Losing credibility through pricing

Be sure to keep an eye on long term consequences as you try to navigate the current economy. The worst possible result?  Devaluing your event by overly aggressive price cutting.  This can hurt you on either the sponsorship or attendee side.

Wherever possible, go for value-add rather than a drop in price.  Your customers are looking for ROI, not just a low price.  Make sure they can articulate how their organization can benefit from their attending, far beyond the cost to attend.

Some discounting can be done without long-term consequences.  Hotel and travel deals to attend your event. Grandfathering last-year’s prices. Bring a colleague to get a reduction on both tickets.

Seth Rosenblatt’s blog on marketing and management at Autonomy gave a great example on his most recent post: Selling value and not price.

Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor and presidential candidate, was selling a leadership seminar that he was speaking at, along with other luminaries such as Colin Powell, Steve Forbes, Zig Ziglar, and even Michael Phelps (presumably without the pipe).  Sounds interesting and valuable, right?  Rudy told me that I could attend this session – which could change my whole life – for only $19!  Wait, not $19 per person, but $19 for my whole office!  Incredible – how could I pass up on such a deal?  Well, you’re now probably thinking the same thing I did, which is how valuable can Rudy really think it is if my whole office can attend for less than $1 per person?

As Seth points out, offers like these hurt your credibility…not just in the longterm, but immediately.  How useful could it be for this price?  Sounds like a waste of my $19. If this were a business-to-business event I’d expect attendance to plummet.

Though this consumer event, held only to build a mailing list (they don’t make money on the event itself), may defy that expectation.

 

The Paperless Event: Onsite

Of course, an event producer cannot take the event paperless alone:  most of the paper is actually given out by the exhibitors. The question is:  do attendees really want to collect a bunch of handouts and carry them home?  And when they get home, do they read them?  Or throw the entire conference bag behind the door?

There are various ways to get the exhibitors’ information into attendees’ hands electronically:

1. Each exhibitor collects leads and sends the pdf collateral via email
2. The event producer creates an area of the event website for collateral–or links to it from the exhibitor directory. A sign-in screen can continue to collect leads for the exhibitor to follow up.  Now that the show directory online is further enhanced, lets keep it up all year as an ongoing resource.  Maybe even throw some content around it…
3. Give every attendee a memory stick on a lanyard, to have the desired exhibitors upload their content onto.
4. Packaged solutions include Prism Technologies–the guys with the touch screen kiosk, and BD Metrics, which continues to expand its social network capability to additional event needs.

Or do all four.

Bottom line, it is possible to include exhibitors in a paperless event.  More and more events are already doing just that.