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MY PLATFORM RULES CONFERENCE
How social media boosted revenue for an investment conference
The My Platform Rules conference, held on the Gold Coast, February 22-24, 2015, decided on a social media campaign to boost attendee levels and general industry interest in a new event which analysed the so-called ‘disruptors’ among investment platform providers.
The conference is a joint-venture between my publishing company, IO&C, and Pat Liddy’s consulting company, MSI Group. It has become an annual event, MPR2 to be held at the same venue in February 2016.
We have produced other successful conferences together for several years, however, this particular conference was the first time that we decided to to boost our sales and marketing impact by maximizing our (and others’) social media connections. I chose Shed Social mainly because I knew the people there and I trusted their integrity as well as ability. I was so impressed with the result, I subsequently invested in the Shed Social business and have become a director.
What really surprised me about the short, two-week, campaign was that I was able to generate ticket sales and extra sponsorship revenue, even though I had been peppering the very same people with direct emails and through native advertising and display advertising on an IO&C weekly newsletter (Investor Strategy News) for months beforehand.
This is when the penny finally dropped for me. Social media should be an essential complement to all sales and marketing campaigns. The “opening” rates for the 2,500 Linkedin connections we concentrated on were proportionately higher than the opening rates, on average, for the weekly Investor Strategy News publication, which was sent to 10,400 people. And at over 35% opening rate, the newsletter has a higher than average opening rate. The social media message was perceived to be “more personal” even though the IO&C direct emails to the very same people also had my name on the top of each.
It was as if I had discovered a different media altogether which people thought of separately and looked at different times of their working day, such as, perhaps when they were more contemplative. It was the difference between print and radio, or cable TV and free-to-air, are possible analogies. I realized, that a combination of mainstream online and social media was the way to go in the future.
- Greg Bright
- Publisher
- IO&C
