It doesn’t matter if you’re a speaker, meeting planner, vendor, or anything else associated with a conference, things happen and the events can get cancelled.
But they will come back!
Use the coronavirus as an example and a training ground. At some point conferences will come back. Once the scare is over or a cure is found, people will desperately want to be around other people. Even an introvert like me is dying to be around others, just not willing to die literally to make it happen. I desperately miss working on my keynotes at my local Starbucks. The buzz of activity around me jazzed me up. Well, that and the caffeine.
No matter what facet you’re in, you need to be top of mind once they come back.
When they come back, you’ll for sure have new competition. Right this minute, people are stuck at home not working, just planning to launch a new conference, new product, or new speaking career.
You need to stay relevant now and not wait until the problems are over to ramp up again.
One way to do this is to launch a booklet and give it out for free. Send it to everyone on your list, post it on social media, and have it available to download on your site. This is for everyone who works around conferences, from speakers and vendors to the people who hire them. Nothing fancy required either. As a matter of fact, a series of 10 page PDF’s is pretty awesome.
Check out the pic below. In April of 2020, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, EMS World sent out their catalog by mail. It was a great way of staying relevant. It said, “We’ll still be here in September. We’ll see you in Vegas.”
So, how about 5 ideas for booklets you can create and send out?
1. Catalog- Like the pic above, go ahead and send out the catalog for the rescheduled event.
2. Keynotes or Breakouts- Edit transcripts of presentations from previous years and turn them into booklets.
3. Best Practices- Publish a white paper of best practices for the industry.
4. Yearbook- Create something that feels like a high school yearbook of stuff from past conferences and events.
5. Futurist Look- Create a future book of what the next conference will be like or shoot out further and look at the future of the industry.
How about your ideas? What could you publish to keep you or your event in the top of mind awareness of your audience?
Dr. Redbeard, a speaker who lost all his events during the coronacrisis