Originally, I published this article on my LinkedIn after the resounding success of the first conference I promoted for Matchr (in this company, I’ve been working as a Head of Marketing). I decided to publish it here, so you can find all my content in a single place.
“Ooh, boy. You guys are super popular!”
We received this message from one of the TRC 2022 Amsterdam attendees when he knew we were completely sold out two weeks before the event date.
Considering that TRC is Matchr’s first conference ever (and, by the way, the first conference I promoted as a Head of Marketing), I can confidently say this is a success.
Instead of seeing empty chairs, we are adding more and more people to the waitlist. Instead of urgently promoting and trying to sell out with a generous discount, we can sit back and sip coffee – meaning focus on communications with attendees and other activities 🙂
I wrote this article for marketers and other specialists involved in event promotion. Hope you will learn something new and get inspiration.
How it all started: Why did we decide to host a conference?
When I joined Matchr in April, Adriaan Kolff told me he planned to organize a recruitment conference. Since we are striving to become thought leaders in the recruitment industry, hosting events like conferences, meet-ups, webinars, and round tables, is exactly what we need.
For your reference: Matchr provides remote embedded talent teams for start-ups and large enterprises like TikTok, Miro, Bolt, Booking.com, etc. We work fully remotely. The number of employees – 36.
If we move from a high-level goal to a more practical ones, hosting a conference gives us such benefits:
- Connection with prospects. We work in a niche where personal contacts mean the world. Due to the conference, we have a chance to meet people, chat, and build relationships. Considering that we are a fully remote company, events become places for in-person connection.
- Building thought leadership and trust. This is rather obvious – as an event organizer, Matchr bring value to all the attendees, and they consider us more reliable.
- Plenty of content. We all know how challenging to find content. The conference is a treasury of high-quality expert content.
- Earn some euros. After all, we are business. We expected little from this event in terms of profit (to be honest, we would be happy if we broke even). But we are making a profit, and it warms my heart.
The major challenges and risks we faced before we started the event promotion
To add some drama to this piece, I decided to write down the challenges that we faced at the very beginning. (If you plan to organize the event from scratch, you may face the same ones.)
- The brand new event. Each industry has its well-known events. Recruitment is not an exception. The question is, why should people prefer our conference to other ones? What’s so special about it that it stands apart from dozens of others? We solved this problem in three ways: 1) Focus on a narrow niche (Tech recruitment). 2) Practitioner speakers from top companies (Uber, Amazon, Booking.com, etc.) 3) Magic (Amsterdam, and it says it all).
- The new team. It is always safe when the train is moving by a well-played team. However, Victor Zhuk, our Head of Events, and I had just started working at Matchr in the spring and had never met. There is always a risk that the machinist will not get what the mechanic wants from him, and vice versa. However, it was not our case. From the very first meeting, we found common ground and moved all the way smoothly.
- Attracting sponsors. We have never worked with sponsors before. How to attract them? What packages to suggest? What benefits will they get? How to showcase the value for them? All these and many other questions must have been answered.
- Extra-tight marketing budget. Finally, when the concept and estimated costs were approved, I realized we had an extremely modest marketing budget. Actually, it looked like a… zero 🙂 But I’m from Ukraine, and I’m not afraid of such “circumstances.”
With such input, we started promotion. Below, I highlight what we’ve been doing on the way to fully selling out.
Getting started with a promotion plan
It sounds obvious, but marketing needs planning.
Why am I emphasizing this? Because many times I faced the situative approach in marketing when activities were implemented reactively, and it reminded fighting with fire rather than a controlled process.
For the first time in my career, I was in charge of the whole marketing process and decided to do things right.
We started planning TRC 5 months before the event date.
As we were on a tight budget, we decided to leverage these strategies:
- The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) domination. The goal was to get as much traffic from the organic search as possible to the conference website and affiliated resources. Spoiler: we took the first rankings for the targeted keywords, and I will tell you how we succeeded.
- Leveraging the power of employees’ networks. We all have connections on LinkedIn – followers, colleagues, and friends. Why should we pass on such an opportunity and pay for adverts? I will share two super-effective tactics that we implemented.
- Collaboration with speakers and sponsors. Speakers are popular among their communities, highly engaging in the process, and show a high level of loyalty. We couldn’t miss such an opportunity to get additional audience reach.
- Paid advertisements on Google. We allocated just $500 for paid adverts to support sales. And it was enough. Moreover, Google paid us $500 for advertising, and I will tell you how you can do the same.
For project planning, we make use of Coda. It is easy to use, scalable, and free 🙂
In Coda, we can track project statuses, set priorities, add collaborators, track the timelines, break down the projects into more granular ones, etc.
…and my loved-ones checklists:
Once the plan was developed and approved, we started working on promotion and driving the first traffic and ticket sales.
Implementing the marketing plan: A step-by-step movement towards “Hurray! We are sold out!”
Below, I cover 4 approaches that helped us promote the conference and sold out.
Approach 1: The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) domination
When I say “SERP domination,” I mean creating conditions when a user doesn’t have a choice but to visit your website from the Search results page.
Let me show you how it works. When we google our targeted query, “tech recruitment conference,” on the first position, we see the TRC website – techrecruitmentconference.com. In the second position, you can see the article “20 Best (Tech) Recruiting Conferences to Attend in 2022,” published on our company’s website, matchr.io.
Let’s scroll down. In the 7th position, we see the TRC page on Eventbrite, the ticketing platform. As a result, the user searching for a recruitment conference will likely engage with one or several of our resources.
We reached SERP domination in several ways:
SEO for the conference website
When the concept was finalized, we started with the website creation.
The main goal was to create an attractive and convertible page that would drive organic traffic for the main search query “tech recruitment conference” and related terms.
As you can see, we reached consistent growth in organic traffic:
Although organic traffic drives only 12% of users, such growth is important because we plan to use this website for future TRC events, and we won’t need to start from scratch.
To rank in high positions and increase traffic from Search, we did the following:
- Optimize for the single keyword – “tech recruitment conference.” We created the single-page website and kept it simple but informative.
- We chose a domain name that included the targeted search query – techrecruitmentconference.com. I borrowed this tactic from affiliate marketers who create single product pages containing product names in their URLs (I suppose many of you saw websites like “buyleatheryellownikes.com”). Such an approach works well in narrow niches.
- We still remember basic SEO. Titles, descriptions, adding search queries to the texts – no secrets here; just a bit of routine.
As a result, we are ranking at the top of the search results for the targeted keyword:
Writing a “killer” long read
To expand the presence on the Search, we wrote an article about the best conferences for tech recruiters in the next step. Of course, TRC is one of them 😉
A month before the event, this piece started driving traffic from the Search… and ticket sales. Today it is one of the top articles in the Search about recruitment conferences.
Leveraging the ticket sales platform
The good thing about ticket sales platforms is not only that they give you all the stuff to sell tickets like payment processing system, promo codes, analytics, etc., but it enables you to create an event page that is indexed by Google and drive traffic.
We chose Eventbrite and are happy about it. About 25% of traffic came to the “Buy ticket page” directly from Eventbrite. Considering that it costs nothing, it is an impressive result.
Link integrations into the top-ranked pages
Driving traffic from Search doesn’t mean that we need to create dozens of affiliated pages. We can natively integrate into existing pages that rank high.
My approach is the following:
- Scrape 10 top-ranked pages for the “recruitment conference” keyword. (You can do top-20 or expand the scope of keywords – it’s up to you.)
- Find contact data of the website managers and reach out to them.
- Ask to integrate the paragraph about TRC.
I got only 1 response out of 10 messages. (Thanks, Zev Newman!) However, it was a top page about recruitment conferences. We continue receiving warm traffic from that page. Here it is https://live-recruit.com/blog/hr-recruiting-conferences-2022/.
Approach 2: Leveraging the power of employees’ networks
Many marketers underestimate the power of the employees’ network. Engaging our people in the TRC promotion became one of the keys to success.
LinkedIn promotion campaign
Let’s calculate. We have 36 employees on board. If each of them publishes at least 2 posts about TRC during 5 months, and each post drives, on average, 1,000 impressions, the overall audience reach will be: 2*1,000*36 = 72,000. On LinkedIn, such an amount of impressions costs about $2,000. We got it for free!
How it works:
- First, I wrote down all the names of our employees and created the 2-months schedule. The idea was that each business day, one of the employees published a post on his or her LinkedIn about TRC.
- Then I sent the instructions to the team and asked them to help with promotion. It wasn’t mandatory, but I knew everyone was happy to contribute.
- Each day kept track of whose turn was, and friendly reminded to post. A personal appeal always works better than a collective one 🙂
Here is an example of a promotion post published by 🔍 Nick Angelides 😁:
Due to this campaign and collective efforts, we started Early Bird ticket sales in the summer. This is what each company can do.
The direct attraction of 1st-degree connections
There is no better way to attract clients than reaching out directly to them.
Let’s count once again. Each employee reaches out to 50 of his or her connections. Overall, we reach out to 50*36 = 1800 people. The conversion rate of such campaigns is about 0.05-1% – meaning that we can sell 9-18 tickets from such a campaign. We sold 10 🙂
(Remember the shout such campaigns create – it may be even more important than immediate sales.)
This is how you can invite your 1st-degree connections (copyright by Adriaan Kolff):
Do a Boolean search of your LinkedIn 1st degree connections on recruiters and sourcers (we promoted an event for recruiters; in your case, find people who are relevant to your event):
Title:
(sourcing OR Sourcer OR “Technical Talent Researcher” OR “ Talent Acquisition Researcher” OR “Talent Acquisition Specialist” OR Recruiter OR Recruitment OR Talent OR “Head of People” OR HR OR “Human Resources” OR “Head of Talent”)
Smaller:
(“Talent Acquisition Specialist” OR Recruiter OR Recruitment OR “Recruiting Specialist” OR “Head of People” OR “Head of Talent”)
Once done, do the following:
- Create a project with your name in SalesQL: TRC_[your name]
- Scrape all data from LinkedIn using SalesQL.
- Eliminate any duplicates with TRC_[someone else name] so that you don’t invite any duplicates.
- Create a CSV file for DuxSoup or a Google Spreadsheet for Phantombuster
- Start inviting people
(Read this guide to learn how to apply SalesQL, Dux-Soup, and other tools to scrape and outreach to your prospects.)
Organize and manage your invitation process!
If you send one email with the instructions to all employees and ask for help, the result will be far from your expectations. The best approach is to assign the lead responsible for this project (in our case, Maria Huz, our talented and enthusiastic recruiter, leaded this process). She was in charge of this process, and many people reached out to their connections, and we got sales.
Collaboration with speakers and sponsors
They are directly interested in the success of the event they participate in and invest in.
For each speaker, we created Speaker Badges and asked them to announce they were speaking at TRC. Speakers are well-known in their communities and have a loyal audience, so the result of such a promotion is significant.
Here is an example of such a badge for Willem Wijnans:
Pro tip: Don’t make speakers create visuals on their own. Take time to do this for them. This is your event, and you must be in charge of this process and all the visual identity.
Also, we asked sponsors to promote on their social media that they are sponsoring our event. (You may wonder, but not all the sponsors do this – so your task as marketers is to remind them to do this.)
Here is an example of the promotion post by Jurgen Jaarsma from People2.0:
Paid advertising on Google Ads
One month before the event, we still had about 30% of tickets unsold, so we decided to incentivize selling with Google Ads.
I set up 2 campaigns: Search and Display.
- Budget – $500. We created a new account in Google Ads and paid with a US card, so Google gave us a $500 promo code. A smart option for those who are on a tight budget 🙂 You can do the same – the details are here.
- Targeting – Europe + South Africa. South Africa is the perspective market for us, especially considering that our company Pantala has an office in Capetown. That’s why we decided to advertise there as well.
- Bid strategy: for Search – Maximize Clicks (first week), Maximize Conversions (after the learning period); for Display – Viewable Impressions (first week), Maximize Conversions (after the learning period). Keep in mind that you need to set up conversions before running ads and make sure they are registered in Google Ads. Otherwise, the Maximize Conversions strategy won’t make sense for you.
- Our niche is narrow, so I targeted the broad match keywords. Of course, I set up the negative keywords list to cut off irrelevant traffic. If you plan to promote the recruitment event, you can use my list: career, careers, job, jobs, vacancies, work. Pretty basic but super effective, enabling you to show ads almost only to recruiters and HRs.
As a result, we have got 54 conversions for $12 each. A rather good result considering ticket prices (€60-170).
Other activities
Of course, there were other activities like scraping and reaching out to people who joined TRC on LinkedIn and email marketing. If you are interested in how we set up these activities, you can reach out to me and ask 🙂
Wrapping up: What is the most important in the event promotion?
TRC taught me 5 things I want to share with you:
- Write the shit down. Have a clear plan instead of scattered notes and ideas. If you implement at least 70% of your planned activities, it will be a success.
- Involve your company’s employees. Uncover your company’s internal potential to boost audience reach and sales.
- Don’t be concerned about money. A huge budget doesn’t mean that your marketing won’t fail. On the other side, limited resources empower creativity.
- Don’t be shy to ask. Marketing is not only about advertisements, texts, and visuals. Reach out to people who may be interested in attending your event, and you will wonder how effective this is. Collaborate with speakers and sponsors – in most cases, they will be happy to help.
- Scaling mindset. When promoting events, consider that you will need to promote similar events in the future. In this regard, build your website, organize data storage, create instructions and documents in a way that you can easily use them in the future, and don’t waste time on building everything from scratch.
TRC ended. What’s next?
Events are an integral part of Matchr‘s marketing strategy. We have long-lasting plans for 2023, including [spoiler] hosting TRCs in different parts of the world, sourcing webinar series, and other events.
On my LinkedIn blog, I will continue sharing learnings, successes, and pitfalls in promoting events and implementing other marketing activities. Follow me to stay tuned!
And thank you for reading this to the end!