One of the great challenges of conference management is getting people to attend. What a struggle conference marketing can be, especially when times are tough and everyone tries to save money on travel and lodging.  All the old marketing message and techniques no longer seem to work. Attendees aren’t wooed by what you’re selling.

Fortunately, there is a new way to attract people to your conferences, but the method is counterintuitive. It takes a new mode of thinking and a desire to reach out to more prospects than ever before.

Remember when people came to live events because they were hands-down the best places to network with peers? In fact, conferences and meetings were once the only ways to connect with peers who weren’t in your back yard. Conference marketing was a lot simpler back then. The value of conferences was clear to everyone.

Conferences and meeting are still important, but one thing has changed—they’re not the only way people network with each other. The internet and social media has made it easier than ever to build a network and learn from others in your industry. The value of conferences and meetings is no longer clear to prospective attendees. The proposition has changed, so conference marketing itself has to change.

The internet and social media—the very things that obscure the value of live events—are also the tools that make conference marketing more effective than ever. Some conference managers see social media as a threat, but it shouldn’t be. It takes a new way of thinking about how conference marketing works, but once you’ve adopted this new mindset, you’ll see how it drives more attendees to your show than ever before.

The first step is to break down walls. Conference marketing is most effective when you reach as many people as possible, right? The more people who know about the conference, the more likely they are to attend.
The internet makes is so easy to reach prospects and to inform them about your conference, but the only way to reach them is by offering content they’re looking for. By offering relevant content and distributing it over the internet, you can reach more people in a month than you could reach in a year-long direct mail campaign.

How is that possible? It’s simple: People who read good content will pass it along. Before you know it, information about your conference could be disseminated more widely than you could ever do on your own. The best part is that people will distribute your content for free.

The next step is determining what is relevant content? Traditional conference marketing sticks to the basics: who, what, where, when. Conference marketing goes beyond basic information. For example, we launched a blog in support of a national conference. Months before the show began, we interviewed the educational sessions speakers and posted them on the blog. We asked them to talk about their presentation: what would they talk about, what did they hope the audience would get out of it and so on.

Traditional conference marketing would never let this happen! The old way of thinking is to build walls, to “force” people to attend if they want to hear from a speaker. The new conference marketing strategy breaks down walls. The interviews were interesting and viewed more than 4,000 times. At the conference itself, we covered the sessions and exhibit hall floor as if the blog were a daily publication. In fact, it was much more than daily. We posted on the blog at least three times per day.

(Side note: the blog also included advertising space, which was offered to exhibitors as a sponsorship opportunity).

The more information you give away to promote conference marketing, the more people will see it. The last step, of course, is to convert those people into attendees, which is a topic we’ll discuss further in a future article. But right now, it’s time to make a choice. Will you continue to stick with traditional conference marketing tactics and watch your attendee numbers decline, or will you use content marketing techniques to spread your message far and wide?