MBA917 How Much Does It Cost To Sponsor a Major Conference? + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that's always got your back with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. If you're just getting started and you want to make sure your business idea is a good one, you want to make sure that people actually want to buy what you're about to sell, then you need to check out our five steps to Idea Validation absolutely free. It's a seven part video course with a workbook you can check it out at 1 00, MBA NET. In today's lesson, you will learn. How much does it cost to sponsor a major conference? Being a sponsor at a conference can be a great marketing and branding exercise for. But it's important for you to know what it costs so you can make sure you have an ROI that you get a return on investment. So I'm going to give you an overview of how much it costs to do this. We've sponsored a whole bunch of conferences and we want to make sure that we share with you the information that we learned. A lot of people don't share this stuff and we want to make sure that we do. How much is the actual spot at the conference? What about fitting out your booth? What about the actual things you're going to be offering to the people that visit your booth? And there's a whole bunch of other expenses we need to factor in so we can total it all up and see how much it costs us and, and see how much we need to make in order for it to be worth it. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Oh, sponsoring a major conference can be a lot of fun. It could be great for your business. But it's really important to track your expenses. And not much. All this is going to cost because again, you want to go in there and make sure that you get an roi. Now, when I say get an roi, I mean actually you're going to make a return on investment in terms of dollars and cents. A lot of people, they have like this phantom ROI where they say, hey, this is great for the future. This is great for marketing. There's these intangibles that we don't see that is really good. No, we're not going to worry about intangibles. We're going to really actually find out how much we're going to actually have to spend for this and make sure we actually make the money back through sales at the conference. That way you can go to the next conference you want to reinvest in that marketing strategy. So how much does it cost? So there's a few things we need to break down. The first cost that we need to break down is, is the actual sponsorship spot. So I'm gonna give you some information, and this pertains to our market, the business market, people that are interested in small businesses, online businesses, whether they're podcasting conferences, whether they're webinar conferences, whether they're conferences on business or email marketing or blogging. This is the general pricing for those types of events. When I say a major conference, I'm not talking about a one off local meetup. And that's a great option if you're just getting started and you have a tight budget. Some of those meetups are like 100, 200 people, sometimes more. And it's worth going to the organizer and say, hey, can I have a sponsorship spot at Your meetup for $300? $300 is a lot for a one day meetup for a sponsorship spot. And hey, if you have a product that is worth $300 or more, you make one sale, you broke even. Now obviously there's other expenses, but the point here is that you make a few sales and it's going to be worth your while. So you may want to start small, but if you want to sponsor a major conference, the smallest sponsorship spot I've seen goes around $5,000. So you're talking about between $5,000 and $10,000 for kind of the lowest expensive spot. There's all these different tiers. You know, they call them, you know, bronze and gold and silver and platinum and all this other stuff. But let's say you go with the lowest tier, let's say it's called silver. It's gonna cost you between 5 and $10,000, depending on the conference. Now there's a lot of factors you need to take. Take a look. Obviously, the more targeted the attendees, the better attendees to the conference. So targeting is very important. But also quantity is important as well. But I would go with targeting first. How likely are these people to be interested in your product or service? Is it a perfect match? If so, the quantity is not as important. So I've sponsored events that are about 250, 300 people. It's a smaller conference, but it was a perfect match. So it was really a good fit. But even if it's not a perfect perfect match, but if you had a chance to speak to enough people, you can make them customers. Then a conference with like 500, 800 people, that's a pretty good deal. So we're looking roughly for the booth itself, 5,000 to 10,000. Now when you reserve this booth, it's gonna be located somewhere. Obviously you know, the tier will depend on the location. Prime location is gonna cost you a lot. Platinum sponsors get really like front of the line and they get mentioned on stage and all that kind of stuff. But let's say for example, you go with the basic package. They're going to give you an eight foot table, a couple of chairs Access to electricity and Internet WI fi, you can expect that much as a minimum. Now they may throw in some other things like a logo that's on their banner at the conference or your logo being on their website linked to your product. Now if you want to have other things included in your package, don't be afraid to email the organizers and negotiate that. I've done that plenty of times. And they're willing to really be flexible and try to, you know, meet your demands because sponsors really help the event happen. So if you want them to mention you on stage or you want some stage time where you can spend maybe five or ten minutes to talk about your product in front of the audience, then ask about that, maybe they can throw it in, maybe they can maybe charge a little bit more for that. If you want them to email their list or maybe hyperlink something somewhere on their emails as a P.S. ask about it. The worst thing is going to happen. They're going to say no, but you know, you tried and maybe you can come somewhere in the middle, maybe they'll say no to that, but how about we do this instead? Now that's just the cost of the actual sponsorship spot and the booth. What's the other costs involved? Well, you're going to need to make this booth look decent, right? So you're going to need, you know, a tablecloth of some sort, if it doesn't come with that, or a skirt for the actual table, you're gonna need a banner behind you with your branding on it or a roll up banner beside you or a couple roll up banners. You're gonna need whatever you're gonna need in that booth to have a successful event, whether you're giving out T shirts, you know, swag, whether you're giving demos of your product with your computer. So make sure your computer's there or desktop computer's there. If you're giving away freebies like stickers, make sure you know what you're gonna have. Have a mockup of your booth in your own home, in your garage or whatever. These booths are not huge. Most of them. The biggest I've seen in most of these conferences is about 10ft by 10ft. It's about, you know, the size of a standard living room, right? So you can do a mock booth in your own home and kind of feel how much room you have, what you're going to put in that booth and set it up in a way that you can imagine what you would like at that booth. Now you also have to factor in the cost of travel how much is it going to cost you to get to this conference with your equipment? Remember that you're going to have banners and you're going to have your computer or computers. You might have some swag, like T shirts. It might be a good idea to get them delivered straight to the venue. If you're ordering some swag, T shirts, stickers, whatever, see if it's possible. If you can have somebody receive them for you at the venue, that's a great option rather than lugging it with you on the plane and paying extra baggage for that. So cost out your ticket, find out where that event is. Obviously it's going to be really cost effective if this event's within your city, driving distance even. But if you have to fly, remember that's a cost as well. And there are events that we have flown internationally for, so that cost is factored in and it makes it a little harder to hit that roi. Now at the actual booth, you need somebody to man the booth, right? So this could be you, obviously it could be you and somebody else because you need somebody to relieve you if you need to go to the bathroom, if you need to take a break, have lunch, whatever. It's a long day, you need a break. Now obviously if you have the budget for it, you can hire people to man the booth for you, but you need them to make sure that they are very skilled in your product, they understand your product very well. So maybe you can see if there's somebody from your staff that is willing to go with you on this trip. But remember, they have their own expenses, their flights, their hotels, all that stuff. Right? Now with these sponsorship packages, they obviously will give the sponsors admission to the event. Now if you have some time in advance, you can go to the form of the Facebook group of this event and ask people that are interested in going to this event, hey, who would be interested in helping me out in my booth? You'd get free admission and you'd work these hours. They wouldn't be working the whole time because obviously you would help them out. They would get to go to the, you know, sessions they like and they get a free ticket to the event and you can get a couple people to help you out as well to do that. And it might be a win win for them. They might be like, hey, I was gonna pay for a ticket anyway, I might as well help this person out and get some experience. And they may be even willing to pay for their tickets and their hotels themselves. So that's a great option, but you really need to make sure they understand your product well. So, so maybe a stipulation would be, you know, that they are with you on a few calls, maybe some Skype calls where you give them some demos and you give them, you know, all the information in advance, whether it's pricing or discounts or all that kind of stuff. So those are the bare bones of the actual costs of the conference. So you need to open up a spreadsheet and calculate how much is this going to cost you. Let's say, for example, that total is $12,000. You need to figure out, are you able to get a return on investment, Are you able to make $13,000 or break even at 12,000 doll conference, how much is your product worth? Maybe it's a membership program and it's $500 a year. So if you want to break even at 12,000, you're going to have to have 24 signups at that conference. At a conference, I found that we've converted around 7%, which is pretty good. So that means 7% of the people that have visited our booth just walked up to us would purchase. So say, for example, for every hundred people that showed up, we would get make seven sales. Now, obviously not every single person that goes to the conference is going to go to your booth. So you need to make sure you have a rough estimate and see how well you could do. Now, that 7% has a lot to do with, you know, my passion for the product, me talking about it and being knowledgeable, you know, just also just being aware of the fact that, you know, I want to be able to answer their questions and not be too pushy, but at the same time, let them know that there's a great offer here at the conference. So it does require some sales skills. But I'm just giving you some sort of barometer, some sort of number to go off. Yours might be higher, might be lower. But the point here is that if your goal is to get 24 conversions so you can break even, you're going to need about 350 people to go to your booth. Now, obviously, the more compelling your offer is, how well positioned your booth is, all that stuff is going to factor in. Now, I like to have an ROI before I leave the conference. Obviously, people can buy after the conference, you're top of mind, maybe they check you out later on. But you really can't calculate that ROI unless you're using some sort of coupon code or tracking link. So I like to make sure the ROI is actually completed and achieved before.

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Guys to wrap up, you want to make sure you can save money when you can. When you're sponsoring a major conference, there's a lot of expenses, but you can save some money. Number one, the earlier plan this, the better. You're going to get a better rate for the sponsorship spot. You're also going to get a better rate for the hotel that is close to the venue. They're usually early bird specials and those spots and those rooms get filled very quickly. So make sure you're early. So if you plan this early, you can save some money just by being a planner right now. The other thing is the more conferences you sponsor, the more cost effective it becomes. Our first conference was a bit pricey because we had to pay for everything for the first time, whether it was our booth setup, our banners, our table cloth and, you know, curtain that we used called a table skirt, right? All our kind of marketing materials, flyers, our swag, all that kind of stuff, we invested. And the thing is that once you do it once, you can reuse a lot of that stuff. And you know, even if you order in bulk the first time, like for T shirts or stickers, those are things that can last. So you can bring them the next conference and that will save you a whole bunch of money. So keep that in mind. Also keep that in mind when you're producing these things. To not make it conference specific, try to make it so you can transfer those marketing materials and those things, the banners, all that stuff, to the next conference. Another way you can save money is to centralize all your printing. So if you're gonna print banners and flyers and maybe T shirts or swag or something like that, if you centralize all that and do at one place, whether it's a local print shop or Vistaprint, for example, you're gonna save money on shipping. You're gonna save money because it's a bulk order. You can negotiate a rate. You can even use a coupon code that will apply to the whole order. So that can save you a ton of cash. Also, if you have some success at one conference, the next time they run it the next year, you can negotiate a great rate. They're going to call upon the last year sponsors to see if they want to return and often they will give you a discount because you're returning. So obviously this makes great sense if you had a great ROI at that conference last year. But I do recommend you ask the organizers how many people will be returning from last year. You want new faces, new customers. So if the percentage is not that bad, you know, 20% are return, fine, 15%, that's great. Keep that in mind, guys. I hope that was helpful. When it comes to sponsoring a major conference, there are costs involved, but you can definitely get an roi. And it's a great way to actually talk to your customers and get to know them and find out what they need and their pain points and how you can improve your product or service. That wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over because it's Free Ride Friday. Who's going to win a free ride to EZcourse, our $500 course that we sell over at EasyCourse. Co Every Friday we give away a free course to somebody who left us an itunes rating and review. Leave us an itunes rating and review and you can win from our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. New to Fairhope. New to Fairhope says Awesome. 5 stars. I loved your episode on Focus. It was awesome. You're a great teacher. And I loved your interview with John lee Dumas@eofire.com well, thank you so much New to Fairhope for that awesome review. I appreciate you listening. And yeah, that was a great interview that I had on Eofire recently. Great podcast, but you are our winner. So congratulations. All you got to do is email me at omar100mba.net so you can claim your free ride. Every week we do this, everybody. So just leave us an iTunes rating interview and you can be next week's winner. That's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Planning a conference can be very hectic. There's a lot to plan. There's a lot of spreadsheets, there's a lot of, you know, pre planning, so try to start as early as possible. Our last conference that we sponsored was heroic public speaking, and we planned that conference about nine months out. I know that seems like a lot of time out, but we really needed to make sure we got everything right. It was a large conference. This is the third time we were a part of it, so we knew the crowd really well and we wanted to make sure that we capitalized on everything we knew. So plan ahead of time will save you time, save you money, save you headaches when it's time to actually be at the event. All right, that's it for me today, guys. Thank you so much. Check us out on Monday. Our must Read episode where I share with you a book that has greatly influenced me as an entrepreneur. I'll be sharing with you the perennial seller by Ryan Holiday. I'll see you then, guys. Until then, take Care. Of.

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like Superheroes and Sidekicks or Auto and Home Insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.