October 2013 - Rottman Creative

Step 3 of 6: Identify your archetypes

Archetypes are personality types or stories that show up over and over again, across all cultures. Think about the stories of humanity: the hero who triumphs, the rebel who challenges, the lover who casts a spell, the trickster who teaches a lesson. We connect to and intuitively get these and other stories, because we live them over and over again. Your association actually evokes an archetype: your brand is linked to one or more of the archetypes—and so are your members.

To really inspire your base—and to know how to market specifically to the different segments of members—you need to know your brand archetype, as well as the archetypes of your people.

We’ve done a lot of work in this area (one great resource is Archetypes in Branding), and we’ve seen how when an association takes time to discern their archetypes, they connect to their members in a new way. They connect because they have a much clearer picture of what they’re about, and what their people are about. Figuring out your archetype map helps take the mystery out of this storytelling you need to do that we keep talking about— because (maybe for the first time) you know what stories will resonate.

In short, archetypes help you know how to talk to your people!

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #9!
The Lone Marketer

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6 steps to Inspiring your base to act.

Step 2 of 6: Run your diagnostics

Think of this as looking under the hood. Gather the most up-to-date facts about your membership base (keeping in mind that it’s probably changed in the past few years). That means looking at surveys, demographics, member feedback, and open rates for emails (including which ones get the highest and lowest).

Get a clear picture of who your typical member is and how they behave— not just the highly engaged or your top influencers, but all of your members.

Once you know that, you can start to plot their story along the continuum of stories that have been with humanity since the beginning of time.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #8!
The Lone Marketer

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6 steps to Inspiring your base to act (Register for your event)

What your association is doing is too important. The lives you are changing matter too much. What’s really stopping you from greatness is that you’re not telling the story of how your conference changes lives. And there is a pretty good chance that you’re not even seeing this. Not yet, that is.

Let’s start with the idea that you are in charge of changing your members’ lives. Your members need your conference more than anything.
They want it. They must have it.

Step 1 of 6: Believe that your job is to changes lives.

How do you get from where you are now to changing the bulk of your members’ lives?

The first answer is a marketing plan. A real one. (As in, not the one from last year.)

You need to develop an integrated marketing plan that will close the gap between the excitement of what really goes on at the conference, and the way you market it.

Your emails are excellent at informing people of WHAT the conference is. But what’s lacking is WHY (“because this will change your life!”). As we’ve said, ultimately, it’s about inspiring your base, and telling them the verbal and visual stories they will connect with.

But first, you need to know who your members are and how they behave.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #7!
The Lone Marketer

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4 Ways to Improve the Timing in Your Marketing Plans

We never get tired of the way Apple introduces new products. They manage to build excitement for the same product, such as the iPhone, over and over again. What they actually change about the product is not the point (because it’s usually not much). It’s how they meter out the marketing, managing to build excitement and hoopla around release dates.

You can do the same thing.

It’s about building your WHY—your source of inspiration—through slices and teases.

Create a rallying cry around a date when something is announced: build it, offer it, and make it limited (going, going . . . gone!). Create both interest and urgency. Give people a reason to keep reading, to click through, to retweet, and ultimately, to register. Generate excitement over time—using a balance of marketing modes.

Here are 4 touchpoints that the timing in your marketing plans must address:

Money-driven stuff: early bird rates, hotel prices that go up after a certain day, and travel rates that increase the longer you wait.
Education stuff: paid workshops with cut-off dates, and sessions with limited seating.
Networking stuff: dinners, lunches, parties, outings, and other special events, paid or unpaid, with cut-off dates.
Certification: sessions with limited seating and/or limited time to react.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #6!
The Lone Marketer

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8 Steps to Create Stronger Emails

How many emails do you get every day? Most professionals get more than 200 emails a day. Sure, it raises the odds of the email being opened when it comes from a trusted source (like your association), but it doesn’t buy you that much in the end. Maybe an extra second.

If only a small fraction of your people click through the email, your marketing breaks down around the very first stage of the buying cycle:

Informing the unaware.
Unaware people aren’t inspired.
Unaware and uninspired people
DON’T REGISTER FOR YOUR CONFERENCE.

Below are the 8 steps to create stronger emails:

Create a story around networking, and lead with it in your content, since the majority of attendees come there for networking.
Spam-proof your subject lines, while still keeping them engaging and interesting.
If you do top 10 or top 5 lists, keeping NEC in mind: that’s networking, education, and certification. Any list of reasons to attend has to touch all three areas.
Remember that branding matters. Your event will be judged by its marketing, including the emails. That means creating branded, well-thought out emails with a recognizable look and feel. To be clear: a bunch of words on the page is a bunch of words on the page; it’s not a look and feel.
Include calls to action, but not too many (a confused brain shuts down). Include no more than three action steps in your email.
Consider the time of day your email gets delivered. Stay away from Mondays and Fridays, and choose either
10 a.m., noon, or 4 p.m., based on what you know of your membership base.
Consider using testimonials. Someone else touting the benefits of attending is more powerful than you touting them.
Remember that venue alone does not inspire. Ditch the cityscape photos and think a little more strategically about images and your brand.

The ninth step is to stop relying on email alone.
In fact, to stop relying on any one thing to do everything you need.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #4!
The Lone Marketer

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Why a Registration Brochure App

In case you’re wondering: we’re focusing on apps for the tablet market vs. the smart phone market because the research shows that the smart phone is more for on-the-go use, to quickly check and respond to email, or to glance at headlines or web sites—mostly for quick information. On the other hand, tablets like the iPad are more strategic thinking devices. They engage people for longer periods of time, encouraging them to sit down and enjoy the experience (more like reading a book or a magazine).

The Registration App

With an app for your registration brochure, here is a snapshot of how it could work: you promote through social networking, email marketing, text messages, and direct mail effort (an inspirational, well-designed piece), all of which lead people to a cool animation or video on your home page, which links to your app in the app store.

Within two or three years, this will be the main way you promote your conference. Everything will be wrapped around your registration app.

And by the way, apps aren’t limited to the registration brochure. Create a digital publication for your sponsors brochure and exhibitors brochure, too (imagine the selling opportunity that could create).

Marketing your app drives registration by building excitement; it sets up a pre-conference feeling for the event.

It’s almost like your conference has already started. In fact, it IS how it starts. You’re not just promoting it six months out: it actually begins six months out. (Perhaps this means you can even start charging more for early registration!) Your web site won’t go away. It will simply become a kind of information hub.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #4!
The Lone Marketer

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The Story is What Sells

Your registration brochure isn’t just a marketing piece. It’s the face of your conference. A face can launch a thousand ships. Or it can make everyone pack up and go home. To make it a face that inspires action, your brochure has to engage your people. It’s got to do the old W&W: woo and wow. The most effective way to do that isn’t to promote the venue. Rather, the most effective W&W strategy is to create a story around the number one reason people attend your conference: person-to-person interaction.

Our research has confirmed that in-person networking is the number one reason people step out of the virtual world and the LinkedIn discussion groups. Hence, your registration brochure needs to upsell the networking opportunities with both copy and visuals, and really tell the story.

If you’re not telling that story, don’t even bother putting a brochure out there.

Because if you thought the recession was bad for conference attendance, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The world of information is downloadable—and it will continue to be even more downloadable. Social networking facilitates connections almost instantaneously.

However, you do have something in your corner. The virtual world isn’t the same as the real one. Slap a camera on your computer, but it doesn’t matter. Virtual experiences can’t match the human experience of standing in a circle of your colleagues, chatting and laughing as you generate ideas and sparks and connections. The experience of all of your neurons firing because you are breathing the same air, in the same moment, at the same place, at the same time as a bunch of other interesting people.

The fact that virtual can’t match human is the meat of your story, and you better tell it in a compelling way.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #3!
The Lone Marketer

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A Golden Triangle of Conference Marketing

We propose a Golden Triangle of Conference Marketing: WHY is in the center. And your Brand is at the top, with your Strategic Plan and Conference on either side. Your brand, your strategic plan, and the essence of the conference are all elements of HOW you do what you do. Outside the triangle lies the WHAT stuff: the deliverables, like social media, apps, the registration brochures, e-newsletters, save-the-date, report to members, and other tangibles.

But all of it must start with WHY your association exists. And it all must be aligned. However, we find that it hardly ever is. For example, if a key driver of your strategic plan is to elicit member feedback, but you only look at the composite scores on surveys and don’t take the time to read the comments, WHAT you’re doing isn’t aligned with HOW you say you are doing it (and the WHY is usually lost altogether).

We can break this down one step further for your conference: WHY is still the foundation and the WHAT things are still the deliverables, but HOW becomes the conference theme. A conference theme that starts with WHY is inspired by the very belief that holds the association together—not by the location or the venue or the time of year. Instead of a clever pun that could work for any association in any given year, your conference theme should spring from something deeper and more fundamental. Your conference theme can become like a rallying cry… or it can be yet one more empty promise. The conference theme holds tremendous potential. But so often, it’s wasted.

We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #2!
-The Lone Marketer

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