#discounted Flights from Seattle to Las Vegas

[tripreviewhub1]

Traveling in Bus From Las Vegas To Los Angeles: A Comprehensive Guide

Are you planning a journey from Las Vegas To Los Angeles and considering traveling by bus? Traveling by bus offers a unique and cost-effective way to explore different destinations while enjoying scenic views along the way. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into everything you need to know about traveling in a Las Vegas To Los Angeles, from the benefits and drawbacks to tips for a comfortable journey.

Benefits of Bus Travel

Cost-Effective Transportation

One of the primary advantages of traveling by bus is its affordability. Bus tickets are often significantly cheaper compared to other modes of transportation such as trains or flights. This makes bus travel an excellent option for budget-conscious travelers looking to save money on their Bethesda to NYC.

Flexibility and Accessibility

Buses offer greater flexibility and accessibility, especially for destinations that may not have direct train or air connections. With numerous bus routes available, you can easily find a route that suits your schedule and travel preferences. Additionally, buses often have multiple stops along the way, allowing passengers to disembark and explore different locations during their journey.

Scenic Views and Comfortable Travel

Traveling by bus provides an opportunity to soak in the breathtaking scenery along the route. Whether you’re traversing lush countryside or winding through picturesque mountain roads, bus travel offers a unique perspective of the landscape. Moreover, modern buses are equipped with comfortable seats, ample legroom, and amenities such as onboard restrooms, making for a comfortable travel experience.

Drawbacks of Bus Travel

Read Also:- Bus From Phoenix to Las Vegas Tickets:- Timing, Duration, Class, Price

Longer Travel Times

While buses offer affordability and flexibility, they may entail longer travel times compared to other modes of transportation. Factors such as traffic congestion and multiple stops along the route can contribute to extended journey durations. Therefore, travelers should plan their itinerary accordingly and allocate sufficient time for bus travel.

Limited Amenities on Some Routes

Although many buses are equipped with amenities for passenger comfort, such as reclining seats and onboard entertainment systems, not all routes may offer these facilities. Travelers should research the amenities available on their chosen bus route and prepare accordingly by bringing along essentials such as snacks, water, and entertainment devices.

Tips for a Comfortable Bus Journey

Book Tickets in Advance

To secure the best seats and ensure availability, it’s advisable to book bus tickets in advance, especially during peak travel seasons or holidays. Booking early also allows you to take advantage of discounted fares offered by bus companies.

Pack Essentials for the Journey

Pack a small bag with essentials such as snacks, water, a travel pillow, headphones, and entertainment devices to stay comfortable during the journey. Additionally, dress in layers to adapt to varying temperatures onboard the bus.

Stay Hydrated and Stretch Regularly

During long bus journeys, it’s essential to stay hydrated by drinking water regularly. Additionally, take breaks to stretch your legs and avoid stiffness or discomfort from prolonged sitting.

Be Mindful of Safety Measures

Follow safety guidelines provided by the bus company, such as wearing seat belts when available and adhering to onboard rules and regulations. Keep your belongings secure and be vigilant while traveling to ensure a safe and enjoyable journey. Also Read:- Bus From Portland To Seattle: Enjoy A Scenic Journey Connecting Two Pacific Northwest Gems

Conclusion

Traveling by Las Vegas To Los Angeles offers a cost-effective, flexible, and scenic way to explore different destinations. Despite some drawbacks such as longer travel times, bus travel provides numerous benefits, including affordability, accessibility, and comfortable travel. By following the tips outlined in this guide, you can make the most of your bus journey and enjoy a memorable travel experience. So, why wait? Book your bus tickets today and embark on an exciting adventure from Las Vegas To Los Angeles!

[updatesandnews]

AAA Reports 4% Increase in Labor Day Weekend Bookings; Motel 6 and Studio 6 Offer Discounts

As summer 2023 comes to a close, AAA Travel has reported a 4% increase in Labor Day weekend travel bookings compared to the previous year. This uptick in travel demand is seen as the grand finale of an exceptionally busy summer travel season.

Debbie Haas, Vice President of Travel for AAA — The Auto Club Group, stated, “Labor Day weekend will be the big sendoff to what has been an extremely busy summer travel season.”

While AAA did not release its usual forecast for the number of travelers expected during the weekend, they did provide the top five domestic destinations for this Labor Day: Seattle, Orlando, Anchorage, New York, and Las Vegas.

Seattle’s tourism, in particular, has received a boost from strong demand for Alaska cruises. Florida destinations remain popular due to their beaches, theme parks, and cruise ports. AAA data shows that domestic cruise bookings over Labor Day weekend have increased by 19% compared to 2022.

In terms of gas prices, while the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $3.78 on Labor Day 2022, it stood at $3.83 on August 24, 2023, representing a 24-cent increase from the previous month. However, AAA anticipates that gas prices should remain steady or even decrease heading into Labor Day weekend, barring any major disruptions like a Gulf of Mexico storm.

AAA also shared insights from a survey of its travel advisors, highlighting key topics and trends for this summer: - 59% of AAA travel advisors have noticed increased interest in travel insurance over the last 60 days. - 83% of advisors reported that the most common concern among travelers in the last 60 days was the fear of getting stranded due to delayed or canceled flights. - 64% of advisors noted that travelers who booked extended vacations (at least 14 nights) did so mainly to have more time to explore destinations. - There is significant traveler interest in ocean and river cruises, as well as all-inclusive and guided tour vacations.

To coincide with Labor Day weekend, economy lodging brands Motel 6 and Studio 6 are offering stay discounts for My6 members. My6 is the free rewards program from Motel 6 and Studio 6, and loyalty members will receive a 12% price reduction on all reservations made during the holiday weekend from September 1 to 4.

Julie Arrowsmith, President and Interim CEO of G6 Hospitality, the parent company of Motel 6 and Studio 6, expressed gratitude for the workforce and extended special Labor Day travel discounts as a gesture of appreciation. My6 rewards members also enjoy a minimum 6% discount on stays at over 1,400 Motel 6 and Studio 6 locations throughout the year, along with various benefits across travel, streaming platforms, food, and entertainment.

In July, Motel 6 and Studio 6 partnered with the Humane Society of the United States for the ‘More Than a Pet’ campaign, which focuses on addressing the pet poverty crisis, providing financial support to pet owners in need, improving access to pet care and supplies, and ultimately keeping families and pets together. Source: https://www.asianhospitality.com/aaa-labor-day-weekend-bookings-rise-4-percent/

[theammywilson1989-blog]

Book your cheap airfares from Seattle (SEA) to Las Vegas (LAS) with LuxFares and fly high ! Choose from an extensive range of discounted airfares to Las Vegas from Seattle and enjoy an unforgettable vacation.

[flysair654]

Hawaiian Airlines

1. About Hawaiian Airlines

Hawaiian Airlines (Hawaiian Hui Mokulele Hawaii), is the largest commercial airline operator in the U.S. States of Hawaii. It is the tenth-largest commercial airline in America and is based in Honolulu (Hawaii). 

Hawaiian Holdings, Inc. owns Hawaiian Airlines. Peter R. Ingram, who is currently the President and Chief Executive Officer of Hawaiian Airlines.

Hawaiian is the longest-running US carrier, and has not had a fatal accident or the loss of a hull during its history. It is frequently ranked as high on the US’s all-time carriers list.

2. Hawaiian Airlines Reservations a. Hawaiian Airlines Booking Numbers

Hawaiian Airline Booking Numbers. Our team is on hand 24/7 to assist you. Online bookings for Hawaiian Airlines are possible 24/7. For more information, call the reception desk. To draw new customers, customers may be eligible for exclusive discounts or offers.

3. Hawaiian Airlines Facilities

Every airline is distinctive. 

United One: These premium business class seats are designed for lengthy transcontinental and international flights. They are available in flat layouts and have aisle access. 

Hawaiian Comfort: This seat is spacious and has plenty of overhead space. Priority boarding, beer and wine are all included. You can also get up to 250 miles. A majority of flights come with headsets. * Premium Select: This cabin has more legroom and an adjustable knee rest. This cabin offers more legroom as well as recliner. Hawaiian Airlines has the best Wi-Fi. Customers can take their smartphones, tablets and laptops to the airport. Every seat is equipped with a magazine so that passengers can stay informed of the most recent news from across the globe.

4. Hawaiian Airlines Popular Destinations and Hubs

Hawaii. The airline has its primary hub at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport located on the island of Oahu and a secondary hub at Kahului Airport on the island of Maui. Hawaiian Airlines offers flights to many destinations such as Osaka as well as Oita, Pago. Lihue. Kahului. Kailua Kona, Hilo. Las Vegas. Phoenix. Kauai. Sapporo. Tokyo. Honolulu. Portland. Seattle. San Diego. Los Angeles. San Jose. Dallas. Phoenix. Chicago. Sacramento.

5. Hawaiian Airline Check in and Boarding Pass

Hawaiian Airlines allows passengers to check in online up to 24 hours before departure. Hawaiian Airlines has provided detailed instructions for printing your boarding pass, also known as an e-ticket.

 The ticket number and confirmation number will allow you to determine the time of your flight. This is the simplest way to obtain your boarding pass, and it also allows for a seamless check-in. There are many other methods to check in with Hawaiian Airlines. There are other ways you can check into Hawaiian Airlines. * Web check-in * Mobile check-in * Hawaiian Airlines counter check-in at the airport * Make a Hawaiian Airlines customer care check-in at +1 (800) 367-5320

6. Hawaiian Airline Policy a. Baggage Policy and Fees

This is the complete guide for Hawaiian Airlines baggage policy & allowance. Carry-on baggage allowance Carry-on rules On Hawaiian Airlines, you are allowed one carry-on bag and one personal item that is completely free. To ensure your bag is appropriate you must ensure your hand luggage can fit in the overhead bin.

b. Pet Policy

Dogs, cats, and all household pets can travel onboard for $125 for one-way travel to/from many destinations. Only domestic flights in the United States allow birds. The fee for pet allowance is $200 if you are traveling outside the United States.

c. Cancellation and Refund Policy

Hawaiian Airlines offers seamless cancellation procedures for every passenger. You can dial for a direct refund at +1 (800) 367-5320 or visit our official site http://www.Hawaiian.com which helps you to manage your bookings. Following this, you'll have the option of refunding or change your reservation.

[cheapflymecom]

Cheap Flights To Las Vegas Nevada From Seattle $57

Cheap Flights To Las Vegas Nevada From Seattle $57. Book cheap flights with CheapFlyME.com Find the cheapest airfare deals, airline discounts and last minute flights with CheapFlyME.com  Lowest Price Guaranteed! Cheap Flights To Las Vegas Nevada From Seattle $57 Jan 27-30 2020 https://flights.cheapflyme.com/flights/SEA2701LAS30011     Read the full article

[rosasmarchitaas]

Affordable Holiday Packages: What Are Some Must-See Places for Your Holiday Getaway?

Do you want to go to Sydney on a awesome holiday weekend? Or head to the gambling houses in Las vegas for an interesting time? No matter what season you plan on going, there should be some type of affordable vacation offers available.

What locations attraction to you? Are you curious about a specific program, such as those designed around golf, romantic endeavors, or families? Compose a list of what you are seeking Book Discount Hotels, Flights and Car Hire out of your future holiday journey and see what kind of offers you can discover. Based on the location and conditions, you might not discover exactly what you're looking for right away, so either have a back-up location in mind or hang on with patience for the right deal to pop up.

Holiday offers at the lowest amount consist of resort housing and 100 % free morning meal. Some may consist of 100 % free cusine or even air travel. It's pretty common these times for tourists to reserve their air travel and resort at some point as it is often less expensive to do so rather than guide them independently. However, this isn't always the case. First, check and evaluate the prices to see which technique would work best for you.

If you're going to an unique place you've never been before, you might want to consider an excursion. Some affordable vacation offers consist of advised trips, usually by a local. This way, you can make sure that you are truly suffering from everything that should be knowledgeable. When going on a self-guided journey by yourself, there is always the likelihood that you will overlook something important.

Find Cost-effective Vacation Packages on the Beach

Holiday offers by the seaside are generally very popular. Everybody enjoys to evade to an unique seaside somewhere for several times. Destinations in the Carribbean, Traditional Isles, Southern The united states, Florida, and Southern east Japan are always worth considering.

Other types of holiday vacations individuals seem to really love consist of ski hotels, hill trips, spa trips, Disney World, and cruise trips. You could always fly to a major town for a couple of evenings of sophisticated fun. In the US, must-see places consist of Las vegas, NYC, and New Orleans. A lot of individuals want to experience the Western Shore as well, so San Francisco, Dallas, and Los Angeles are often on the top of many individuals details. Other areas across the world you might want to consider consist of London, uk, London, uk, Seattle, Seoul, Nassau, Hong Kong, The other agents, Modern australia, and Greater.

[seomiamiseo]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2rYfMNM

[dentalimplant0]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from http://dentistry01.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-case-for-against-attending.html

[greenmelonmarketing]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[humbertovsheffield]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[ryangonzales928]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[europeantravel1]

Budget Air Travel in Europe

Budget Air Travel in Europe 2021 Guide   Nowhere else in the world has the advent of low-cost airlines revolutionized travel as much as in Europe. Numerous airlines compete with each other for customers, flying from airports across the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Turkey and Scandinavia. to name just a few, opening up a world of possibilities that were previously unthinkable; family holidays on the beaches of the Costa del Sol; skiing trips to the French Alps; spontaneous city breaks to Baku and Bratislava. Who would've thought it? The ease of finding affordable flights in Europe has radically altered how we plan our trips to that region. When I first began traveling in Europe, no one spent their own money to buy one-way airline tickets within Europe. The cost was simply too high. Today, that type of thinking is very outdated. Before purchasing any long-distance train or bus tickets, you should first check flight prices — you may be surprised by the price and the time savings. Very competitive discount airlines have made European itinerary planning easier and have turned vagabond travelers into jetsetters. You can fly almost anywhere on the Continent for less than $250 per flight, deciding where to travel is largely a question of following your travel dreams.  You are no longer limited to places that are within a reasonable train ride (or driving) distance. That being said, those are still perfectly acceptable ways of traveling. It is best to examine all possible options before making a decision. It is now possible to enjoy a far-flung vacation from Greece to Portugal to Scotland. Airlines that have sprung up from the ashes of the former Eastern bloc carriers have found enormous success and even a spiritual successor in their quest for cheap flights and cheap holidays. Their success has been driven by a number of strategies the most important of which is offering flights across borders for much cheaper prices than their domestic competitors. The biggest success of the cheap flight's revolution is the fact that the European holiday market has become so wide open and the fact that so many airlines have come up with a number of ideas that make flying as cheap as possible. For instance, there are low-cost carriers, such as Easyjet, Ryanair, and Vueling that have found success by giving travelers a very cheap deal. They have taken the basic model of a full-service airline with lounges and food and beverages but made every flight a head-to-head flight against a ticketing system that shows the price of all flights instead of just the first segment of the route taken. This means that a traveler can fly from Dublin to Munich and pay the same as a visitor that flies from Munich to Dublin. Such systems are not new, German carriers Vueling and Easy Jet have been operating for a number of years and both companies claim to have over one million passengers a month using the system. However, the difference between the price of flights booked on Easy Jet and Easy Jet-owned competitor Ryanair is night and day. Another strategy employed by many budget carriers is the introduction of limited period fares. This is a great way to keep airfares low and to ensure that flights are sold as seats are available. This can be done through special promotional rates that are available for a limited time or the use of stand-by flights. Stand-by flights make the fare system work by letting the carrier book the air ticket from where it is stand-by. This is a great way to fill the empty seats in an aircraft. But what happens if the aircraft is full? It is possible for a flight to be sold as sold but empty seats remain and are given the special discounted rate. Such a flight is likely to be from an airport served by more than one airline. One way to avoid such problems is having multiple airlines serving a single route. Another strategy that a number of budget carriers have used to get so far is to offer flights from an airport serving multiple airlines. This has the advantage of giving maximum flexibility to the traveler in terms of timing and route. The downside is that it can be a problem in terms of security, as there is no guarantee that only one airline will be serving each airport. The main way to guarantee that you get the cheapest flight is to book as far in advance as possible. Early booking is always cheaper than later booking because of the costs of delays and cancellations. But you can still get a cheap flight if you book from a secondary airport serving several airlines. This will ensure you get the best deal possible because of competition. The cost of a cheap airline ticket can also vary depending on where you are traveling to and from, how much you pay for the ticket, and also which airport you are flying from. As a further tip, you can always try to travel on days that are busier than other days. So, if you can save on your airfare, then you can take more cash and spend it where it is better spent. Remember, that you must make sure that you know all the terms and conditions of the ticket before you pay for it. Cheap Flights within Europe The following are some of the affordable airlines that cover a lot of the European skies, as well as their major hubs. To find out more, visit Skyscanner, or check out Google for "cheap flights" plus the cities you'd like to fly to/from. New airlines pop up and old ones close all the time. Airline Main Hubs Aer Lingus Dublin, Shannon AirBaltic Riga Air Italy Milan Blue Air Bucharest CityJet London (London City) Condor Frankfurt EasyJet London (Gatwick, Stansted, Luton), Milan, Berlin, Paris (Charles de Gaulle, Orly), and more Flybe Birmingham, Manchester Eurowings Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg Icelandair Reykjavík Norwegian Oslo, London (Gatwick) Pegasus Airlines Istanbul Ryanair London (Stansted), Dublin, and several other cities SmartWings Prague Transavia Amsterdam, Paris (Orly) Vueling Barcelona, Rome Widerøe Oslo, Bergen Wizz Air Budapest Cheap Flights From The United States To Europe Europe's biggest low-cost year-round airlines are Ryanair and Easyjet. Both airlines operate hundreds of routes in more than 30 countries. These fly across both North America and Europe. They provide a combination of affordable travel and on-time departures. In the United States, the carriers are based in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Orlando, Florida among others. Ryanair currently flies from New York's JFK airport. Easyjet operates from Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Las Vegas, while it's based in the Irish capital Dublin. They both offer a wide range of flight options to suit most needs. easyJet's flights depart from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and North America. Ryanair also provides transatlantic flights to the United Kingdom. Low-cost airlines offer a combination of fuel-saving engines, fuel-efficient fleets, in-flight food and beverages, and high-quality service. It's one of the only cases where price plays a major role when buying tickets. While on one hand, they provide the cheapest flight fare on several of their routes, they offer a range of flight options on most routes to match the needs of most passengers to make your flight more enjoyable through different upgrades. They've recently launched Ryanair Check in which if you've used their flight to any destination, the airlines will check your ticket for free. They also offer an Early Bird offer that guarantees a seat on any flight of your choice between Monday and Friday for a year, or until the end of the month. This is a great promotion for travel plans who are planning to travel during the hottest travel seasons. Ryanair airlines have a range of routes to popular destinations such as Majorca, Bora Bora, Majorca, Krakow, Krakow and Split. All have flights to major destinations across the world. Flights to the United Kingdom are provided by the national airline of Ireland, Aer Lingus, and they are based in Dublin airport. There are flights to London, Bristol, Exmouth, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds Bradford, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, and Stornoway. Seasonally other airlines such as Condor Air, Eurowings What's the downside of Budget Airlines? Saving on budget airfares can come with potential pitfalls. Budget tickets are rarely refundable or exchangeable. Many airlines operate exclusively online, so it can be challenging to contact a customer service representative in case of problems.  Flights are often closely organized to squeeze more flying time from each plane, which can exaggerate the impact of delays. If you are instructed to arrive at the check-in counter an hour before the flight and show up with a half-hour to spare, you have just missed your flight. Also, it is not uncommon for budget carriers to cancel a slow-selling route or go out of business, leaving you scrambling to find a viable alternative. Because budget airlines do not make much money from your ticket, they look for other ways to increase their earnings — bombarding you with advertisements every step of the way, via advertising in e-mails, in planes, onboard food and drinks that are not included, and charging outrageous fees. For instance, you could be penalized for paying with a credit card (when there is no other option), checking in and printing your boarding pass at the airport, "priority boarding" ahead of the pack, bringing an infant along, and — of course— checking bags. The initial fare shown on the website can seem low at first glance. Once you begin the checkout process, each step seems to involve an additional charge. Checking bags is not free. For many budget airlines, the price per bag increases as you get closer to your departure date. You might be charged an extra fee for checking a bag over a certain (relatively low) weight limit. You should not assume that all luggage qualifies as carry-on in Europe; many budget carriers have smaller dimensions than other carriers. Before booking, make sure you understand the baggage policy carefully. Frequently Asked Questions Where is the cheapest place in Europe to fly into? It is a common question and an important consideration for all travelers. Is it still possible to find the cheapest place to fly into? Is there any difference in prices for flights into Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and London? I find that flights to Frankfurt are cheaper generally. How can I get to Europe cheap? Well, it all begins with the question of how can I get to Europe cheap. If you look at the cost of getting to Europe from US cities it is usually very expensive with the exception of Miami, New York, and Boston which tend to be the cheapest destinations if you are looking to save money. The problem with these destinations is that they are so large that it may take a little planning and research to find a flight that will fit into your budget. This is where online travel sites like Priceline, Orbitz, Expedia and Google come in handy; once you decide the dates of your travel, you can go to a travel search engine and search through many sites and find the best deal to fit your budget. Which is better, Ryanair or EasyJet? There are many comparisons of the two airlines and they should be compared on a level field. We should not forget that each airline is a business and has its own interests. The two airlines try to offer a good service all around the world and both offer cheap flights as well. If you like this story please bookmark our website:  https://europeantravel.blog/ Read the full article

[patrickrandolph33]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[jackburnsblog]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[seomiamiseo]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[johnwathen21]

The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences

Posted by randfish

I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.

First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.

What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?

Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:

Lost productivity – Usually on the order of 1 to 4 days depending on the length of the event, travel distance, tiredness from travel, whether the team member does some work at the event or makes up with evenings/weekends, etc. Given marketing salaries ranging from $40K–$100K, this could be as little as $150 (~1 day's cost at the lower end) to $1,900 (a week's cost on the high end).

Cost of tickets – In the web marketing world, the range of events is fairly standard, between ~$1,000 and $2,000, with discounts of 20–50% off those prices for early registration (or with speaker codes). Some examples:

CTAConf in Vancouver is $999 ($849 if you're an Unbounce customer)

Content Marketing World in Cleveland is $1,195 (early rate) or $1,395 later

Pubcon Las Vegas in $1,099 (early rate), not sure what it goes up to

HubSpot's INBOUND is $1,299 (or $1,899 for a VIP pass)

SMX East is $1,795 (or $2,595 for all access)

SearchLove London is $890 (or $1,208 for VIP)

MozCon in Seattle is $1,549 (or $1,049 for Moz subscribers)

Cost of travel and lodging – Often between $1,000–$3,000/person depending on location, length, and flight+hotel costs.

Potential loss of employee through recruitment or networking – It's a thorny one, but it has to be addressed. I know many employers who fear sending their staff to events because they worry that the great networking opportunities will yield a higher-paying or more exciting offer in the future. Let's say that for every 30 employees you send (or every 30 events you send an employee to), you'll lose one to an opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have had them considering a departure. I think that's way too high (not because marketers don't leave their jobs but because they almost always leave for reasons other than an opportunity that came through a conference), but we'll use it anyway. On the low end, that might cost you $10K (if you've lost a relatively junior person who can be replaced fairly quickly) and on the high end, might be as much as $100K (if you lose a senior person and have a long period without rehiring + training). We'll divide that cost by 30 using our formula of one lost employee per thirty events.

Total: $4,630–$10,230

That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.

What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?

Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.

In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:

New skills, often gained through exposure at events and then followed up on through individual research and effort. It's absolutely true that few attendees will learn enough at a 30-minute talk to excel at some new tactic. But what they will learn is that tactic's existence, and a way to potentially invest in it.

Unique ideas, undiscoverable through solo work or in existing team structures. I've experienced this benefit myself many times, and I've seen it on Moz's team countless times.

The courage, commitment, inspiration, or simply the catalyst for experimentation or investment. Sometimes it's not even something new, or something you've never talked about as a team. You might even be frustrated to find that your coworker comes back from an event, puts their head down for a week, and shows you a brilliant new process or meaningful result that you've been trying to convince them to do for months. Months! The will to do new things strikes whenever and however it strikes. Events often deliver that strike. I've sat next to engineers whom I've tried to convince for years to make something happen in our tools, but when they see a presenter at MozCon show off another tool that does it or bemoan the manual process currently required, they suddenly set their minds to it and deliver. That inspiration and motivation are priceless.

New relationships that unlock additional skill growth, amplification opportunities, business development or partnership possibilities, references, testimonials, social networking, peer validation, and all the other myriad advancements that accompany human connections.

Upgrading the ability to learn, to process data and stories and turn them into useful takeaways.

Alongside that, upgraded abilities to interact with others, form connections, learn from people, and form or strengthen bonds with colleagues. We learn, even in adulthood, through observation and imitation, and events bring people together in ways that are more memorable, more imprinted, and more likely to resonate and be copied than our day-to-day office interactions.

A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up

In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:

New tools or processes that can speed up work, or make the impossible possible.

Resources for advancing skills and information on a topic that's important to one's job or to a project in particular.

Actionable ideas to make an existing task, process, or result easier to achieve or more likely to produce improved results.

Bigger-picture concepts that spur an examination of existing direction and can improve broad, strategic approaches.

People & organizations who can help with all above, formally or informally, paid as consultants, or just happy to answer a couple questions over email or Twitter.

Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017

In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:

Brand exposure to people you meet and interact with at conferences. Since we know the world of sales & marketing is multi-touch, this can have a big impact, especially if either your customers or your amplification targets include anyone in your professional field.

Contacts at other companies that can help you reach people or organizations (this benefit has grown massively thanks to the proliferation of professional social networks like those on LinkedIn and Twitter)

Potential media contacts, including the more traditional (journalists, news publications) and the emerging (bloggers, online publishers, powerful social amplifiers, etc)

A direct introduction point to speakers and organizers (e.g. if anyone emails me saying "I saw you speak at XYZ and wanted to follow up about..." the likelihood of an invested reply goes way up vs. purely online outreach)

But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)

Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite

It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:

CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?

Total: $A Lot?

How do you measure the returns?

The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).

It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.

I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.

Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh

Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.

It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.

Some broader discussions around marketing event issues

Before writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.

If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.

If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.

Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.

For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.

Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.

This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.

I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"

That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.

Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.

There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.

Which marketing conferences do I recommend?

I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.

Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:

INBOUND by Hubspot (Boston, MA 9/25–9/28) is a clear choice here. If you craft your experience well, you can get an immense amount of value.

Content Marketing World (Cleveland, OH 9/5–9/8) is always a good show, and they've recently focused on getting more gender-diverse.

Dreamforce by Salesforce (San Francisco, CA 11/6–11/9) has a similar feel to INBOUND in size and format, though it's generally more classic sales & marketing focused, and has less programming that overlaps with our/my world of SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.

Web Summit (Lisbon, Portugal 11/6–11/9) is even broader, focusing on technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and sales+marketing. If you're looking to break out of the marketing bubble and get a chance to see some "where are we going" and "what's driving innovation" content, this is a good one.

SMX Munich (Munich, Germany 3/20–3/21 2018) is one of the best produced and best attended shows in Europe. This event consistently delivers great presentations. Because of its location on the calendar, it's also where many speakers debut their theses and tactics each year, and since it's in Germany (or, more probably because it's run by the amazing Sandra & Matthew Finlay), everything is executed to perfection.

Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:

MozCon by Moz (Seattle, WA 7/17–7/19) I'm obviously biased, but I also get to see the survey data from attendees. The ratings of "excellent" or "outstanding" and the high number of people who buy tickets for the following year within a few days of leaving give me confidence that this is still one of the best events in the web marketing world.

CTAConf by Unbounce (Vancouver, BC 6/25–6/27) Oli Gardner, who's become an exceptional speaker himself, works directly with every presenter (all invitation-only, like MozCon) to make sure the decks are top notch. In addition, the setting in Vancouver, the food trucks, the staging, the networking, and the kindness of Canada are all wonderful.

Inbounder (Valencia, Spain 5/2018) This event only happens every other year, but if 2016 was anything to judge by, it's one of Europe's best. Certainly, you won't find a more incredible city or a better location. The conference hall is inside a spaceship that's landed on a grassy park surrounding an ancient walled city. Even Seattle's glacier-ringed beauty can't top that.

ConversionXL Live (Austin, TX 3/28–3/30) Peep Laja and crew put on a terrific event with a lovely venue and clear attention paid to the actionable, tactical value of takeaways. I came back from the few sessions I attended with all sorts of suggestions for the Moz team to try (if only webdev resources weren't so difficult to wrangle).

SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA TBD 2018) I haven't been in a couple years, but many search marketers rave about this show's location, production quality, panels, and speakers. It's one of the few places that still attracts the big-name representatives from Google & Bing, so if you want to hear directly from the horse's mouth a few seconds before it's broadcast and analyzed a million ways on Twitter, this is the spot.

Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain

Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:

SearchLove (San Diego, Boston, & London 10/16–10/17) It's somewhat extraordinary that this event remains small, like a hidden secret in the web marketing world. The quality of content and presentations are on par with MozCon (as are the ratings, and I know from other events how rare those are), but the settings are more intimate with only 2-300 participants in San Diego & Boston, and a larger, but still convivial crowd of 4-600 in London. I personally learn more at Searchlove than any other show.

Engage (formerly Searchfest) The SEMPDX crew has always had a unique, wonderful event, and Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities to visit.

MNSearch (Minneapolis 6/23) One of the exciting up-and-coming local events in our space. The MNSearch folks have brought together great speakers in fun venues at a surprisingly affordable price, and with some killer after-hours events, too. I've been twice and was very impressed both times.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.

Help us better understand the value of conferences to you

Two years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again, and see what's changed. Please contribute and tell us what matters to you:

Take the survey here

I look forward to the discussion in the comments. If the Twitter thread was any indication, there's a lot of passion and interest around this topic, one that I share. And of course, if you'd like to chat in person about this and see how we're doing things at Moz, I hope you'll consider MozCon in just a few weeks in Seattle.

Roger's note: *beep* Rogerbot here! I think Rand forgot an important benefit of one conference: At MozCon, you can hug a robot. If you're considering joining us in Seattle this July, we're over 75% sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket while you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!