Written by Scott Oser
Your largest conference of the year just wrapped up, and it was a huge success. Time to take a step back and let your attendees, colleagues, and yourself relax, right?
That’s tempting, but it overlooks the power of effective post-event marketing. In fact, the days immediately following your event are a crucial time to engage attendees and maintain momentum.
Here are four post-event marketing tactics that can help you maintain momentum from your meeting:
1. Thank Attendees
Attending an event requires attendees to make a commitment of time, money, and energy. For this reason, they should know you appreciate that they invested those resources in you. A post-event message—by phone, email, or letter—is a great way to thank attendees for coming and to let them know that the event wouldn’t have been what it was without them.
Membership tip:
Connect with nonmembers to let them know they are invited to join your association and can save on upcoming events when they register as a member. Resist making the hard sell for membership, which can often be a turnoff.
2. Share Meeting Highlights
Your meeting covered many important topic areas. Link to other member resources on these topics in your follow-up message. Most importantly, this simple step reminds members of your valuable content and shows nonmembers the benefits they could receive by joining.
Membership tip:
You likely have other resources available to members in topic areas that were covered at the meeting. Share those resources in a follow-up message. This will remind members of the valuable content you offer and will show nonmembers what they could take advantage of if they were to join.
3. Continue the Conversation
Focus on popular conversations from the meeting and involve people who were unable to attend, so that the discussion has a life outside of the event. Above all, the content and conversations should continue to be relevant and of interest to attendees and others in your audience. Make sure to prompt these discussions through social media, online communities, and other content-sharing vehicles.
Membership tip:
Invite members who could not attend to share their input and join the post-event conversation. Show them you value their perspective. Since engaging every member matters, you should create these opportunities all year long.
4. Emphasize Education
Continuing education is usually one of the main reasons an individual attends your event. Afterwards, remind attendees that they received education credits at an event hosted by you—and tell members they did so at a discounted members-only price, if that’s how you price your events.
Membership tip:
The opportunities you offer to earn continuing education credits should be promoted to your nonmember prospects. Remind nonmember attendees that they can receive credits at a reduced price at the next event if they join.
Most association marketers understandably want to take a break immediately after a big meeting, but you don’t want to miss the great promotional opportunity available in that moment.
Ultimately, if you plan well and have the communications and activities listed above scheduled and ready to launch even before the event starts, you might be able to take that post-conference break after all.
About the author
Scott Oser has over 25 years of marketing experience in the association industry. Since starting Scott Oser Associates in 2006 he has been fortunate to have worked with an extensive number of individual
membership, and trade, organizations in a wide variety of industries. Scott is highly skilled in creating
effective membership, marketing and sales programs with the ability to align resources and operations to consistently achieve and exceed goals.
