The conversation usually starts with:

• “It just costs so much.”

• “I don’t know if it’s valuable.”

• “I have to carve out at least 3 days of my work week to do this.”

Conferences are often frowned upon both by the individuals who attend them and the businesses who pay for booth space, sponsorships and tickets. When $5,000 (or more) is spent in dollars and team time, there becomes an expectation on ROI to return every dollars spent — immediately.

And yet, conferences are one of the most valuable and critical marketing activities for early stage startups.

Like paid ads, conferences have been incorrectly positioned in the funnel. Some understand that conferences are a brand touch point (top funnel) or a sales enablement mechanism (middle funnel). But the majority of founders look at the high price of conferences and put massive expectation to capture leads and even close deals on the floor (bottom funnel).

Now, I’m not saying you won’t have sales conversations. But if you’re attending a conference ONLY to walk away with a list of prospects and you judge your ROI based on that, then you’re going to be very disappointed. And, you’re forgetting how marketing works.

Let’s break down why conferences work by talking about the common misconceptions and how to correct your thinking, specifically for early stage startups.

The compounding marketing effect of conferences for early stage startups

You’ll learn who your buyer actually is.

When you’re sub 10 customers, you’re still learning who your primary buyer is. The larger the organization you sell into, the more complicated the buying committee. Conferences are like a fishing net that captures all the people interested in a specific topic, and those people may be your influencers, users, buyers, and financial gatekeepers. At a conference, you can meet with ALL of them at once and get incredible data on who you should sell to and what’s important to them.

Brand awareness not just for your buyer, but the ecosystem you serve.

Conferences are like a savings account of brand you cannot see. You fill up your bank account every time you attend. It compounds interest. At some point, you feel like an overnight success, but it was actually a concerted effort from these deposits over time.

Instead of only measuring conferences by the bottom of funnel lead activity, think about all of the brand touch points made with your audience who had no idea your product existed. They’ll like your LinkedIN page and connect with your profile. They’ll sign up for your email list.

Then, WOM takes over. They will tell people in their ecosystem about you. Guaranteed. Those people will go to your site and fill out a demo form. You’ll wonder where it came from. “A friend told me about you.” Where did THAT friend hear about you? From a conference.

And when you take special attention to the look of your booth, it becomes a highly visible brand touch point that draws prospects in.

In person connectivity you cannot get from ads

With ads, we endlessly speculate why someone clicked in a futile attempt to recreate what “worked.” Did we target the right person? Was it the color of the ad or the copy? AI can spin up thousands of variations of ads for you and will tell you which one performed (via clicks) the best, but you’ve learned nothing about your prospect until you have the sales conversation.

At a conference, you get the unique opportunity to conduct a two-way conversation with someone well before they are in your pipeline. And when you’re early stage, you must prioritize talking with potential customers as much as possible. That’s how you know you’re building the right thing for the right people.

There are a few more reasons I could wax on about, but let’s now look at a case study from one of my clients who is hitting the conference circuit.

Case Study: Exum Instruments

The Product: An analytical instrument (mass spectrometer) used by scientists to measure the elements inside any solid sample of material. Great for finding counterfeit materials in materials science.

The Client’s Challenge:

• Bringing the instrument to conferences is expensive. It’s heavy, so it’s costly to ship, adding extra expenses to every conference.

• Sales cycles are long (up to 18 months).

• No nurturing mechanism existed to help move potential prospects met at the conference into qualified pipeline, which is important considering the lengthy sales cycle.

• Being a small team, conferences required the founder, head of marketing/sales, or the sales person on their team to attend.

• And because of this, the ROI expectation became quite high.

We came up with a playbook we’ve run twice now that applies the full funnel model:

• Pre-conference prep to game plan what we’ll do before, during, and after the show to maximize value. Usually at least one month before the event.

• Viewing the show floor as a multi channel opportunity to capture content, generate media attention, and qualify leads. Marketing, PR and sales all woven together.

• Post-conference team huddles where we start with a pipeline review, followed by marketing and PR content that communicates to our audience why we were there.

I won’t give it ALL away (cause that’s what you pay me for) but here are a few examples to try on before your next conference:

• Pre-conference PR (this one is my favorite):

  • Find the list of media partners on the conference website. Don’t see one? Ask the organizers if media are attending. Then, reach out to media with a link to schedule a 15 min interview with the founder or most senior representative attending the show. Trust me, if media are attending, they’re there because they WANT to talk to you. So make it easy! For my client, we generated 4 on-site media interviews and 3 subsequent articles. We also now have solid relationships with these outlets for future news announcements.

• Marketing at the show:

  • Record podcast interviews with those who walk into your booth or other vendors. Your goal at the early stage is to show that you understand the problem well and created the right solution. The best way to do that is to let other people tell that story for you.

• Post conference wrap up:

  • Market your attendance. Share social posts with that great photo from your booth. This makes you look bigger than you really are, which is important for credibility at the early stage.

  • We also hosted an exclusive webinar for the qualified prospects met at the conference. We ended up opening the registration broader since the group was quite small, but the tactic worked — it offered prospects an opportunity to learn more in a dedicated 60 min Q&A with the founder.

Other conference ROI examples from this client:

• Conversations that started as awareness of the product were then nurtured through email marketing and became hand raisers after a few months. Think about that: the pipeline you generate from conferences could be immediate and it could take months. And that’s OK! That’s how marketing works! Someone sees an ad and two months later, when the pain is real, they solve their problem with your solution.

• Partnership conversations were generated among other vendors. Now, they’re attending events with those partners to share in the cost and it makes them look credible.

It’s more than the day of.

After reading this, I hope you walk away understanding that conferences provide value far beyond the days the event is held.

When you think about the full funnel, conferences are an opportunity to:

• Educate your prospects

• Learn more about your buyers and their pain points

• Have direct 1:1 conversations to qualify/disqualify leads

• Create PR buzz

• Capture marketing content

• Cultivate partnerships

• Look bigger than you are

That’s a lot of ROI you get to measure beyond pipeline.

Still unsure if conferences are right for you? Or are you curious to talk through the playbook in more detail? You know where to find me! (Or maybe you don’t - email me a [email protected] and let’s talk).