How to promote your product at conferences

Everyone has been to conferences at least once, sat in large halls and listened to the speeches of top managers, directors and entrepreneurs. But only a fraction of them have ever thought about how to promote their product at such events. Let’s find out how to find your target audience at conferences.

Formats of participation in conferences

Making a presentation

Choose and prepare a relevant topic for the event. It can be case studies, research, checklists or insights, as long as the topic is interesting for the audience. Integrate your product natively into the report, it is important that the presentation does not turn out to be a direct advertisement. Otherwise, half of the audience will listen to your report until the end.

Try to choose a problem that is the pain of your target audience, show its importance and offer possible solutions with the help of your product. To give a live example, due to the departure of Western social networks there is a need to launch new sources of traffic. This is a complex and long process that requires organised work of the marketing team. To organise the processes, we suggested using our product MOGU.

This approach brought us new, interested users.

Sales through sales managers

Prepare POS materials (flyers, business cards, t-shirts) and send your managers to the conference. As a rule, venues have networking zones where conference participants can get acquainted and socialise. While networking, talk about your product, exchange contacts and make connections. With good work and a relevant audience, one manager can gather more than 20 contacts.

Exhibition booth

This format will require financial investment and creativity. The booth may include an interactive panel, a roll-up, and comfortable chairs for conducting product demonstrations to customers. Despite the fact that the stand will cost a decent amount of money, the end result may pleasantly surprise you. Be sure to calculate the investment and forecast the final income.

Will it all pay off?

Calculate the forecast and you will find the answer to this question. Carefully study the attendance statistics of past events, try to estimate how many contacts you can collect with your current resources. Use the average values of your sales funnel to calculate conversions.

Be sure to calculate expenses, don’t forget tickets to the event city. Take into account accommodation, if you have more than 1000 kilometres to cover, it’s better to arrive the day of the conference to get some sleep and energy. Include the cost of flyers, business cards, put in contingencies.

In the end your economics should add up to a profit. If it doesn’t, you need to wonder if you’ve chosen the right event.

Handling contacts

The process of collecting contacts at conferences is chaotic, you met a person, put them in your notes, a day later you forgot who they are and what they do. Add contacts as tasks to the MOGU task tracker. This will make the process of handling contacts consistent and efficient. You can set tasks via Telegram-bot, which will save you time.

After collecting contacts, it is important to process them in time. We recommend doing this within a week after the conference, while people remember your product.

Your funnel may look like it took no more than 5 minutes to create. If you’ve collected only 5 contacts, this approach may seem too complicated. But if you’re talking about 20 or more contacts, you can’t do without a task tracker.

Use a table view of tasks to visually observe the funnel. You can assign a responsible manager, set a deadline or add a comment to a task.

Checklist for promoting your product at conferences

To summarise, to get results from a conference keep this cheat sheet:

• Choose 3-4 conferences relevant to your business
• Analyse statistics from past conferences
• Contact the organisers and determine the format of participation
• Act boldly and don’t forget your main goal – lead generation
• Collect and transfer contacts from the conference to MOGU.
• Process and convert them into sales