Why plan a conference? The benefits of conference events

Whether you’re looking to grow your business, build industry presence or engage with your audiences, hosting a conference can be an extremely effective approach.

In fact, 41% marketers believe that events are ‘the single-most effective marketing channel over digital advertising, email marketing and content marketing’.

(Bizzabo)

And according to Bizzabo, the most successful businesses are spending ‘1.7x the average marketing budget on live events’.

So why all the hype?

Live events may be so valuable to marketing, sales, HR and operations teams because of the direct face-to-face communication they enable. A day conference event could allow your business to engage with hundreds or thousands of people on a more personal, meaningful level, and in a switched-on environment.

Conferences can be a brilliant way to connect with your employees and customers, and when properly coordinated and measured against your business goals they can provide numerous benefits.

Here are 10 key benefits you can expect from planning a conference

1. Improving your company’s presence in the industry, by cultivating thought leadership in a relevant way.
2. Increasing awareness of your brand and company aims. A conference contributes to building recognition and marketing your brand on a large-scale. Bring on the merchandise!
3. Networking and building relationships with your audiences and peers. A conference can give you access to influencers and key decision makers that may not have heard about what you can offer them. A survey by EventMB found that 82% of attendees attending corporate events prioritised networking.
4. Making face-to-face connections. Again, not only can a conference provide ample networking opportunities, but it can facilitate meaningful conversations in a far more personal way than a set of emails could. Face-to-face interactions can build your impressions of a person beyond the work-life and help you develop better relationships with your attendees and other businesses.
5. Generating hotter leads. 68% of B2B marketers agree that live events help generate the most leads (Marketing Charts). Having a dedicated forum to promote your services and drive interest makes conference an excellent lead generation tool as part of an integrated communications strategy.
6. Promoting new products or services, and getting feedback on them.
7. Showcasing your partners and suppliers. There may be some partners and suppliers that you’d like to promote as an extension of your offerings, and featuring them at a conference is also a good way to strengthen your partner relationships.
8. Enabling a beneficial learning experience to develop company culture. If you’re considering hosting an internal conference, it can act as a platform to clearly communicate business goals and changes to the wider company. A conference event can provide key learning opportunities in a consistent, controlled way to ensure that everyone is working towards the same shared vision.
9. Fundraising. A conference can not only be used to benefit your company, but can be used to raise money for a cause that your team support.
10. Sharing new ideas. A conference is ultimately a tool to create and share content within your network, so the speakers, workshops and interactions with delegates can all help fuel your business and industry with new ideas to progress as a whole.

Maximising your conference ROI

If you’d like to know more about how to generate a higher ROI for your conference, you can read up about it on our blog — Are Conferences Really Worth It?

Or if you’re considering planning your own conference, you can chat to our experienced team about how to maximise your conference results. Simply click here to request a Free, no-obligation Conference Planning Consultation!