You’re having your weekly marketing meeting, and the main question on your agenda is determining which two or three Microsoft Dynamics conferences to exhibit at from the dozen or more up for grabs.
The decision is an important one for your company, since you’ve become accustomed to generating the majority of your annual sales leads from these few big investments. For years, it’s been a pleasantly predictable marketing environment. But over the last year, the entire Dynamics conference situation seems to have been turned upside down, with old conferences changing their focus and new unproven conferences being aggressively marketed as the next winners.
How do you make the most informed decision in this suddenly turbulent Dynamics conference environment? By determining answers to five key marketing questions:
- What level of confidence do I have of a particular conference achieving its attendance goals? When there were just a few conferences that occurred year after year, that wasn’t such an important question—you had data from previous years to help you feel comfortable with projections. Sure, conference organizers can provide all kinds of data about the direct marketing they plan, but with so many new conferences having appeared as old ones reformulate their agendas and goals, the reality is that it’s impossible to obtain safe projections. One approach is to make sure you have an out at some point after registrations have begun, when you can judge if they are coming in at a pace that will meet projections, or not.
- Will the attendees actually be my prospects? Just because a conference is billed as a Dynamics GP event, for example, doesn’t guarantee it will be targeted to your industry or business focus area in GP. You need to know that the industry, business focus areas, and/or geographic target markets you seek out will be well represented at the conference.
- How many serious sales leads from your target market(s) will I leave the conference with? Part of your calculation needs to be based not only on expected attendance and target markets, but on the number of other exhibitors. Too many exhibitors for too small a crowd will reduce the number of serious sales leads you walk away with.
- What cost per sales lead can I expect to achieve? The key here is determining the real final cost of the conference, not just the cost of a booth. To do this, you will need to carefully figure out ALL your costs. How many people will need to attend? What will the travel and equipment expenses be? How much will you be paying your people attending the conference, fully loaded?
- What will your opportunity cost be by attending a particular conference? In other words, how much in sales will your sales and marketing team be passing up by spending two, three, or four full days manning a conference exhibit booth. More to the point, what might your yield in new sales leads have been had you devoted the same budget to a proven and predictable online marketing resource, like MSDynamicsWorld.com?
At MSDynamicsWorld.com, we have a huge base of readers – more than 55,000 strong, and we have a long track record of serving up sponsored content (“exhibits” at conferences). We can reach finely tuned market segments all year round and predict with surprising accuracy the response rates to content and attendance at webcasts.
You can go back to the old days of predictability and eye-popping sales leads—it’s just that you are doing it in a new medium.
