A potential attendee has been hearing about your conference from her colleagues, and she is raring to go to this year’s event. But her notoriously tight-fisted manager isn’t too keen on paying the costs for her to attend on top of having her out of the office for several days.
How can you help her convince her boss that the value she will get out of the conference—and bring back to the office—outweighs the cost?
Think about crafting an attendance justification template potential attendees can download, personalize, and use to sell their bosses on just how beneficial their attendance would be. That’s something the Society of Hospital Medicine provides every year, said Emily Daniele, SHM senior marketing manager, during a recent MeetingsNet webinar.
“We have found it to be a marketing tactic that helps drive registration,” she said, adding that it’s also something that is easy to overlook in the flood of details and decisions that go into planning a meeting.
A justification template should highlight all the key information about the conference, including the topics it will cover, the key experts and influencers attendees will meet and learn from face to face, the skills they will learn, the networking and collaborative opportunities, the wealth of new products and services they’ll learn about on the show floor, certifications they can earn, and all the other ways your event will help attendees challenge themselves and grow professionally.
If you already are using a justification template, take another look at it to see if there’s anything you can do to take it up a notch, suggested Brooke Gracey, manager of mobile strategy, CrowdCompass by Cvent. Can you add some testimonials from previous attendees, include some return-on-investment data from the previous year, or create a video showcasing some of the event’s highlights?
Potential attendees are eager to develop their professional skills, and their bosses should be, too. Providing a conference justification template will make it easier for those attendees to remind their bosses of the ROI your conference will bring.
