My Favorite Marketing Hack When Speaking at Conferences

0:00Right. So we're going to talk about Neil's favorite marketing hack when speaking at conferences. So Neil's been on the circuit for the last couple of weeks. I have as well. But Neil had some thoughts here. So Neil, this is a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot

0:30For anyone who's watching the video format, you can see him nodding yes. But David works with him. So check this out. Eric and I speak at the same conference. And Eric and I both try things like boots and sponsoring events or working out deals. And for most events, and when I say most events, I'm talking well over 90 plus percent, the boots just aren't as effective as they used to be. Speaking is probably one of the most effective strategies, as well as setting up in-person meetings. If you speak though, and you can apply to speak at pretty much any event, some will accept you, some won't. It happens to all of us.

1:08Eric has been running this process and it's pretty cool. And I sent it to my team. So I got an email because we both spoke at an event called SAS Open, which I believe is Nathan Latka's event. And David from Single Grain, Eric's company, he sends me a message. Of course, I'm a competitor, but it doesn't matter. I still love the approach. He sends me an email saying, Hey Neil, we missed each other at SAS Open. Hopefully I can catch you at another SAS conference later this year. Having said that, I wanted to share our CEO, Eric Su's slides from SAS Open regarding SEO shortcuts, building a media moat.

1:45It was well received. So hopefully you'll get some value from it. On another note, a lot of the information provided at this event is exactly what we provide for our partners. I'm not sure if this is something you currently need help with, but we are happy to provide an audit and share what our recommendation in order to optimize and increase your current SEO performance. If you're interested, just hit reply. And of course, his slides are attached in PDF format. PDF is important because then the design and the fonts and everything comes across. And I thought it was great. And then I didn't respond to him.

2:20And this was 12 days ago. So then two days later, which would have been 10 days ago, he emails me again. Hey, Neil, just want to follow up on the slides I sent you. Also, do you want to take us up on the offer for SEO recommendations? Question mark. That was it. Then three days after that, which would be seven days ago, he emails saying, Neil, we never heard back from you in regards to the SEO slides I shared with you and the free audit I offered. If you're interested in the future, feel free to reach out. And that was it. He didn't keep pestering me after that, but I loved it. And the reason being is if you spoke at a conference, you've built up goodwill with a lot of the attendees, even if they didn't hear your session because you're talked about during the event or people know that you're speaking because of the agenda.

3:04And even if they missed it, they probably want the slides. If they attended it and they got value, there's a good chance they'll take you up on the free recommendation. I thought it was a great marketing strategy forwarded to my team. Eric, thanks. I told my team to copy and modify it so the text isn't the same, but leverage a similar strategy. Yeah. Hey, whatever works. And I think there's a couple of lessons in here. And so one is if you see something interesting, go ahead and test it. One in 12 experiments usually are, that's kind of the ratio for the experiments that end up working. I actually got this tactic, funny enough, Neil, from Nathan Latka and Patrick Campbell.

3:42So they used to do this at conferences all the time. And so they would do this at the conference called SaaS talk. And so these tactics get passed on. And the key thing is when you do these types of things, you as so I know the team wanted to send it as me, but let's say you're the marketer, you're the lead marketer on the team. And so they ran the copy through me and we talked about the number of times to the number of times to actually email because we didn't want to pester people. And so the number that we settled on was three or four times, and it was over a span of maybe two, three weeks or so.

4:17And it was very lighthearted. It's not like constantly saying, hey, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. It's also, hey, here's a resource for you. By the way, if you wanted to chat, go for it. If not, that's totally fine. By the way, here are the slides again. So we're trying to layer on some value in there. Neil, before we finish off on this one, if you want to share this one, I thought this was interesting because I hadn't heard of this before. But I've spoken at conferences for years. Neil's spoken at conferences for years and years too. But now Neil does this thing where he actually arranges for the conference organizers to help him book some meetings.

4:50Is that how it works, Neil? Yeah, it is. So what we'll do is depending on the event I'm speaking at, we'll have the conference organizer hit people up like their main sponsors, people who spent money, their biggest attendees like corporation wise where they're buying a lot of tickets. and you know they have money, assuming the conferences are expensive. And we try to tend to speak at expensive conferences, which means attendees typically have money or the businesses have money to spend. And we'll do deals with them where they set up meetings. So let's say if you are SaaS open, we didn't do this with SaaS open, but let's say you're SaaS open.

5:26We would say, all right, Neil's gonna speak, here's his fee, we'll negotiate the fee, or we'll say, hey, he'll speak for free or discounted rate, but we want X, Y, and Z. X, Y, and Z used to be booths and sponsorships. And the ROI and that kind of stuff wasn't that great. It was better to just charge the speaking fees. What was great though was saying, hey, what's your attendees? What companies are they from? We want to set up meetings. And then the conference organizers were like, hey, as additional perk, because you bought so many tickets, we can get you guys a meeting if you want with Neil Patel and his team.

6:00And this is what they've done. Let us know if you want to set it up. And they're not forcing it Because if you're forcing meetings, the quality is not going to be there and your conversion rate is going to be terrible. And they'll be like, oh, yeah, they give you feedback on all these different types of marketing strategies and presenting on this, that and the other. And that has been the number one producer of revenues for conferences for us. So when we go to conferences, that's been super effective. The other thing that's been effective for conferences is going to industry events. So like Google has another live event tomorrow where they're breaking down a lot of stuff.

6:34We're under NDA, so I can't talk much about it, but they're tight-lipped. They didn't reveal tons to us anyways. And agencies will be there and customers will be there. So we'll have some of our exec team go down there, be there at Google, networking with other large corporations that are spending an arm and a leg at Google, which is another way to pick up revenue. So industry events like that, we find also great ways to generate more income. Got it. And last thing, you know, when you set up those meetings, it sounds like it's very lighthearted. It's optional. What's the topic of those meetings?

7:06It's just hanging out or what is it? how can we help? So a lot of times I'm like, Hey, what's the purpose of the meeting? So I'll give you a great example. It was in Brazil. They set me up with a meeting and it was with the CTO and it was a good size company, beauty company. I think they had 30 something thousand employees. So it doesn't matter if it's in Brazil or Portugal or the US, if you have 30 ,000 plus employees, you're usually a decent sized business. I'm assuming everyone would agree with that one. it doesn't matter what currency exchange 30 ,000 plus employees is 30 ,000 so met up he brought his CEO and chairman as well we didn't know that he's like oh what was the purpose of me like yeah I just want to talk to you see what we can do to help where your problems are and we're just light-hearted discussing things like yeah we're doing a lot of this stuff internally and they were just like but you know what we really need some help expanding globally so we're already in Brazil we're doing well in Brazil we need help expanding into Europe and we're like cool, we have a European team and we help with this, right?

8:06We're NP Digital, we're a global ad agency. We've been adding a new region literally at least once a month. We've been exploding in new regions. And there's like, oh, cool, we'd love to work together. And we're still in conversations. But that's typically how they go. Some of them are a bus, they don't convert, I would say more than half of them, probably more than 70 % of them relate to no business. But it's somewhere around 20 to 30 % relate into new business. And their campaigns typically start off small, but these are massive companies. So then use the land and expand approach in which you're going after multiple divisions within that organization because large corporations that are publicly traded typically have many divisions and product lines.

8:44And then you also go after expansion through multiple regions. Oh, you're in the United States. Let's help you with Canada, Mexico, the rest of Latin America. Let's help you with Europe, APAC, et cetera. So those are the final ways we grow. The final thing to close this out is what Neil's not mentioning here is that both of us try to be as helpful as possible. It doesn't matter if it's new business or not. And so if they come in and say, Hey, we need help with this, we need help with that. And we don't offer that. The first thing we'll do is fire off an email. And so at the end of the day, the worst case scenario is you meet a cool person and you have a new friend and best case scenario is you get new business for the company.

9:20Is that about right, Neil? Yep. That's right. And it's a long-term approach. It's funny how a lot of these people I meet two, three years later, they hit us up and then they're interested in working with us or they move to a different company and then they're interested in working with us. Yep. And that's what it is. It's a long game. You just want to have the first initial impression. And then if they continue to follow your content, then you're building a deeper and deeper relationship. So that is more of a justification to great content. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.

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