Written by: Vickie Sullivan | March 10, 2022
Big Market Changes Coming for Event Speakers
Buckle up and pay attention. The Content Marketing Institute’s 12th Annual B2B Content Marketing Report (pdf) has a serious heads-up for professional speakers.
The backstory: In the past, large companies would send their sales teams to speak at industry association events. The trade-off for providing these free presentations: The speaker would give a thinly veiled sales pitch. The goal was to gather leads. That gave professional speakers a great counter-pitch as the no-selling option.
That isn’t the case anymore. Over half of the respondents in the CMI report said speaking at events is part of their content marketing game plan. (Not sales, content marketing.) Events (all versions, including hybrid) had the best ROI last year, so 61% of respondents say their growing budgets will go there.
As a result, subject matter experts are flooding the field in the name of brand awareness. That means the biggest obstacle to using these free folks is now gone. This impacts professional speakers two ways:
• Either you’re a keynote speaker or you are a free speaker. Workshop/training folks will find it very difficult to get paid in industry association markets.
• It will be harder to compete on content. Big ideas are now free. Either you’ve done something cool that everyone wants to learn about, or you have star-status prominence and folks want your perspective on what’s next.
Listen: How to Compete in the New Association Marketplace
Yep, this looks like bad news. But these new developments don’t have to be fatal. Step back, think strategically about your next move. And keep in mind that marketing efforts based on past experiences won’t cut it anymore.
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