Marketing Conferences – Best Practices

[saad_sinpk]

I’ll just never be able to say enough about industry trade shows. The connections you will make, the education, the atmosphere, it’s the best money you’ll spend.

I don’t really know anyone who has had any real long term success in the marketing industry that doesn’t attend at least a couple of shows a year, it really is a necessity if you want to stay at the top of the game and know what’s hot before it’s hot and who the new kids on the block with great services to provide you are.

Many of the relationships I’ve helped members here form both in my tutorials and more often in private PM’s are companies that I originally met at an industry show and began working with from there.

Had I never attended a trade show I really believe it would have taken me two or three times longer to get where I am revenue wise each month.

In a few days I’ll be attending ad tech NYC, which is my favorite show each year. I have no doubt I will walk away from it with at least a dozen new traffic sources to try and the best account manager connections within these companies to give me the best chance of using them successfully.

When you attend a show, you get face time with the exhibitors, which is the power of the whole thing. If I come across a traffic network in a magazine or follow a link back I found online, I never really know who I’m dealing with out of the gate, nor do they really know who I am.

I can sign up, but I may get automatically tossed to a low level account manager, or I may get no support at all. I may find their platform confusing, I may make a mistake that costs me money, and I may walk away even though with the right knowledge I could have done a lot of business with them.

When I meet a company at a show, I never have that problem. Now certainly their traffic or product may suck balls, but at least I know that there wasn’t something I could have done better.

It’s sort of like getting VIP treatment from day 1, you’re at the show, so your taken more seriously off the bat, but also, the people that get sent to the show are always going to be the best that company has to offer, ALWAYS.



The top account managers, business development managers, and executives will always be the ones at the show, and those are the people you want to be working with. It’s the low level staff who gets left behind to keep the lights on while the real staff is out getting new business.

What’s great about that is when I come across a bunch of complete tools or people that give me a creepy feeling (which happens at least five times per show) I know that there is no way in hell I’m going to work with them. If those morons are the best the company has, no thanks.

An example of that is at last years ad tech I met a newer traffic network who was of course very interested in selling me and everyone else there boatloads of their unbelievably awesome traffic. Interestingly they also had another booth right next to them for their CPA network.

As one of their cute little reps was trying to tell me how much money I’d make running their traffic to the type of offers I was interested in more traffic for, I asked her why if the traffic was so amazing, were they not running it through their own CPA network, after all, I was interested in the traffic specifically for some hot CPA offers which they could easily have access to themselves on their very own network. Why sell it to me for pennies when they could make a fortune running it themselves?

She couldn’t answer and froze up (not a good way to close me on buying), her boss, the network owner was quickly called over and came up with a real gem of an answer:

Well sir, errr derrr we don’t need to do that, we have way more traffic than we can use…….besides it’s really two totally separate companies, they don’t even talk to each other really, you’ll understand the quality when you see it yourself.

Now, I’m no genius, but to me there is no such thing as more traffic than I can use when it’s profitable. Also, telling me that two companies that you own don’t have anything to do with each other is also not very convincing.

To me, you should either be in the traffic business, or the lead business, not both, unfortunately most networks these days want to play on both sides out of greed and it’s a huge conflict of interest.

Christ, at least make me feel like you aren’t just waiting to fuck me. Am I really to believe that you aren’t going to look at where I’m driving all the traffic to, and then just hijack the campaigns yourself?

At least with a true traffic network I can convince myself that they are only focused on making millions of dollars a month selling me traffic, but having to know they have a CPA network just sitting there waiting for me to find their best converting traffic, all while paying them to do so is, call me crazy, not that enticing.

Needless to say I haven’t heard much about that company in the last year, I even forget the name, Revenue Some Bullshit but I can guarantee had I started spending money with them I would have either found junk traffic that was worthless or good traffic that as the months went on would slowly start getting worse and worse as all my converting traffic would be getting siphoned off and pointed at their own accounts.

On the flip side, if I’m meeting really smart energetic people who know the business and understand my goals with suggestions on how to meet them, I want to grab those business cards and follow up with them the following week, making sure that my account is in only the hands of the person I met at the show who I feel is best suited to work with me.

On the publisher side of things, I’ve helped hundreds of CPA hopefuls get approved to top networks just by telling them to show up at the closest event. I’ve never once heard of anyone who met a network face to face at a show that was rejected, not once.

Certainly a few blackhatters attend these conferences to, well obviously, if I’m there that’s at least one pretty major blackhatter always in the crowd, but what most networks are trying to stay away from these days are the noobs, time wasters, and Chinese and third world scammers, so by showing up at an industry show, you basically become prime real estate in their eyes.
Truth be told you don’t even need to attend the shows for that, I’ve been telling people for years just to note in your publisher application that you met them at _________ they’ll never know the difference. Just make sure you know at least one company rep that attended in case they casually ask who you spoke with there and you’re in there like swim wear.
One thing that is a HUGE waste of time at trade shows is the fucking keynotes. Jesus Christ, you’ll want to commit suicide if you ever stupidly sit in on one of the speaker sessions.

There are only three types of keynotes at these shows:

1. People like the founder of Buy.com or Twitter who have absolutely nothing to fucking do with your business model and are going to spend an hour and a half talking about how they engage their users to spend more time on the site and blah blah a bunch of meaningless shit that won’t help you make a cent.
2. Posers. People who don’t know shit about the industry but somehow have enough people fooled that they do to get on stage and fill time, (cough) bloggers. They’ll drone on about shit you’ve known since dial up was hot and I challenge you to find any piece of useful information during any of them besides where the closest exit is.
3. Presentations you think are going to be great but will be astronomically disappointing, kind of like that big box under the Christmas tree you thought was the G.I. Joe Mobile Command Center but turned out to be a snow suit. Take…..Google adwords for example. They love to come to these shows and come up with clever titles like How to explode your adwords profitably in 2010. You think to yourself, well fuck me, this is going to be serious, let me go snag three extra pens from the lobby just in case two run out during my note taking. What happens from there is you spend 30 minutes learning how to setup your very first adwords account, and if you haven’t slit your wrists by this point, a 30 minute Q&A where a bunch of affiliates ask really smart questions about things like quality score and google slap that the panelists pretend to not know the answers to, then just before a riot breaks out with the google team being strung up by their mac powerbook cords, the session ends, they give you a piece of shit yoyo with Google all over it and a fancy Google pen (in case your other four ran out from taking notes on what a keyword is) then they ride off into the sunset leaving you to feel used and dirty, kind of like a girl who loses her virginity in a McDonald’s parking lot after senior prom.

In a nutshell, avoid the sessions. Stick to the exhibit hall, networking areas, and most importantly the bar, because that’s where all the real business takes place.

[rozermored]

Thanks for your post. It is really informative...