The Right Way To Approach Event Marketing in 2025

You and I, we started this year saying we're gonna decrease events, and then, you know, you— I think you're increasing again. And then the last couple weeks I've been invited to a couple of things. There's travel involved and they all sound fun. But so what's your updated outlook on this?

I won't match the number of events that I did last year, which was 200 days traveling, right? It was in your slide deck for the conference I'm presenting. I think it was 30-something or 40-something, and those were main events. That doesn't count corporate events on top of it where like—

It's a lot.

We're getting customers and stuff like that. So I had, for more than half the year, I had events. And if you add those in, it'd probably get closer to 50-ish, which is a ton. It won't beat last year, but we're doing events this year. We're just being more picky. And what I mean by that is we're looking for events with thousands and thousands of people, And we're doing a better job vetting. I had a talk with my team recently because I went to an event in Florida somewhere. And when I went to this event, they said, yeah, it's one of the biggest home services event and home service clients are really great for our SMB division. I did not get paid for speaking. You know, we got sponsorship, didn't care for the speaking revenue. We're like, wait, this is going to be like fishing with dynamite, right event. I went in there, I spoke, no joke, maybe 10, 15 attendees that were customers. The rest were agencies and maybe 30, 40 people in the room total. And I told my team, I'm like, we need to do a better job vetting. It's not about the money. It's not about us getting compensated. Like they paid for airline ticket and hotel. It's not about any of that. I'd rather have paid our own dollars, which we're doing for the right events. And, you know, some of these events I'll speak in front of 5,000 attendees at my speech, like not the conference has 5,000 attendees, I'm talking about 5,000 people showing up for my speech. And the amount of revenue we collect because it's the right audience is way better than getting paid for a speaking gig. So we're being more selective, but I'm willing to be on the road for any of the right events.

Yep. So that event, then you thought it would be Fishing with Dynamite, but it wasn't.

Yes, but when we look at our hit rates of selecting events like that, this one came inbound. We're usually doing a lot of outbounds for the right events. This one came inbound, and the inbound's like, dude, I know you, you know, like so forth, so on.

And I'm like, man, that's actually a good call out because when We do get a lot of inbound because we create content, right? But I think when you understand where you should be in front of, so for example, for Care at ABM, I should be speaking at the ABM conferences, right?

Yeah.

You actually have to actively reach out.

Yes.

And then once they take a look at you, once they took a look at your resume, it's like, oh, okay, he's got a YouTube channel, he's got a podcast, okay, he's been around for a while. They generally will know who you are in the marketing space, right? I think that helps give you a leg up, but you actually, have to take matters into your own hands? Because the events was like, I think HubSpot's decent for us, right? I think speaking at some other marketing software company events this year, they'll be okay. But I think I need to be at the ABM events.

Yeah, so we put them in buckets. So we look at HubSpot as a really good event. We look at Web Summit as a really good event. There's a few other ones like that, like DMEXCO, there's a few others, that one's in Germany, that we look at as really good events. Some of them though, like the HubSpot Web Summits, we look at them as really good events for branding and brand recognition and getting our name out there in the space. We look at certain other events like, uh, the Mexico, I think it's called that.

Yep.

Where it's a really good event to pick up customers. So we put them in buckets and then we split our time and it has to be a really good event for branding or a really good event for customers. When it's a really good event for customers, we don't worry too much if it has 1,000 attendees or 5,000 attendees. We don't want 100 attendees unless they're all potential customers and they're the right fit. But that's usually our bottom tier limit is like 100. And then we will speak at all of those events for revenue. And then any of the branding ones, We don't evaluate based on how many people attend the event. We base it on what stage am I speaking at and how many people can the stage fit? And then we look at how many people attend the total event, because then you do rough math on how many people you think will show up. And that we want to target at least 1,000, if not, if it's international, because internationally you make less money per customer because they don't spend as much as the US. I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm just saying it's reality. Uh, international, we want thousands of people listening on a speech. While in the US, if it's 1,000 people in the room that I'm speaking to, we're okay with that.

You know, the one thing I think we should add too, when we both spoke in Dubai, um, we, they, they handled travel, but we also got a situation where we said, hey, we want introductions. That was your idea. And then also we want to, we want to have a booth, right? And then they would hook you up with a booth. And so we both did that for our respective organizations. And I think that's a good thing because sometimes they might not have, they might not have a speaker budget or they might have a speaker budget, but you say, hey, you don't need to give me the speaker budget. Just give me a booth, give me some introductions and I'm good to go. Cause you're going to make a lot more off of that anyway. Yes.

But let's go back to the Dubai event, right? I won't do any more of those.

Same here. And we won't call it out, but it wasn't for, it wasn't for our customers.

No, because what ends up happening is, is we go there. Speak, no customers. It's branding, but there wasn't enough people in the audience for it to be worth it for branding. And it was international. So those customers aren't going to pay as much as they would in the US or UK. And then the conference wasn't our ideal customer profile type. So the booth didn't pay off and the introductions didn't pay off either. On the flip side, if I look at, and this is not even flip side, if I also look at, The Germany event that we both went to, I won't call it out either. We didn't have to pay for anything. I won't do events like that either.

Yeah.

It's branding, but not enough. And the reason I accepted that is we have a German team and I've never met the German team. So I was like, oh, this is a good opportunity. And it's good brand recognition to get the name out for our German team. But when I look at that, not really our ideal customers were there. And then there wasn't enough people for it to be good from a branding aspect.

I think a good happy medium is probably HubSpot.

Yes.

So HubSpot's a great one because they have 20,000 people over, you know, X amount of days or whatever. And you had, I think you were main stage, so you had like 3,000 or 4,000 people or something like that. And my stage was like 700 people. So it's a pretty good amount of people.

I don't look at HubSpot as a good happy medium. I look at HubSpot and Web Summit as like the gold standard.

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Because I've been at enough events, it is hard to find the sheer number of qualified marketing employees in an organization that you'll find at, let's say, like a HubSpot. Because if another conference has 5,000 people listening on your speech, and let's say HubSpot has 3,000, 4,000, what makes HubSpot better is from a branding standpoint, they're all marketers. Most events, when you're pulling in that many people, they're not all working in a marketing division. They could be entrepreneurs looking to hire marketers, but the reality is, is if you look at the best marketing contracts that come out of a business, they tend to be run in an RFP format. They tend to be, you first get included from either procurement or people who work in the marketing department. So our play on HubSpot is, if you keep speaking enough, a lot of those employees keep switching from company to company, which is reality. Eventually they land at from, and HubSpot's going upstream, but a lot of those players eventually go to work for Fortune 1000 companies, especially in a bad economy, because they tend to have more money than startups. And then you end up picking up a lot of business because they end up having budgets at those corporations versus at the SMBs that they're at. Didn't you speak?

So Adobe Summit's a pretty big conference too. Didn't you speak at that?

No, I got paid to be an influencer.

Okay, well, okay, let's not talk about that one then, because it's not related to this. But this is our little kind of right way to approach event marketing in 2025. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.