We’re just returning back to the #FlipMyFunnel Headquarters after a phenomenal event in San Francisco that sold out a week before the event. There was a ton of excitement in the air and attendees were amazed at the amount of buzz this movement, which is hardly seven months old, has created. The number one question we got from attendees was “How’d you do it?”
Here’s a list of our top 14 strategies that helped us create one of the best events San Francisco has ever witnessed:
1) Media Partners
The key to building buzz around a movement is notable media partnerships. You need publications who have a large reach in the your target audience. In our case, this as B2B marketing professionals in the technology sector. The media partners who had the biggest reach with this sector were MarTech Advisor, Heinz Marketing, and TechnologyAdvice. Target account list for marketing and sales
2) Target Account List for Marketing and Sales
If there’s any place your marketing and sales teams should align, it’s on events. Marketing and sales counterparts should work together to ensure the revenue goals of the event is met. The marketing and sales teams at Terminus used Social123 data to help identify the best-fit accounts that met the ideal customer profile. Once the right accounts were identified, the sales development team began their outreach to start booking appointments for the event.
3) Targeted Advertising
Targeted advertising can help ensure your conference is on the radar of people you care about most. The team at Terminus ran this form of advertising on the best fit accounts they identified from the Social123 data. This helped to create awareness of the event within the accounts.
4) Tons and Tons of Personal Video Invitations
It is really hard to say no to a personalized video inviting you to speak at a conference. Sangram, Founder of #FlipMyFunnel, knew this and used this strategy to attract the best and brightest thought leaders in the industry. When we first started these events, we created an A, B, and C list of speakers we wanted to invite. Because of the highly personalized nature of the videos, we never got past the A list and had a top notch roster of speakers at every event.
Here’s the video Sangram made for Jill Rowley:
[Tweet “Want top speakers at your event? Try making them a personalized video. #FlipMyFunnel”]
5) Direct Mail Before the Conference
Getting people signed up is only half the battle. Having them show up at your event is often an even bigger challenge. To drive help drive attendance, we sent postcards to everyone who registered with a call-to-action that directed them to tweet a selfie with the card.
6) Personalized Thank You Video for Registration
Big thanks to our friends at Vidyard for this one! We employed their platform to send a personalized video for each person who registered. The technology inserts the person’s name throughout the video in various places which helps them feel as if the video is made just for them and allows us to execute this at scale. This helped drive additional excitement about the event and encouraged people to show up.
Check out a sample video below:
7) Twitter and LinkedIn Ads
The beauty of social advertising is the level of targeting and the ability to engage accounts on their terms. Each platform offers its own level of targeting, but each one is equally valuable to ensuring your message reaches the accounts and people you care about most. On Twitter, targeting is more content and interest specific. We targeted people using such hashtags as “#B2BMarketing” and “#AccountBasedMarketing”. We also targeted users who shared similar interests with our speakers and sponsors. On the LinkedIn, the targeting is much more company and job role specific. For example, we targeted marketers who worked in technology companies with more than 50 people.
8) Women in Marketing Contest
This one is a cause near and dear to my heart. One thing I realized early on in this movement is there are far too few female marketing leaders and I wanted to change that. Sometimes it only takes that one connection that lights the spark in someone’s career. We wrote a blog highlighting the female speakers on the agenda and ran a promotion offering female tech marketers a complimentary ticket to our San Francisco roadshow. The response was overwhelming with a ton of great tweets and over 40 women who applied.
9) Influencer Posts on Integrate
Although Integrate wasn’t an official sponsor of the event, they have been a huge supporter of the #FlipMyFunnel movement since the first day. Their team has attended just about every event we’ve ever held and they even offered to publish an influencer post on their blog for the San Francisco event.
10) Local Industry Groups
A company or group does not need to be a sponsor in order to drive attendance at your event. We’ve learned this every city we’ve traveled to so far. Brands and groups like LeadGnome, Oceanos, BAARC, MITX and the Technology Association of Georgia all helped to build buzz around our events. We provide them with promo codes, creative and email templates to help them in their outreach. Additionally, we even recognize our top supporters on our event site as “Funnel Flipping Friends.”
[Tweet “Local groups don’t need to be a sponsor to build buzz for your event. #FlipMyFunnel”]
11) Press Release
Writing press release for your event helps to extend your reach beyond the local area and can be used as a pitch tool to drive members of the media to your event. Big thanks to our friends at PR Newswire who helped us make it happen. The reach was over 85 million and was beyond our wildest imagination.
12) VIP Sponsor Experience
Your sponsors are key to building buzz and driving attendance. They are also your customer for the event. One of the highest priorities for us at #FlipMyFunnel is ensuring our sponsors have the most badass experience possible. We do this through weekly emails that update them on important conference news and provide them with everything they would need to promote the event to the fullest. This includes custom promotional creative with their logo in various sizes for social media and also email templates that require very little editing to send. We also host a VIP Dinner the night before every event which allows sponsors to get face time and quality conversations in with the accounts they care about the most.
Here is an example of the creative we provided for Insightsquared that included their promo code:
[Tweet “Your event sponsors are your customers. Treat them to a VIP experience. #FlipMyFunnel”]
13) Even VIPs Need VIPs
There’s a saying “Every person needs their tribe.” To help drive the tribe, we gave our sponsors two weeks and 10 complimentary tickets each along with an email template to invite the people they cared about most to the actual event.
Here’s what the template looked like:
14) Ask for Things That Are Out of Reach
One big lesson we learned in this conference is you don’t get what you don’t ask for. When we decided to publish the press release, we originally planned to self-distribute. As luck would have it, one of our sponsor case studies featured Ken Wincko, VP of Marketing from PR Newswire. We reached out asking for them to distribute our release not knowing what to expect. They responded with a resounding “Yes!” and even took it a step further. They offered us the opportunity to be featured on their Times Square Billboard for a day.
We were truly blown away and humbled by the offer. And we have to say it was pretty incredible to see our idea go from white board to massive billboard in just seven months!
Check it out below. We promise it’s not photoshopped!
[Tweet “You never know what’s possible until you ask. That’s how #FlipMyFunnel landed in Times Square.”]
If you think that’s cool, then you should know we are just getting started. We have learned and evolved a lot over the past seven months and we plan to grow even more in 2016.
Want to be the first to know what we’ll do next? Join the #FlipMyFunnel VIP Club and Slack Community to get the latest news first.
