Matt Wolfe shares practical ways to get more from conferences: network with sponsors, photograph speakers for later reference, and use the conference app to manage contacts efficiently.
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Hey, welcome back to Hustle and Flowchart. Today I am kicking off another solo episode and we're going to be talking about some conference hacks. We just got back from Traffic and Conversion Summit live in person. Events are starting to kick off again, and we wanted to share some tips that we've learned over time around how to really be the most effective at these conferences and really get the most out of these conferences. So that's really what I'm going to dig in on this nice little short, snackable episode today. If you want the notes for this episode episode, you can get the complete action guide with all of the steps from this episode over at hustleandflowchart.com notes. That's hustleandflowchart.comnotes. let's get into it.
What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. All right, so on this episode, I'm going to break down three different little hacks that we've learned from going to conferences and really leveraging them to connect with people and to network and to build our influence among the other people at the booth, be it the speakers, the attendees, and the exhibitors. We really, really like to network and connect with as many people as possible. So I'm going to share with you three killer hacks that you can use to connect with a ton of people at these conferences and do it in a way where you really deep connection. This first little tip actually came from Steve Sims. We bumped into Steve while at the Traffic and Conversion Summit, and he gave us some advice that really made the conference worthwhile. This. This little tip turned the whole conference into something that's going to end up being very, very, very profitable for us. And what Steve told us to do was to go around and meet everybody who is running the booths. So stop trying to network with as many of the attendees and speakers and start going around and learning who the brands are that spend money on events like this. So in our scenario, we've got Hustle and Flowchart, the podcast, the YouTube channel, the newsletter, all of that stuff. The ideal sponsor, the ideal way to make money off of these media platforms that we're building is to talk to the brands that are sponsoring an event like Traffic and Conversion Summit. Everybody that was at Traffic and Conversion Summit that had a booth is trying to get in front of an audience of entrepreneurs and digital marketers. Well, that's the same audience that we have for our various Hustle and Flowchart Brands. So the people that are going to spend money with us are the people that are running these booths. They're the CEOs of the companies running these booths. They're the marketing managers of the people running these booths. So the advice we got was to go and build relationships with the sponsors. Now there's a little add on to this. Once you get home after the event is over, email all of the people that had booths, all of the sponsors that had booths that you really want to connect with. Shoot them off an email and thank them for sponsoring the event that you were just at. Send them an email that says something to the effect of hey, I'm going to use ClickUp as an example because they're one of the brands we've been really, really talking to lot. But here's the example. Hey, ClickUp, we just wanted to thank you for sponsoring Traffic and Conversion Summit and having a booth there. We know that without companies like your sponsoring this event, this event would not be possible. So it is really you guys and companies like yours that make events like this happen. And we just wanted to reach out and show some appreciation for you being there and being a part of this event. Now, there's no ask there. It's just a thank you. It's just a gratitude email, but it opens the conversation. It puts your foot in the door when you get that reply, then you open up a conversation, then you say, hey, it was great meeting you at the event. I'd love to jump on a call and see what you're working on and see if there's some ways that maybe we can help your company and you can help our company. Let's chat. But these gratitude emails open the door to start that conversation. Alright, so the second hack that I want to share, take videos and photos of the speakers. So for example, we watched Pat Flynn speak at Traffic and Conversion Summit during Pat's presentation. I actually filmed some video of Pat up on stage and I shared it to my Instagram and I tagged Pat and of course Pat turned around and re shared it to his Instagram stories. So you're getting that sort of viral sharing element of the person on stage is most likely going to share the fact that you videoed them on stage. But also the next step to this is after the event is over, give it a few days and once the event has wrapped up and you're doing all of your outreach to reconnect with the people that you met at the event, email them or DM them through social media and say, hey, thanks so Much for sharing my video on social media. I actually took a handful of photos while you were on stage. Would you like me to send you those photos now? Every speaker wants more photos of them speaking, especially if they're in front of a large audience. That gives them huge credibility. In this case, Pat was speaking on a huge stage. It was a huge, huge room. So the size of the room, the size of the monitors, the size of the stage, and, and Pat being kind of a little ant up on the stage in comparison to how big everything was, is a really cool, credible photo. So I can DM Pat and say, would you like these additional photos that I took at the. They're going to respond and say, that would be great. Thank you so much for taking these photos. I'd love them. You get their email address, you send them the photos. Once again, you've just opened the door. You've just kicked in that reciprocation principle that we talked about with Robert Cialdini last week. You just gave them a reason to want to reciprocate and you just gave them a reason to remember you as well. So now you can send them these photos, but your foot is in the door. You now have a conversation with this speaker from this large conference and, and you have a door open to reach out to them, ask to work together, ask to be on their podcast, ask them to be on your podcast. However you do it in your business, you've just now opened that door. All right, so the third and final little conference hack that I want to teach you is if the conference you're going to has an app, download and use the app from the conference. For the first day that Joe and I were at Traffic Conversion Summit, Joe had the app on his phone. And I didn't, I just, I didn't see the value. I didn't understand why I should care about the app. But what we quickly learned about the app during Traffic and Conversion Summit is that everybody who is at the event had a name badge on that name badge had a QR code. If I scan that QR code with the app. So with the Traffic and Conversion Summit app, if I scan somebody's QR code, it then adds them as a contact inside the app. Now, that in itself isn't that valuable, except any data that that person has tied to their account, their first name, their last name, their phone number, their address, their email address, their name of their business, all of the details that they personally entered into their profile on the app now get added to your contact record for them on Your app now that's just in itself really, really cool because I could come back from the event, open up the app, look at all the people I connected with and start shooting them emails. But where it gets really, really cool is that with the Traffic and conversion app specifically there was an export option. I was able to export an Excel file of every contact that I met at the event. And that Excel file had their name, their email address, their phone number, their physical address, any info that was on their profile was in the app and available to export to an Excel file. If you could export to an Excel file, you can import them into your ActiveCampaign account. You can import them into, you know, a mail shake account where you can send off multiple emails with merge codes in them. There's so many things that you can do to now automate some of the follow up with them. So if your conference has an app, get the app, don't overlook it. The app is probably going to be a huge, huge networking tool for you. We've gone to PodFest in the past. PodFest has a really cool app. The point being, if there's an app, download it, use it to connect with other people in the in the event, because that app probably has the ability to export all of your contacts and organize all of the discussions that you've had throughout the event. Another killer thing about the Traffic and Conversion Summit app was every contact that I met, I can actually put a note in their contact record. So after talking to them, I can look at their contact record in the app and put a note about, oh, I talked to Mark from whatever finance he wants to invest in our company. Don't forget to follow up about an investment. Right, I can just type that note onto his contact record. And then later when I come back to my house, I export the Excel sheet. Any of my notes are also on that contact record in the Excel sheet. So I have a quick reference of why I wanted to reach out to that person and then I can plug them into whatever automated tool I need to use to reach out to them. Or you know, in some cases a manual. Just I need to send an email manually to this person. Alright, so those are my three conference hacks that really, really were game changing for us. Going to conferences, get to know the sponsors, the people that are putting on the booths around the event, take videos and photos of the speakers and then reach out afterwards and ask if they would like those photos to open the door with them. And also make sure if the conference has an app, download the app, figure out the app's abilities and use the app to the fullest ability because they're usually designed to make networking and connecting with other people at the event easier. All right, so those are my three conference hacks. Hopefully you find those helpful. Hopefully you leverage some of those when you go to your next conference. Now that the world is opening up again, there should be a lot more conferences happening and a lot more people stepping out into the light of day again and, and having some fun networking and growing their businesses the old fashioned way. So if you like this episode, please go over to iTunes or YouTube and leave a comment. Leave a review, let us know that you're enjoying this stuff. Also, if you want the action guide the flow notes for this episode, go to hustleandflowchart.com we'll provide you with all of the notes directly from this episode. And finally, Easy Webinar. And if you're not using Easy Webinar yet, but you're doing webinars, go check out Easy Webinar. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle easy webinars hooking up hustling flowchart listeners with a sweet discount to get their tool. Easy Webinar does automated webinars, live webinars, hybrid webinars, live streams, builds the landing pages, does all the backend tracking for you. It is a complete solution for webinars. So go to easywebinar.com hustle they're hooking you up over there and and I hope you enjoyed this episode. If there's somebody you know that's going to a conference that could use the little kick the little hacks to better improve their conference experience, send them the way of this episode. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks so much. See you guys in the next one.
