Effective marketing of SEO conferences?
I know at some point in time conferences held something interesting for me.
But lately, I’ve been perplexed by SEO conferences. In a short while there will be a Seattle SMX conference on June 4th & 5th. I’m sure they will have some interesting information presented, but the costs related to them as a whole seems to be increasing… while specific agenda items decrease.
This conference will be $1195 for an attendee. That is a fair amount of change for the regular consultant. I would assume that for most small and medium shops- that $1200 in conference fees, plus another $300 in airfare and another $300 to $500 in room charges ads up pretty quick. $2000 in total costs probably eats up the majority of profit on a few client deals for them.
The thing that gets me is the information presented. Almost all of the sessions seem to be panel based and do not have any specific industry experts attached to them. No VP’s from Google or Yahoo speaking about the way things work, no one from Wikipedia talking about how social search impacts the site, or even a few Fortune 50 company marketing folk talking about how they plan search campaigns. I know there are some talented folks in our profession… but where are the names?
The blog post from March 20th makes me think there is a lack of speakers signed up, or at least a lack of qualified speakers. In other industries I am used to seeing a list of brand names talking about specific niches and having credentials that inspire me to listen to them. Yet after reading the agenda and the speaker invite, I’m not really inspired to pony up $2000.
The second item that derails my marketing brain is the cost of sponsorship and exhibit space. There are five premium sponsors paying $25k to be there. I scratch my head at that; because the five exhibitors are Yahoo, Marchex, Microsoft, Google, and BruceClay
Why is that strange? Because the sponsorship space and dollar amount basically limits the spotlight to the providers of very massive search services. I don’t know how relevant that is for the attendees, when there may be many other sponsors that service search engine marketers, rather than search engines.
Am I supposed to be motivated to spend $4 to $10k of my companies revenue to send some of our employees to listen to a group of people without names? or to get marketing materials from one of the “big boys of search” that I’m pretty sure everyone on my staff is familiar with?
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Right on Barry. I couldn’t agree more that’s probably why I’m not attending. I’d like to do some in person networking with some other search marketers sometime, but I’m not willing to pay that to do so.
Here’s a funny tidbit, check out their openings page: That conference has an opening for a formal debate on “Is SEO Bull?.”
I hope they don’t conclude the answer to be yes!
Yup, the blind leading the blind, financed by the mercinary.
[...] I wrote Effective Marketing of SEO Conferences, and one of the underlying issues was that the panels involved were things like “Is SEO [...]