To drum up buzz and attendance for its annual digital marketing conference C3, technology company Conductor came up with a national tour of promotional shows called "The Road to C3." In order to determine the cities where the tour should stop, Amy Holtzman, the director of online marketing and demand generation who organized the tour, turned to a data-driven strategy.
Using an online tool called BatchGeo, Holtzman uploaded Conductor’s client and prospects lists from Salesforce to see the cities around the country with the highest concentration of the target demographic.
“I had tried a free tool with Google but it’s hard to use, so I looked for an alternative and came across this in my search,” Holtzman said. “BatchGeo mapped our dataset and showed me the density in every geography. Then we took the top six.”
The tour kicked off on April 29 at the City Club of Washington in downtown Washington, D.C., then headed to the Tower Club in Dallas, Westin Bonavenutre in Los Angeles, and Hampshire House in Boston. The tour continues June 15 at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, California, and wraps up in Chicago at the Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago on June 17.
The results confirmed some hunches, but also gave some surprising results.
“We thought we would probably go to San Francisco, but when we looked closer, Palo Alto actually had a denser population of customers for us,” Holtzman said.
The detailed reports allowed her to further narrow each city selection to an ideal neighborhood to start her venue search. Then she researched the top venues in those neighborhoods according to online directories from BizBash and Yelp.
The tour events are free and feature a keynote presentation, networking time, and other programming. According to Holtzman, an average of 65 people have attended each tour stop—about 55 percent of the people who registered. That yield is higher than the 50 percent that planners had estimated. Attendees receive a 50 percent discount on conference passes for C3 in New York in October at Pier 92, another move aimed at boosting attendance.
