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Are there any good marketing automation conferences?
Events
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- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
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6 Answers
Davis:
If you want to get good information on automation, the process and the hear from the various vendors I would recommend attending Dreamforce (in process now), Sirius Decisions Summit in Scottsdale, AZ., MarketingProfs B2B Conference in Boston and Sales & Marketing 2.0.
Most of the vendors also have their own customer events on top of the ones listed above.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo
Dreamforce
MarketingProfs
SiriusDecisions
Marketing Sherpa
DemandCon
= all have marketing automation content
I have an infographic with some of the top marketing conferences- you can find it here:
http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2011/07/infographic-must-attend-marketing-events...
Note: the company I work for sponsors some of these conferences- though this is my opinion.
Marketo did a great Infographic that not only identifies shows, but also calls out their typical month and location. It's a fantastic resource. You can find it on their web site.
The vendors all have great shows (I've been to Marketo's show and created the Eloqua Experience when I worked at that company), which contain both product-specific information as well as general marketing automation sessions. They tend to have the highest concentration of marketing automation practitioners/attendee that you'll find.
The Sirius Decisions show in Arizona has been a great source of information, and has a pretty senior-level audience in attendance. The primary reason to go, though, is access to the Sirius analysts, who are some of the most forward-thinking people in the industry.
Forrester has a good marketing conference which touches on marketing automation, but mainly at a high level.
MarketingProfs and Marketing Sherpa are great shows for tactical marketing, but they don't have a lot of specific marketing automation content. The OMS show often has one or two sessions about marketing automation, but it tends to be the same content year after year. I've spoken at the Sales 2.0 conference and they have one or two sessions that touch on sales lead management.
I started a new show this year called DemandCon, primarily because there were no events dedicated to the discipline of demand generation that were independent of vendors or analysts.
Davis,
It's a good question. I would suggest you take a look at www.omg.org. Or you could contact Ken through an email him on ken.berk@omg.org, who is the Business Development Manager and trust me they have the best conferences taking place during the year and you could always give them my reference. We'll I work as one of their sales wings in helping them out.
It will fetch you more fish in the pond.
Regards
Vincent Cooper
Manager Business Development
Quantum Business Management Pvt Ltd
vincent.cooper@qbm.in
I have an obvious bias here but Eloqua Experience from October 19-21 in San Francisco is the only one listed here that is solely focused on Marketing Automation: http://www.eloquaexperience.com/2011/northamerica/overview/
This is of course geared to Eloqua customers. The major advantage of this conference is you have marketers at many levels who have "been there and done that" and are sharing their experiences.
Conferences are so old media. They come from an age when we were information poor and had to traipse half way across the country just to stay informed.
One of the biggest problems with today's marketing is that there are so many old fashioned marketers out there trying to apply yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problems. This is a good example of that old-fashioned thinking.
Think about it as an attendee:
In the time you've travelled there, queued to get in and jostled for a place could you not have attended the same presentations online where you have pen and paper handy, computer to save bits you need and google/wikipedia etc.to check any facts you need an extra reference on. Admit it, how much of these presentations do you really remember.
Ask yourself another question: Is your buying methodology so poor that you wouldn't have found these people and learned this stuff anyway?
Think about it as an exhibitor:
Take days out of the top people in your company's schedules - not just the attending days but the preparation ones and not just the sales team but the CEO, telesales team etc. - how much is that worth to your company if they were doing their normal jobs. Is it worth that tens of thousands expenditure for a few dozen grubby business cards (most of which aren't even slightly interested but were only given to you for the free draw) and a hangover. If you put that money into your normal prospecting what return would you expect (I'll bet it is 2-10 times higher)?
Ask yourself another question: is your inbound marketing so poor that you wouldn't have met and engaged with these people anyway?
So what is it for? PR? Jolly? To show off that you've got investor funds? Sad.
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