The Conference Strategy Behind Socially Determined’s Market Creation: Making 32 Events Count

When you’re attending 32 conferences in a year with a small team, every event needs a clear purpose. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Trenor Williams revealed how Socially Determined transforms conference attendance from an expense into a strategic asset for market creation.

The Strategic Framework

Healthcare conferences can quickly become a resource drain without clear objectives. “I would love to know,” Trenor admits when asked about measuring conference ROI. Instead of chasing perfect metrics, they’ve developed a strategic framework for categorizing and extracting value from each event.

Three Categories of Value

Socially Determined categorizes conferences into three distinct buckets:

1. Market Presence Events “We know that some of them are purely just about eminence and being there,” Trenor explains. These events build market awareness and credibility, even if they don’t directly generate leads.
2. Ecosystem Building Events “We know that some of them are going to be about building our partner ecosystem,” Trenor notes. These conferences focus on developing partnerships rather than immediate customer acquisition.
3. Lead Generation Events For specific conferences, they are “really explicit, like what do we do ahead of time meetings to set up driving to very specific, targeted leads.”

Finding the Right Ratio

The challenge isn’t just attending conferences – it’s finding the ones worth attending. “It’s been such a weird few years with COVID and also feels like there are more conferences than ever before,” Trenor shares. Their solution? Focus on the vendor-to-customer ratio: “We found a few that are closer to two to one to one, and trying to maximize those.”

The Pre-Conference Strategy

For lead generation events, preparation is key. Rather than hoping for chance encounters, they:

• Set up targeted meetings in advance
• Focus on specific, qualified leads
• Prepare customer stories relevant to target attendees

Leveraging Customer Voices

A crucial part of their conference strategy involves getting “customers and partners to be able to tell the story.” As Trenor explains, “If that’s who’s telling the story, it is going to resonate so much better with the market, with their peers.”

The Evolution of Their Approach

“This year in 2023 is by far the best year in doing that,” Trenor shares about their conference strategy. The improvement came from:

• Better event selection based on vendor-to-customer ratios
• More strategic pre-conference planning
• Clearer categorization of event purposes
• Leveraging customer success stories

Measuring Success

While traditional MQL metrics matter, they’re not the only measure. “It’s not that we don’t try to do that, but it’s a lot harder than that and that can’t be the only measure,” Trenor explains. Success includes:

• Building market presence
• Developing partner relationships
• Creating customer advocacy opportunities
• Generating qualified leads

For founders building new market categories, Socially Determined’s conference strategy offers a crucial lesson: don’t try to make every event serve every purpose. Instead, categorize events clearly, prepare extensively for the ones focused on lead generation, and recognize that market creation requires a mix of presence, partnership, and direct sales activities.