to two thousand people before COVID anyway. So audience for events, like to visualize this stuff. So you’ve got those potential attendees and current attendees and amplifiers. And the event marketing that works the best is targeted at these folks. Like it’s those amplifiers and attendees. And then if you’re trying to maximize attendance, you wanna go after the whole industry. So just stuff to think about as you’re choosing those those tactics from that big list of that big board that we put together for you. In terms of audience research, so understanding customers, right, those conversations, it it can help most with obviously the the audience itself and then finding the relevant one, figuring out demographics and behaviors and attitudes and analyzing competition. Right? Looking at who else has been successful, figuring out what they’ve done well, why it’s worked for them. And then programming, also. So a number of event, organizers and including my friend Charlene who who who I think is running MozCon again now. She she started at Moz years ago and that was her first event. Now she runs tons and tons of events in all sorts of fields. But getting right speakers, right, choosing right topics, getting that positioning correct, all of that sort of programming stuff. Audience research is invaluable for this. It gives you data instead of just opinions. And the way I would go about this, hi, Charlene. Aw. I’m so honored you’re on this call. The way I would go about this is, and actually Charlene is great at this. Oh, look, there’s a picture of her. What timing? Is to start with the interviews. Right? So I would talk to individuals. Right? So I hey, Troy. Right? Troy runs this agency Mavericks. They it’s a it’s a small virtual event. They they do a very, good job of of bringing agency owners together. Right? Like what’s worked well or partly for your series. Right? So talking to other organizers of other events, they’re often very happy to share their experiences with you. Talking to my friend Will. Right? Like, hey, what do you think are important topics in the field right now? You know? Hey, Charlene, what are the best events that and sessions and speakers that you’ve seen recently? Like what got really high ratings? It’s these kinds of questions. You can, do that through networking. You can also do it, through emails or outreach on social, those kinds of things, you’ll get good answers. I am shocked at how willing people are to I think there’s just like a camaraderie among event organizers and marketers that everybody wants everyone’s events to do well. I kinda love that about our field. I would then take the answers that you get and before you assume they’re correct, try and validate them with surveys. I’m showing some informal ones on Twitter here, which is not necessarily the best, but, also I like to use Typeform for, sending out surveys, putting on your website. You can use which one call it? If you want, you can try SurveyMonkey Audience or Qualtrics or something like that for large scale. They’re expensive, but I’m a little nervous about the respondents that you get. I think it’s better if you can target it to the industry that you’re after and, you know, whatever the job titles and roles or types of people you’re going after. If I were running San Diego Comic Con, maybe then I would think about using Qualtrics or or SurveyMonkey Audience or something broad like that. On-site works fine too. I think this can work really well if you already have a smaller event series and you’re leading up to a big one. So this might be something that we would do on SparkToro around office hours leading up to our like bigger conference, right, as you put kind of a, you know, a type form that happens after or during the the process that you’re in on the website. That that works great too. And if you have emails, you can ask directly. You can even grab, you know, five hundred of your contacts, put it in a BCC, send it out, get one to one responses. Might take a while to reply, but this is a process that we’ve done at SparkToro. I’ve done a few times and, yeah, it’s been pretty helpful for us. So what this gives you is audience attributes. How do people describe themselves? What do they talk about and have interest in? Who do they pay attention to? What are speakers and content and events that they liked in the past? And you can use that data for all those things that we talked about. The competitive research, you know, what, what other hashtags do people use that I participate in? Who do they follow on social? Right? So if I’m in that packaging design industry, I can see that people who use the hashtag packaging follow these sources. And essentially, this is exactly the places that I’d wanna work with to broadcast the event. This is where I wanna do my PR advertising, sponsorships, co marketing, whatever I’m doing, all my my outreach because these people will reach a high percentage of the people that I need to reach. And this is also kind of a you know, if I this is I’ve done the filter to individuals instead of organizations, up in the filters of SparkToro. This is essentially showing me people whose profiles include packaging design. What do they engage with most? Who specifically do they engage with most? And yes. Right? Like Jessica, Eric, Joanne, Debbie, that’s probably who I wanna invite to at least participate or amplify. Maybe they’re my speakers too. Maybe they’re my my creators for the event of some kind. Maybe they’re on my advisory board for the event, whatever it is. This is essentially saying these are the most followed people by these types of professionals in this field. That’s what I’m going after. And what I like about this approach, you don’t have to use SparkToro. Right? You could troll through it manually on LinkedIn or Twitter, or or use a tool like FollowerWonk, right? Which is which is great for sort of Twitter bio searching. Twitter’s own search is terrible. You get data about the whole market, not just the people that you reach and know, which is great. So I like this because it lets you sort of market beyond those just running ads or the existing lists that you’ve got. You can kind of reach the broader field. Alright. Spark Toro Fest. This is one of our naming convention ideas, Rich. So you’re you’re not on there or or you’re not wrong there. Alright. So event marketing flywheel kinda works like this. If you’ve seen people in event marketing industry do it, this is probably quite familiar. You you go find sources that reach the audience. You try and provide some value that earns their attention. Wow them. Right? And bring them to your event page. So you you are doing essentially marketing with the event page being the call to action that you’re driving everyone toward. That can be what what’s frustrating is a lot of CMOs and event marketers will be tasked with, I need to prove that this source sent it over here, which you you shouldn’t worry about. You should not do. If you’re a guest on someone’s YouTube channel, if you mention their, your your event on their podcast, you’ll never see that analytics. Like it’s nearly impossible to track unless you do time series stuff and there’s a live broadcast. But I would ignore that. I would not worry about the attribution. I would worry about getting the message to the right people. And the idea is that you’re turning other people’s audiences into your audience. I think this is how slowly but surely you build up a great event. Alright. The idea when you’re doing this outreach, when you’re finding these sources, Amanda, you and I talk about this all the time. I think I build this slide for like every kind of marketing I think of because it’s just it’s just how great marketing gets done. I want this person or publication source to amplify my event to talk about what we’re doing here. What could I do that would get them to do that? What’s the thing? Right? What’s the thing that’s gonna trigger that action? Could I invite them to speak or send a speaker? Could I be a guest on their podcast? Could I be one of their webinar speakers? Sponsor their email newsletter? Could I publish research they’d cover? Run a joint survey with them? Get quoted in one of their like, this is the stuff. Right? That’s the that’s the meat of the, the work. And this is this is not easy, but because so few people invest in this and most people just throw money at Google or Facebook, it’s less competitive. It’s also way higher higher ROI. So we are a little low on time. I have a story. I was I was gonna talk a little bit about the the story of building Mazcon and and how we did that specifically. Talking a little bit about the kind of resonance that was built up through doing things differently, which I can do, and I’d like to, but I would also love to do some hands on examples for folks. Amanda and I would love to help you out. If your company is planning to run a mastermind group, a concert, a trade show, a training seminar, a live stream, whatever. If you in the comments want to tell us three things, like what kind of event you’re trying to build, who it’s for, and your primary goals. So may maybe you’re trying to actually make money from the event. That could be okay. That’s that’s one. That’s a very different goal from we’re trying to do lead gen for our product or trying to build our audience over time and build our brand over time. You know, when we talk about we’ve mentioned them a few times, but HubSpot’s inbound, I mean, could see in their financials, they they lose millions of dollars a year running that event. Like four to seven million dollars a year they lose running that event, maybe even more than that. Why? Why would they lose money on an event every year? It’s because they think of it as an advertising and brand building expense. And I would argue it’s a superb one, but super different goal than, hey, we’re gonna run SparkToro office hours or the packaging design folks are gonna have a live stream about an award show for the latest packaging design professionals. Really, really different. So if you’d like to share these with us, go for it, in the comments. And in the meantime, yeah, I’ll give you a little give you a little story time. So I I don’t know that probably not a lot of folks know this. So, know, Mazcon, before I left the company was about yeah. It was around two thousand attendees. It was a live event every year in person at the here here in Seattle, where where I started the company. And when I got into the industry, one of one of the first things that I was doing was going to a lot of, a few conference series. Right? So search engine strategies, which was owned by Google’s now, liaison, search liaison, Danny Sullivan, back when he was like industry side. And I think he sold that show. That show kept going. He started a new series called SMX. So I was going to a lot of those events and others in the field, some regional ones to SEM PDX in Portland and bunch of others. And those events were twenty four white dudes on stage, sometimes one woman, usually panels. Right? So you’d you’d have panels of three or four people who’d present for twelve minutes on a particular topic in the in the search marketing field. And they’d be in breakout rooms, then there’d be a maybe a keynote oftentimes from someone at Google or Yahoo or Microsoft search because those were still big back in the day. And then a big trade show floor with a lot of, booths where people were were selling things to each other. So old school conferences. Right? If you think of like what did twentieth century American conferences and events look like, this was quite similar. In fact, the only event I ever went to in the nineties was a dental conference for for professional dentists and orthodontists. And this you know, those early events were like this. When we made Mazcon, the very first Mazcon was one speaker, me. It was about two fifty attendees because I had dropped out of the University of Washington, but I applied to their alumni thing to get special discounted rate on using one of their classrooms for the event. And it was me for seven hours talking about SEO. Like every session was just Rand is gonna present on keyword research. Now Rand on link build, whatever it was. But that event grew up. And the first year that we had speakers other than me was like year two. The event was growing. It was almost all marketed through the blog. So was essentially content marketing that turned into this. And there were two innovations that at the time were relatively unique. One was everybody on one stage. So everybody has a keynote spot. There is no keynote or everyone’s a keynote. And two, there’s not twenty four white dudes. So when I when I first started making it, I was like, we absolutely even year one, I think we had to have I was like, we have to have fifty fifty gender balance. And then that expanded into, hey, we have to have more kinds of diversity and representation. Like it cannot all be straight people. It can’t all be white people. It can’t all be right? And eventually what became very cool was when we when we would put together the programming for the event in the in the last few years, probably the last five years I ran it from say twenty thirteen to eighteen, we didn’t have to do it. We didn’t have to do any sort of quotas or like, hey, how are we doing? Because our speaker selection was already from such a diverse set of people that it was just natural that when we were like, okay, well, we want someone on email marketing. Alright, this person. We want someone on content. Well, this person. We want someone on, you know, CRO. Well, this person. We got to the diversity that we wanted without having to enforce or actively work on it, which was super cool. That is super And I can tell you that it had lots of pushback. So today, a diverse event is not that surprising or revolutionary, but and it wasn’t surprising or revolutionary. It was just there were lots of people who were either some degree of uncomfortable with it or thought it was unnecessary. So I remember talking to, I won’t out who it is, but like a close friend who makes, who builds another conference who was like, the quota thing doesn’t feel right to me. Like, don’t think it’s right to enforce a quota. It feels unnatural and awkward, like, you know, whatever it is. How would people feel if they knew they were selected just because of their gender identity or or, you know, their ethnic background or those kinds of things? And I was like, they’re they’re not. That’s not how it works. But regardless, what I love was a few years into Mazcon working this way, that same person came back to me and was like, okay, I’m sold. Like, I see it. I get it. It does two things for you that’s really powerful. One is when you do that, the quality of speakers goes up because you don’t realize what you’re ignoring and missing. You you don’t see when you don’t expand your your set, you don’t see what you’re missing. So our audience ratings for speakers rose every year for like ten years in a row. And second, lots of people want to see people like them on stage, and they will not go to events that don’t feature anyone like them. And so, you know, you could see I remember talking to a guy who who now has an extraordinary reputation. Right? But he was like, ****. I did not realize until I saw Will Reynolds speak that you could be in marketing and be black and be a speaker. Like, that was something that never I thought it was a thing for, like, white dudes. Yes. There you go. Right? Like, if you don’t see yourself represented, you don’t know that you could potentially do that thing. I think this is true for folks of all kinds. Right? Like, as soon as I see a Jewish quarterback in the NFL, which will never happen, you know, then I’ll be like, hey, look at that. Schmooly, way to go. Throw that ball. You have your opportunity. Yeah. That’s I I might have missed I might have aged out at this point. I think I’m I think I’m Tom Brady’s age. So that’s not gonna work. Alright. So I thought I’d share that and then, yeah, let’s hear from some other folks. Yeah. Absolutely true about diversity and inclusion in events. I would imagine that as people see more of themselves within the speaker panel, then they start to reach out and say, hey, can I apply to be a speaker next year? Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. And also they buy tickets. Right? Like, it’s good for the universe and the world and ethically and all those kinds of things. It’s also good for your bottom line. It’s kind of nice that these things work together. Cool. We have some good examples out there? Yes. Let’s see. Some people are asking about in person digital. So Andrew asked about in person digital marketing meetup in our home market to build partnerships with referral sources and invite clients or potential clients to speak and share their knowledge. Oh, I like that a lot. Yeah. So I would, Andrew, in your shoes, I would start with the, essentially you’re trying to serve those clients and potential clients. And so I would do I would start that interview and survey process with them. Right? That’s the yes, they’re also your speakers, but they’re who you’re trying to serve. And so I would ask them about their goals. Who do they want to get in front of? Like who would they hope would be in there? And then I’d be really cautious. I think it could be tough to build a very large event depending on the size of your home market. If we’re talking about like whatever LA or New York City, maybe it’s easier. But if you’re in Seattle or Cleveland or Vancouver or BC or something like that, it’s gonna be a more limited set. And so I would just I would try to book a venue that feels full when you have even a small group of people in it because you want the energy in the room. This is one of the things event organizers sometimes really screw up. Charlene and I have talked about it many times. If you have a room for five hundred and you fill it up with three hundred people, there’s there’s like this deadness. Right? It’s just it’s kinda there’s like empty chairs and empty space, and it feels like, oh, man, do they have trouble selling or whatever. And if you instead have a room for three hundred and there’s three hundred people in there, that energy is completely different. And the same thing is true with twenty five or fifty. So just I would optimize accordingly, and I try and serve those clients and potential clients with the audience. They wanna reach, you know, if they have whatever, if it’s really all about like them wanting to show off to their boss and their team, how do you get those people to the event? If it is, hey, wanna reach my own customers, okay, how do we get them to the event? Do we have to market through and with them? It’s it’s all that kind of stuff. And then for the programming, I would just I would have someone who is pretty tough on speakers to coach them and help them build their slide decks. This was something many years for MozCon and even for for SearchLove and other events I helped with where I would be like, sure, I will look at your Amanda can attest that I am hopefully fair, but a little harsh. Yeah. It’s appreciated. But and I think I don’t know. I feel like there’s a lot of mixed sentiment on speakers needing to provide their slides in advance for feedback. I know some people really hate it. Some speakers really hate it. I mean, I personally like it. I mean, I might be like, oh, man. I gotta do this early, but that’s not a reflection of of how I feel about the event. That’s more of like, shoot. I gotta do this. But I always appreciate the feedback because I see it as like, well, if I’m gonna be on your stage, I better do a good job. Like that benefits both of us. So Abs absolutely. I I think there’s also like this aspect of this is frustrating but true, which is some speakers, if the event organizer has seen them many times and kind of knows that they’re gonna do a great job and whatever, you don’t have to worry about it. And if there’s newer folks, it’s much more important. And that comes through in the audience, right? Like what you don’t want, you don’t want to have an audience walk away from any of the speakers and be like, that was not great. Or didn’t measure up to the level of the other people at the event or the other talks at the event. Don’t have to slide into someone else’s style. You don’t even have to be great on stage. If your content and the stories that you tell and the information is incredibly useful and the thing that people want presented in a way they expect that you’re gonna do well even if you are a nervous person, even if your whatever sort of natural charisma isn’t all the way up there. I’ve seen great results for speakers. Yeah. Should we cover two more examples and then wrap Let’s do it. Okay. Patricio asks or says he’d like to do a training or webinar for tech CEOs with the goal to introduce them to how branding can improve their business and serve as lead gen? Oh. That is a good one, Patricio. Funny story. I yesterday morning in Seattle, I was invited to speak at an event, which I did for for a local venture capital firm that basically invited all their portfolio CEOs. I’ve done those a few times for various ones. In fact, it was a huge, huge builder for Maz’s very early consulting business. I spoke to the gosh, what was the VC’s name? I’m forgetting. They fund oh, Benchmark. They funded like eBay and a bunch of other really early like big tech companies. So I would I think it’s very hard to get in front of tech CEOs to get them to come to anything. It’s just because they they generally speaking have whatever, low bandwidth and also low belief in the ability of an event to level them up, but they’re very networking focused. So if you can do things where you say, oh, these tech CEOs, what they want is to meet investors, to meet other tech CEOs, to learn from other people who’ve had lots of success. Like, I think one of the early things that got a bunch of tech CEOs to go to this GeekWire event years ago here in Seattle was they got Rich Barton, who who started Expedia and now is the CEO at Zillow, to come and be the keynote speaker at this event. And so, yeah, when I rolled up, I was tech CEO number, like, two hundred of basically every tech CEO in the city because we all wanted to see Rich. If you can find those few linchpins, whatever, virtual or in person, I think you said, yeah, webinar. So I would go virtual. If you can find a few linchpins who are like, oh yeah, they’ll pull the rest of these folks with them because they really wanna see those people. That is probably a great way to start that. And I would ask, right? Get on the phone with a dozen of them, ask like, hey, if this person and this person are speaking, who would those be where you’d go, well, I can’t miss it. I gotta go. I’d also, I’d think about making it invite only and doing something kind of like make it feel high status. Yeah, the exclusivity. Yeah. All right, last one here and then we’ll wrap up. Melissa asks or Melissa’s event is going to be a live conference for an association of tech consultants. Intent is to recruit additional members and cement existing members. I feel like one really good opportunity is to engage the existing members as speakers or at least some of them, right, to show to one, to kind of show like, hey, one of the value adds is you can be a speaker at our event. And then it’s also aspirational for additional new members. Yeah. I like that too. So the the interesting thing about an existing association is usually you can get that email list, which is super powerful. I would use that email list to do my interviews and surveys. I might consider taking that email list over to Clearbit, full contact, people, p p I p l, I think it is, and using their identity resolution to turn those emails into, you know, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles, etcetera. And then like looking at the content these folks consume and what they follow and read and all that kind of stuff, I’d probably connect with a bunch of them on those platforms. Right? So like if you reach out on LinkedIn and you say, oh, hey, you’re part of this like technology association and so am I, and we’re putting together an event for folks and like, would you have five minutes to chat about that? Or like, you know, would you be up to take this survey to see you you can start to get that almost, the association itself feeling like they’re part of the programming, and then they’re gonna want to go more, which is helpful too. People are attracted to things that they feel like they participated in the creation of. So that’d be one of my tactics. I might, I might be tempted to talk to the marketers for the association and see if they would be willing to sort of work with you budget wise, time wise to kind of help with the amplification of that too. Yeah. Because they’re getting a lot out of it. Yeah. That’s great. We gotta wrap up here. Thank you, friends, for joining. Thank you for your incredible participation in the chat and everything. Is very helpful to us. It’s enlightening to us. And then we’re gonna we’re still gonna go back and read through because there was some great feedback on events, networking and events, not not networking and events. And yeah. Yeah. And we should have some news about Sparktoro Fest or whatever we’re actually gonna call it. Yes. Quite soon, coming quite soon. And these slides and the presentation will be available on this Crowdcast page right after we’re done, and then Amanda will get that email out to everyone. Amanda, thank you so much for your moderation, even though your two year old is being a cretin today. Yeah. I really appreciate it. Yeah. I had to tag out and him some stickers because he went in the potty. Yeah. That was his reward. I mean, if only we all got stickers for that. I would have so many stickers. Alrighty, friends. Thanks for joining us. Take care, everyone. Bye. Bye.