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4 Simple Tips for a Successful User Conference

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For attendees, a user conference is a little like a mini-vacation.

It’s an opportunity to bask in the luxury of being a valued customer, perhaps with a stay at a beachside resort with catered meals and evenings of receptions with open bars. Not a bad assignment if you can get it.

For the marketing and communications team tasked with seamlessly pulling off a sparkling, well-attended event that woos customers new and old while simultaneously showcasing the best of the organization’s product and service offerings, it’s a whole other story.

From planning a pre-conference messaging strategy to identifying an appropriate venue to staging informative and engaging presentations, there is a seemingly endless list of tasks that go into conducting a successful user conference. No one blog post could cover all of the best practices and important steps, so this post will serve as a brief summary of simple tips and observations from personal experience that virtually any organization can follow.

There’s an app for that: Event apps, such as AttendeeHub, can be customized with important conference information such as schedules, maps, agendas, wifi connectivity, speaker background and more. An event app’s push notification feature is particularly useful when sharing information on last-minute schedule and location changes, ensuring attendees have a source for all the latest news and announcements about the event. At a recent event, I consulted the app several times per day to plan my own activities around agenda items and was happy that I didn’t have to bother the event’s organizers with every little question that popped into my mind.

Go easy on the sales pitch: The beautiful thing about a user conference is that the vast majority of attendees are already your users. They don’t need a “Come to Jesus” moment of conversion that changes them from skeptics to believers. That’s important to remember so your customers/attendees don’t feel like they’re being beaten over the head with constant sales pitches over the course of the entire event. Certainly, it’s ok to mention new product features or service offerings, but as always, keep the focus and orientation on what you can do now and in the future to solve customers’ most pressing problems.

Keep it moving: Freed from the pressures of having to convert nonbelievers, conference organizers should extend this collegial feeling toward the event’s programming. In other words, create a tone for the event that feels light and engaging to attendees. Focus on sharing successes and problems that your solution has helped clients overcome, rather than getting bogged down in minutiae. The last thing you want is roomful of slack-jawed, bored attendees staring at their phones (even if they are just consulting the event app!) while speakers drone on during endless presentations.

Give me a break: Keep individual sessions to an hour or less. Schedule frequent breaks, and why not end programming on one afternoon at 3 or 4 p.m. to give attendees some time to enjoy their surroundings? The more you make your conference feel like a mini-vacation for customers, the more likely they’ll be to return year after year.

[Your Business Name] – Powered by Communication

How Often Should I Reach Out to My Prospects? It Depends

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The first rule of real estate is “location, location, location.” Anyone who’s ever been in the market to buy or sell a home has been told this by a family member, friend or agent. But when you’re buying a house where exactly is the best location? The answer: It depends.

Truth told, there are many variables when you decide to buy a home, most notably price and cost. You may want to live in a certain location, but the price of the houses there may not fit your monthly mortgage budget. So you have to look for a different location.

Another example: let’s say you want to buy a house in a historical part of a city. The prices may be cheaper for the houses, but there may be a lot more maintenance and cost that goes into it.

In marketing, the question often arises, “how often should I be reaching out to my prospects so I can close a sale?” The answer here is the same as buying a house: It depends.

Some of the factors determining your approach to outreach are sales goals, clearing the shelves, price of the product and the length of the sale. The following are some points to keep in mind when determining how often you want to reach out to potential buyers based on your approach to the sales process.

The Hunting Approach to Sales and Frequency of Contact

In this approach to the sales process, the service or good could be a one-time acquisition or it could be purchased several times. When gaining leads, the company looks at the population of prospects, and then answers the question, “who am I going to go after?”

Next, they determine the outreach approach based on the “target’s” buying journey and how they gain information. And then they hunt.

With this approach, what one hopes to achieve is an initial buy and then the possibility of repeat customers. Because of this, they need to determine how often to reach out and provide prospects with pertinent information to get them to buy. This approach may be applicable to both business-to-business (think Dunder-Mifflin) and business-to-consumer relationships.

Groupon is a good example. If you’ve ever given your personal email address to Groupon, you’ll soon find that emails show up as frequently as daily. And there’s a reason. It’s because the sales and buying opportunities change daily, and the buyer has to act fast or could miss out on the deal.

Another example is if you have an Amazon Prime account. Emails show up almost daily, because the discounts and shipping options change daily as well.

But what about other sales and discounts that don’t change as frequently? In this instance, too many emails can sometimes be annoying because the offering isn’t necessarily changing that often.

In these instances, it’s important to assess when the amount of outreach becomes an annoyance. What you want to avoid is prospects hitting the “unsubscribe” button and losing their business or never getting it in the first place.

Examples of companies that may reach out too often are online meal kit delivery services, movie theaters and car rental companies. The questions to answer here are: is the meal kit option changing in the next month, do I need to rent a car this week, and are the movies switching out today? If the answer is, “probably not” then it’s important to watch how often emails are sent.

The Gathering Approach to Sales and Frequency of Contact

In this approach, the company is trying to build a relationship for the long-term. They start with some of the same steps as the hunting approach determining the appropriate population, looking at their “options” to start a relationship with and how they gain information. And then they date.

In the gathering instance, the cost of the good or service is usually (but not always) much more expensive than the hunting approach. As such, the language used in these company’s messages is also different, focusing more on the benefits of the product (a new HVAC unit), the return on cost (a car) and a tie to an emotional state (a diamond ring).

For B2C relationships using the gathering approach, outreach is common but usually not as frequent as the hunting approach. Sure, there may be a sale on a certain model of new car, but chances are that sale isn’t ending tomorrow. And, a bachelor looking for an engagement ring is probably going to take his time to find the right one; not because he got an email every day for a week.

When gathering customers, the time it takes to sell the good or service, or close a deal, can take a lot longer than the hunting method as well. So, determining the cadence of outreach to prospects is also important for the company to note. For example, if a company knows that a buyer isn’t going to make a decision in the near future, then daily emails are probably not a good idea.

Determining cadence of outreach is particularly important when developing B2B relationships, because these deals can cost millions of dollars and take months to close, and when that money is on the line, the buyer values a long-term relationship and is gauging what can be expected.

Something to consider here is the level of the individual that the outreach is being sent to and how often messages are being sent. For example, overwhelmed by the amount of email in his or her inbox, if sent too often, a message has a good chance a C-level executive will delete it. Or, these people may have a separate email box for those messages and they end up eternally ignored.

If you have a good email address for someone at this level, then don’t bother them too much with your messages. Consider who’s making the buying decision and dating you in return probably an influencer at a lower level in the organization who’s more likely to read and receive your invitation to engage. So perhaps more of your energy and messaging should be focused at this level.

Conclusion

Where have we gotten with the answer when determining how often to reach out to your prospects? It depends.

When buying a house, once you get past location, logic and good advice tell you to look at what you can afford, the most (and best) house you can get for your money, and the community amenities around it.

When determining your email and outreach campaigns, use logic and good advice to determine the type of relationship you want to develop with your prospect, their journey to making a decision, and then how often you need to reach out.

There’s really no right answer for the question about frequency just a better answer depending on your good or service and the relationship you hope to make. But whatever you decide, keep in mind what it will take to keep your buyer(s) engaged and avoid hitting the unsubscribe button.

Why Are You Reading This?

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News Flash: There is a lot of written content on the web. That means it is challenging to grab a reader’s attention and even more difficult to hold it. One study, from way back in 2014, found online readers generally click away after 15 seconds. Five years and billions of smartphones later, it’s probably closer to 12 or 11 seconds.

That’s why when creating PR or marketing content, we constantly need to consider the reader first. Certainly, companies have their own goals for every content piece they create, but the reader’s experience, what’s meaningful to them and their goals for reading your content must be the first priority.

Here’s how to grab a reader’s attention in written content and hold it to the last word.

Identify your reader

This is the most important question. Whether crafting a thought leadership article, email blast or white paper, it needs to be laser-focused on who the reader is because as soon as they sense a piece of content isn’t relevant to them, they’ll delete, click or scroll away to something else. It’s a tougher question than it appears. If you set your sights too narrow, you risk alienating a lot of prospects; if you aim too broad, you risk being ignored by everybody.

Headline and lead paragraphs are the most important

What did you think of the headline for this blog post? Did it pique your curiosity? If so, good, because that’s what headlines need to do. Readers typically decide to continue an article after the headline and first few lines, so these two introductory elements are perhaps the most important parts of the content in most writing.

Style matters

The type of content will often dictate what style you use for your headline and lead as well as for other writing choices. A blog post, like the one you’re reading, allows for a little more causal headline, lead and language, but regardless of the style, it needs to be relevant and easy to read. Longer pieces, like white papers, should also move the reader along, even if they are written in a more formal style.

Tell the reader why they should stick with you

There are many ways in those lead paragraphs to encourage the reader to keep reading. Options include presenting a common, pressing problem that they want to solve, asking a provocative question that they will want to answer, or enticing them with ROI. For example, in B2B (and even in B2C) dollar signs always grab readers’ attention. Obviously, if the content has no financial element, then that’s not feasible, but sharing quantifiable numbers automatically establishes interest and often relevance in the reader.

Make every paragraph meaningful

Keep the reader engaged through the entire content piece by putting information in every paragraph that they care about or include actionable data they can begin applying today. The overriding goal of PR and marketing content is, of course, to attract prospects, but writing about only your solution is a turn-off, even presented in a vendor-neutral fashion.

One size does not fit all

I was going to title this subhead: “keep it short,” but one study shows that a 1,600-word length for most pieces is ideal, even for blog posts. Other research contradicts that finding. For a white paper, eBook or byline, that length or longer seems appropriate, but with blog posts, we say keep them shorter and then drive the reader to download the longer content piece.

What nearly all the research says, however, is if it is quality content, the reader will stick with it, regardless of length. In healthcare B2B PR, which is where we at Amendola Communications live, quality content means relevance to the reader, their job or their business. Stay on that track and you’ll have them reading to the last word, which is what I hope you’re doing right now.