Going Beyond Digital Marketing to Bolster Client Relationships

November 24, 2015
By Mya Surrency

How We Integrated Digital Marketing and a Rush Print Job to Ensure Successful Event Marketing for San Francisco Travel

When San Francisco was chosen as the host city for a national conference, we integrated both digital and print marketing through multiple channels, including a microsite, pre- and post-conference emails, newspaper advertisements and a spadea in order to aid San Francisco Travel in reaching meeting and event planners throughout every stage of the event.

Meeting Professionals International (MPI) is an organization that is committed to providing industry-leading professional development, networking and marketplace opportunity for its members. The annual World Education Congress (WEC) is the signature event through which MPI delivers top-rated education, networking and business opportunities to the meeting and event community.

To generate buzz around WEC, San Francisco Travel built a microsite welcoming attendees to the city. They had 24 sponsors and each sponsor had their own landing page within the microsite. San Francisco Travel entrusts us with their email marketing, but WEC is such a large event, they called on us to update all of the sponsors’ landing pages with current logos, content and images, a time-consuming task that we were able to take off of their plate.

In order to reach a larger number of MPI’s target audience prior to WEC, we created an email that was sent to a database of meeting and event planners. The email invited meeting and event planners to register for MPI’s Hosted Buyer Program, which allowed them to meet with suppliers that they wanted to work with at WEC. The email was sent to 729 planners and had a 28.7% open rate.

In the interest of gaining more traction for WEC and to create a positive experience for attendees, we designed a full-page print ad and spadea welcoming meeting planners to San Francisco. The full-page ad ran in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, a day before WEC started. The spadea was a broadsheet that was placed around 2,000 copies of the newspaper that were delivered to the convention center during WEC. We were able to complete the rushed-job in two days time.

“Through some great last-minute work by our partners at Digital Edge, we were able to create this great piece that ran in The Chronicle,” said Howard Pickett, Chief Marketing Officer at San Francisco Travel.

Overall, WEC saw a 25 percent increase in attendance over the previous year.

Following WEC, we sent an email to all of the meeting planners that met with representatives from MPI about their Hosted Buyer Program. The email was sent to 149 planners and had a 30.5% open rate. We also ran a final ad in The Chronicle, thanking all of those who attended the conference.

“While we specialize in digital marketing, our client relationships are more important to us than staying within our niche,” said Mya Surrency, Chief Marketing Officer at Digital Edge. “We’ve put together a team of professionals with an array of talents and experiences. Our Creative Director has over 15 years of experience in print marketing, so we can handle a multitude of marketing jobs.”