LIVE SaaStr Insider: Today we're chatting Media and our top tips from SaaStr Europa!

Test it off the bat is what is what. When is information coming for Saster annual sponsorship? When do I get my like booth clicks what are boots do? That is all coming next week. So next week we're going to do a full for deep dive into Saster Annual everything you need to know. We'll do it like the agenda is launching next week. We'll go through the agenda, we'll kind of go through the rough and task schedule, the schedule for sponsors. As you guys know, if you've done this before or maybe if you're new here as a sponsor, some of it does change a little bit from day to day. But we've got a very good agenda that is and a lot of really great speakers that will be announcing next week. So that's the exciting news off the bat. Feel free to still drop any questions that you may have about annual into the chat that'll help us build out some of the content for next week. But yeah, so without further ado, let me get my screen here. That's. I've not, I'm not used to my home setup again, like how do I have this many anyway? Okay, I'm start with just a quick note on our Saster media. I know we talk about this a lot but I know it always feels somewhat surprises folks when we do talk about our media and then like some of the things you can do with it. And I want to call it out because I know that right now we're in this transition time between Europa and Annual. It's a great time to get on the podcast because I will say all of the really great content from Saster Europa is now coming out on the podcast. It's now coming out on saster.com so it's such a really great time to be a sponsor of this because like listens usually pick up at this time between like, you know, you're open annual and then right after annual again because folks know that like the best, the very best content obviously gets promoted year round, but the very, very best cream of the crop, the top sessions that, you know, the attendees let us know and vote on, they come out first. So right now we've, I don't know if you guys have seen, we started releasing and rolling out some of the top Europa content. So UiPath is out there launched. Darkly Loom's coming out tomorrow, Rippling's coming out next week. These are just such great brands to be affiliated with on the Saster podcast upcoming and then obviously you know, we're going to go through A bunch of Europa amazing content from now till Annual and Astra Annual. All that really great content will kind of take us through the rest of the year. So it's a really great time. And just a tidbit there. I wanted to share about the podcast. We do have a couple open slots for the podcast upcoming and so that's why I mentioned it again. I think Q4 is looking a little bit more full, but we've got some availability upcoming in Q3, so. So something we wanted to bring up and share about because it does, honest to God, pick up in terms of views and listeners this time of year because of how the events and the content comes out. So more to come there. But just a quick note on the podcast there. Now the other media assets I know you guys always ask us about, like what is the most updated availability of sort of our media assets? Because we have three different newsletters. Like the Insider is really full right now. The Weekly is full poll for some time. I think there's one gap because somebody dropped in July, there's one more in September and I think that's kind of it. So like the Weekly does fill the first because that is our largest audience size. So the Weekly is great. If you're thinking of, you know, launching something post Annual or post Europa, which is now and you want to get out to the crowd or you've got something new that you're doing at Annual, you want to reinforce that the Weekly is a great place to do it. It's our top content of the week. So again you kind of get that hit of it's our very best ask for content of the entire week goes out in the Weekly has our biggest distribution. So I love the Weekly for that sense. Now the Daily we have opened up new slots in, so that's why that one has upcoming inventory I think for every month except August. August full, but you know, September again if you want to combo it with annual good time. If you want to do something as a last minute launch for next week, there's one spot there in July left as we open up more slots in the Daily. And that was actually based on sponsored feedback from all of you guys of like everyone was trying to get in the Daily. We were always capacity constrained. So we opened up new slots and basically rotated how we do the Daily and its distribution. So yeah, this after Daily it's our latest breaking news of the week. Again, because we're between events, this is like I would say our content gold mine of the year. A lot of really great content coming out of the pipe. A lot of really great content coming out in the run up annual as well. So good time to do it. And then just last thing I'll say is Insider is distributed on LinkedIn. As you guys know, people are on LinkedIn all the time. The distribution is going wild. So if that's something you're into, Insider is a good one to consider. Cool. There's a few like success stories which I'll just quickly touch on. I know it's covered these before. You know, SAP, who I think is actually coming back to do more of the daily did like a. Just to give you guys some topical ideas of what you can promote in our newsletters. You know they've promoted one of their own virtual events in our daily newsletter and which did quite well. Instruct has this really killer ad that's actually running currently. It's one of our top performing ads of all time already I will say because it's their definitive guide to product led growth models. So this is obviously a gated ebook. This has been doing really well because it looks like a native ad. It looks like something we would write up on sastor.com, people have been eating up this like a gold mine. Also plg so hot right now. So yeah, this one's been doing extremely, extremely well. Even though it is one of our newest assets that's already shot up to the top. So just some flavors of ice cream there of things you could do. I prefer strawberry. Anyways with that I know we want to share some of the learnings we had from the most recent event which was Sasha, but 2023, we just had it a couple weeks ago in London. It was a great event. It's funny because literally the week after there was a heat wave in London. So it was really, really hot after this. So Sasha brought the heat to Europe. So with all that being said, I'll mainly pass it to Kevin and David on their comments. I'll maybe jump in with some color commentary of how this kind of translates to the annual in some places. But yeah guys, take it away.

Awesome. Yeah, I think the one of the first learnings and as we look back at a lot of the sponsors, some of the things that really stood out to us is just having a really solid and a really fun activation.

Right.

Obviously for a lot of folks, sparking up meaningful conversations, generating leads, getting product feedback.

Right.

You really want to engage with the community and so the more you can be creative, the more you can stand out. Again, a phrase I constantly use with a Lot of my sponsors, like be memorable, right? Really be creative with an activation just to kind of again, like make it fun, make it conversational. But we saw some really, really great examples of folks that had awesome activations at SAS to Europa deal. They had an amazing one. This was the ice cream, I believe it was make was doing some cool giveaways with the spin wheel Vertice. The golfing got a little competitive. I was even over there practicing my putts before everyone was let in. Give myself a little leg up. But it was a lot of fun and you could see like this is where there was a lot of buzz, a lot of conversations going on. And again, from just driving for that desired outcome of conversations leads feedback, this really, really stood out. But David, I'm sure you saw some awesome things as well.

Yeah, no, I think there's a couple of good examples right here. I mean, we did have these food activations that we facilitated and so deal took one of those. They fully branded it. So, you know, if those are very limited, but if you have the opportunity to jump on one of those, again, thinking ahead to annual, I think they're great, you know, because they're limited. You know, we, they go to our top sponsors first and then down the line. But again, they're, they're, they're highly sought after and a real win. But then you can also kind of make your own, like fortis, you know, the golf. Yeah, Kevin, I think they had to remove you from that game, right? It was getting a little, you were spending a little too much time there. But yeah, I mean, look, people were coming and having fun. It was a conversation starter and that was something that they, you know, kind of. They had. It was good. They also had a scoreboard that they, they had. It was fun and make. You know, we talk a lot about spin the wheel. These guys took it to another level. This was like a highly customized wheel that was like beautiful and really well done. And their, their booth was, was jam packed the whole time. So yeah, those were some, um, you know, there was other, like, there was like boba, what do you call it? Iced tea. Tea. Boba tea. Um, there was crepes and waffles and lots of fun food. Um, but so both, you know, leveraging the ones that are available, but we're bringing your own. Just make sure you talk to us. Right. We have to get okay with the venue and things like that, but let us know earlier, sooner than later, and they're always worth doing. I love your line, Kevin. Memorable.

Yeah, I would say Same rules apply, you know, from Europa to annual. If you're one of the sponsors on the call. I see a few of you on here who are, who are doing both or maybe if you just in Europe and you're thinking about doing annual, you know, same rules apply. We've got. I think these are great examples because they're both examples of things that like we can do together with you of like a food activation. Those are always provided by Zastra. Like we work with the venue because of all the rules and regulations around food service, etc. To give you guys basically a list, right? As David said, we start with the top two sponsors and go down usually I would say between the super goals and of our sponsor activations at annual do sell out fairly quickly as things that people want to do. I know people have like literally hot takes of like, you know, they saw the, the boba that we did an annual last year. They've already got that. Or like the Vietnamese coffee is already. Or like there's a few that have already like called dibs if you will on some of the activations. But I like this example because you know it doesn't have to be food related. There are a lot of really great food related options. Obviously it works. It's a little bit more turnkey because most of them can just do some sort of branding on like the cups, on the, you know, on the service item, whatever it is. And so that makes it really easy for all parties involved to get it done. I do like these examples of things like you know, vertice and make it obviously 40s. Like they didn't make this cutting green but you know, they did their own roll up. They kind of put some thought into it of like okay, what are we going to bring to activate? You can see how they kind of like moved around their furniture to make sure they had for in their booth. So I think that's a good middle ground. And then you've got folks like make who you know, they've got custom branded things that either you've made for other events or you're making it for faster and then you can, you know, store it at your office, take other events. I think that's also a great way to do it. If you've got a little time. I'd say now's a good time to do it. For annual you've got about like, you know, 90 days to do it. That's a pretty good timeline to get something turned around quickly without any rush fees. Good way to do it. And you Know, things like this are always super eye appealing because I think when, you know other folks have spin to win, this one kind of stands out because you see it's branded. It literally matches our booth colors. Like it all is very vibrant and it kind of draws you in. So there's obviously different flavors of how much customization you can do. You could do super turnkey, like food stuff, or you can go all the way to things like make or, you know, other folks had like a. I think Verdain had like a completely branded like Pac man game that they brought from their office. Again, um, we can pretty much. We pretty much did everything that people wanted to do at Europa. We pretty much can accommodate 99% of things for annual if you start early. So yeah, definitely get in touch with our team and sponsor success. If you're already thinking about doing this or you're like, oh, I've got something I've got in my office or I'm on a brand, like, how can I make sure we can get it set up?

So Amelia, there's a question from an attendee. Do you have any contact for F and B providers and are there any restrictions for annual this year?

Yeah, so there are always restrictions for annual every year just because of how we're in the same menu, which is the San Mateo County Event Center. So you guys will be getting a list. You know, I know you're going to get a lot of things next week. That'll be one of the things that comes out in that list is kind of the providers. A lot of them you'll see are, you know, your rear providers. There are some newer ones as well. But yeah, anything food related, you do have to go through that list. If for some reason you've got one that's not on that list and you want to see if it can get approved, I say go ahead and email sponsoring success. Now you can see, see me, I'm just aisling.com and we can see if we get approval, right? Like again, no promises. It's. We don't really care if you do a food activation that's on our list. It's just a matter of if we can get it approved, which we can try and help you do. And if they say yes, great. I would say things they usually like say no to are things that are like alcohol related because they have a dry fleck liquor license. So that's, that's a hard no at annual. I know we actually were able to accommodate that for Europa, but for annual that is a hard no. America rules different. Yeah, basically anything that's not liquor within bounds we can pretty much try and accommodate. So just let us know. Yeah, cool.

Keep asking questions, we'll answer them here. But yeah, I'll kick off the next one. You know, one of the things that we've seen now at the, at least at the past three or four Saster events that's been really successful are after parties and these are a couple examples. I went to the Verdain one. They did rooftop cocktails at this great place in London and it was really nice, it was really nice venue. They had a really big turnout which was great. And then we saw here we see this often. Sponsors will often partner with each other. So Paddle and Top Line got together to have a boat party which was after I think the first day of Europa. So that was great. And just the little post above the guide to some of the ancillary unofficial side events. What we do for our partners is we will promote this for you. We'll promote it to disaster attendees of the event. And then you can see like a good example in the VERDIN was the rsvp. You know, you can still cap the number of people because obviously you probably can't host all 10,000 of our guests at an annual after party. But these things are great. We, I love seeing sponsors come together. Makes it quite cost effective and a great way to like, you know, keep building those relationships. Kevin, which ones did you go to?

I went to Exclaimers afterparty and it was, it was a ton of fun but also too like it was really cool because I bumped into a lot of other folks in our industry that I know and you know there was, it was actually like, it was cool. Like we were making tons of connections. I knew some people that are looking to hire and kind of making intros like. So it's, it's really cool. Like there is a really massive networking opportunity at these, at these after parties I think kind of similar. But another twist to this too is I also saw a lot of our sponsors doing like smaller, like more intimate customer dinners.

Right.

And not necessarily a big blown out party but something a little bit smaller, a bit more intimate. Bring your customers together, couple in some of your key prospects. Right. But it's, it's just a really great opportunity to continue the conversation. Again it's a little bit more on the experiential side which I think a lot of marketers are looking for and really love. So yeah, anything you can do that just continues to, continues the conversation after the event. These are all really, really good examples here.

Cool. Amelia, did you make it to any?

I did not make it to any because I was busy running around with like two different radios at Europa. But I will say, yeah, these are really great examples. We usually do write them up for, for annual or you know, you're open next year if you're thinking that far ahead. Yeah, these are always great. I would say for annual, you know, we're a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday mix. So I would say doing it on that first day, which is the Wednesday, is probably a good place to anchor because Thursday, which is day two, is usually when you have the big party. A lot of people do stay for the big party. So it's kind of hard to compete head to head with that. Like you might as well just sponsor the big party versus having your own thing that night if you're thinking about doing something Day two because we've gotten that feedback in the past. So yeah, day one, which is actually September 6th, is safer for things, you know, off site, on site and annual. And I like the point about, you know, it doesn't always have to be big. I think we could do a whole separate webinar on how to plan your own customer dinners and events. And they don't always have to be dinner. Right. Like we saw folks in Europe also do like there was a run that they did in the morning. I think Paddle also did like a different breakfast for some of just their customers and like their podcast, like it doesn't have to always be food related. I think we gravitate towards that because it's a little bit more turnkey, just as like marketers and staff in general. But yeah, it doesn't always have to be food related. Bear that in mind as well for any after parties side events, if you will for faster annual. There's a question here of what time will annual end on Friday. People usually want to get home for the weekends. Yeah, great question. So we've definitely factored that in. I would say most of our hard hitting like content we're stacking like Friday morning but not too early because again it's like the day after the party. So we have noticed attendees usually like to get a late start on the third day. But yeah, I think the onus and idea here is that on Friday, you know, we'll kind of see like a beer garden in the afternoon. Kind of do some like final AMAs and workshops. Because we do have such a big international audience too. We're very aware of the fact that like some folks Will probably head out in the afternoon of Friday. But yeah, that's kind of the like we'll probably start to like informally wind down around 3. We usually go till about 6 o' clock on Fridays but again all the locals I'm sure are going to stay in party because then it's Friday and you don't have work the next day.

There's another question. Yeah, go ahead. About agenda for the event. And Emily, I think you mentioned next week, right?

Yeah, it's coming Monday.

Monday, yeah. Nice.

Yeah, you might, you might see it a little more sooner on the weekend because you know we always like put it on the website a little more for like a formal launch. I Pam. But yeah, Monday is the formal launch.

Awesome. I think this is definitely a really, really, really important one especially too with everyone being a lot more distributed, remote. You're you know, getting FaceTime with a lot of your key customers and your key prospects really helps accelerate the relationships, accelerates your pipeline. So you know, use this as an opportunity to get FaceTime with these folks. Invite your key customers and invite your key prospects, your partners. We've even seen folks are who are, you know, interviewing you know, senior level candidates that they invite the candidates to come. So you know, anyone who is really important for you to get FaceTime with. It's just a huge opportunity to you know, to get more and more time with them. Again build a relationship but use this as an opportunity as a good excuse get your customers and prospects there. Again I think the folks that really take advantage of this look back at it and even to an ROI on your sponsorship perspective really helps prove out that ROI as well.

I can't say this enough too for both Europa and Annual we always help people invite customers and prospects whether it's like discounted passes, if you're a top tier sponsor, sometimes even com passes. I don't see people take advantage of this enough. You'd be surprised when the amount of times I've been like, yeah, we've offered some of the diamonds like 10 free passes and some of them invited zero. Like you know, different priorities for different people. But yeah, I, I can't stress this enough. I think you know, the barrier is not as dead as maybe Twitter makes it out to be. Annual is a really good time to get together with your customers and prospects and to the point, you know, we just touched on site event like you don't always have to do a side event like you know, if you invite them to Annual you have an activation, you have some sort of thing going on you meet them there, you get face. I think that's what really matters is putting in the effort. I know we've, we've had a lot of recent like articles on Samster.com about customer success and relationships and how face to face really matters. Like, you know, meeting them there or offering and meeting them there is I think never a bad idea to do. Even if they're, you know, if they, what's the worst they could say oh, I'm actually not going to faster and if you're a faucet you could say hey, you know, you're in California or if you're local we can help get you a ticket, would you come meet us? Or you know, you could take it from there, we'll come to you, that kind of thing. I think it's always appreciated. I don't think it's never like a net negative to be like hey, are you coming to Saster? Can we get some face time? Just face to face to meet up? Since a lot of people are distributed now, so can't stress that enough that most people don't take advantage of one.

Other one of the last one on that. I think the sponsors who do this really well. Well what I've seen is of course like a lot of the folks that we're talking to who are planning the events and doing the strategy, it's a lot of the marketers and I think the sponsors who do this well are the ones that you know, get this in front of their sales teams really early, get this in front of customer success teams early, like really work with those client facing, you know, functions in the organization to say like, you know, if you had a pick list of your top five dream prospects to be there, like who would they be? Right. But I think if you can coordinate and strategize with those client facing teams, that's how you can really activate this. So more of a tip internally on how to bring this to life.

Yeah, that's a good point. You might have to, Kevin's right. You might have to push your team a little bit to do it right. Like they may not get it off the bat. You might have to kick them in the butt just a bit to get them to do it. But I always think it's worth it.

Yeah. One of my sponsors actually said they for last year they did this and they basically for the sales team that was going to go to annual, it was those that had clients and prospects there that they invited. So you can use as a little incentive Gamify. But Yeah, definitely connect with those teams.

That's well put. Well put. I think we've seen that work. That's great. I'll just jump in here a couple things that we saw, like people leveraging their experience. Both really post event. Right. Something I encourage everyone to take a look at. Make produced this really awesome video about their experience at Saster Europa in London the week before last. Go check out it. Check it out on LinkedIn. I know Saster shared it as well, I think on Twitter and LinkedIn. So that was really awesome. It got a ton of likes and follows and feedback. So yeah, that was a really cool thing. And I think they'll be leveraging that for lots of different purposes to show their culture, culture and their brand and how they come to life. So that was really great. I also love what Chart Mogul did. This is a little bit both at the event and post event, but they had this great research report on SAS benchmarks. So, you know, a lot of times folks are handing out, there's a lot of fun stuff. Right there was what, like some make your own T shirts and hats and socks and you know, I'm not allowed to bring any more junk home, but not junk swag. But anyway, this was cool, right? I thought this was great. Maybe it's my nerdy side, but there was this great bench benchmarks report that they put together in advance of Saster. They distributed there, they shared it post event and I think it was just really great insight. So leveraging data reports, our community really eats that up. And of course, you know, post event they're continuing to promote it. So I thought that was really, really cool.

Yeah. And the chartreuse of the one I think is Bianca points out, like Jason had mentioned it as one of the like reports that he references, like a data point that he referenced, like his opener along with, you know, other Bessemer other ones as well. But yeah, that was cool because it kind of tied into like the opening of what he said and then they were like, oh, yeah, we've got this benchmark report already.

Yeah, yeah. I can't say how many people I talked to that post Europa who weren't there heard about it and there was tons of FOMO and so like, definitely like lean into that, capitalize on that. I think, I think Hook in particular and this was even leading up to the event, but I think like from before the event, during the event and even after, I think it was about 15 different pieces of content and LinkedIn posts that they put together. And I know for that like it just created a really strong awesome buzz around them and again it got more meetings, more conversations on site. It's another great touch point as you're doing lead follow up after the event. So the more you can kind of leverage this as an opportunity to create really cool content. Even if it's just like short form videos and pictures, like it is really, really cool and probably beneficial. So definitely lean into this to create content and share your learnings.

Yeah, I'd say staff share was the first of like not maybe the first event but the, the most I saw people tiktoking out of like I would. I do these things that I call like I do around the production team knows or Saturday knows. I like I'll literally do loops around the event and just make sure things are going smooth. I do this often like at least once an hour if not more and so on a lot of my loops I'd be like these people are talking more than I've ever seen before. And just an internal tip too. Like if you have bandwidth, if you have budget to send somebody on your marketing team to just focus on creating content. I do think it helps. I think it is sometimes hard to split the difference of like okay, we're just going to ask our team that we're selling to also create content. There is a lot going on at Saster so sometimes it can be hard to focus in and do that. We did see a few sponsors who you know, set their content marketing manager, etc. Or social media person to do some of this content so that they could focus on it because there is always a lot going on just in the content world outside of what's going on at the booth. Okay, final, final tip here.

So yeah, we, we the ancillary opportunities I think is something I think we already touched on media but the ancillaries are something that we offer that are really cool. A great way to kind of extend your presence, make your brand look. I'm always a big fan of the water bottles. They're always. We always have really nice high quality water bottles that we co brand with a partner and everyone takes them home and they last a long time so they tend to show up for years to come. So those are great. That one happens to still be available for annual if someone's interested in that. It also makes a great giveaway. You can give it your booth. So you kind of kill two birds with one stone. And I thought something in London that was really amazing was the pub. Kevin, I'll let you talk about that.

Yeah, the pub was amazing. It was again, I just think, a really cool experience, a really cool place. I mean, we hosted happy hours, we were giving out drinks, there was food, there was constantly people in the pub. And so just in terms of again, a really cool experience, but something where you're going to get tons of exposure, extend your footprint at the event. These are all huge. But I think the ancillaries are great because it does give wider awareness and presence that you're at the event and it's going to drive more traffic to your booth and spark up more conversations. And again, depending on what the goals may be like, we've got a couple different options still available that can definitely help you hit that desired outcome. So a lot of cool opportunities. We're probably going to see things fly in the next couple of weeks. So if you're thinking about these, whether it's the media or ancillaries, definitely get in touch with us sooner rather than later. But even too like the media where there's lots of conversations happening because you know, before the event, during the event and after, like just an additional touch point to the wider Sasser community. Definitely, definitely helps drive better results and outcomes from the event itself. So all certain things we can do just to help you guys out.

Agreed. I think it does pick up the most around now. So it is like, I don't know, I was even looking at it this morning of like, I think this is the most we've gotten like in bounds in a single day already this morning. And I was like, it's 9:30 Pacific. Like it's the, the momentum usually, you know, starts to pick up around now. So it's, it's kind of a natural entry point to annual and maybe to, you know, for all of our sponsors on this call, start ramping up whatever you're thinking of doing as well as a tie in disaster annual. Right. Like we're doing a lot of things like this summer SAS kind of like marketing promo we're doing with like saster.com and like the agenda going up and then speaker promos going live and a bunch of other fun stuff we're going to announce in the coming weeks about Master Annual. But yeah, I think all of that is good to start capitalizing on thinking about never too soon because are, you know, promoting it, inviting your customers or maybe having those internal talks now of like, okay, let's. Now would be a good week if you haven't already to sit down and game plan, you know, before the 4th of July, what you Guys want to do at fast for annual. Whether you have a booth, if you're thinking of doing something ancillary, if you want to add something on, whether it's an activation through us, something that you bring, all that requires planning, right. Of, like, what your goals are and how it all ties together. So now's a good time to do it. I would say before. Before you flip burgers or cook some hot dogs on July 4, now's the time to do it, to get your plan in action because that gives you plenty of time to execute before the annual in September. So any other final thoughts, guys? Because I know we wanted to keep. I know these webinars always really long and I feel like next week is going to be really long. So we're trying to keep the blank inside.

That's that that was a final. Next week's going to be pretty important. A lot of great information be shared. We'll record it. But definitely encourage you to come next week to really dive deep into annual.

Yeah, I think my final thoughts is just think of us as an extension of your team. Like we're here to help. Whether it's just brainstorming ideas, strategies. But again, on any of the planning, of course, the sooner we start planning, the sooner we, you know, the more time we have. The last thing we want to be doing is try to rush anything. So. So we'll be in contact soon, of course, with a lot more details and next week will be great. But even if you want to get started earlier, get conversations going, definitely reach out to us.

Awesome. All right. And we'll give it a final second for questions here. If you guys have anything in the Q and A again, you can feel free to email any of us. I know you all have our emails of things we want to see specifically either next week or in the coming webinars. Thanks everyone for coming back. I know we, we say these are every Wednesday. We had a small break for Europa, but we'll be back every. Or sorry, every Thursday. Every Thursday from now through annual. So exciting updates to come and we will see you all next week.