Event Marketing: 4 questions to ask before submitting a speaking application
Speaking at events offers a great opportunity for marketers to build their own personal brand and reputation in the industry as well as improve their career. It also provides a way for solutions providers to gain credibility through customer success stories.
However, getting on stage is easier said than done.
If you’ve ever applied to speak at an event, you probably know that it can take a while to hear back from application evaluators, if you hear anything at all.
Having applied to speak at several events in the past, I can relate — but I also have the inside scoop on what happens on the agenda-building side.
Over the past couple of weeks, the MECLABS content team, myself included, has been hard at work sifting through hundreds of speaking applications for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 in Las Vegas.
I’ve spent over 30 hours reading through applications, analyzing blog posts, watching videos and reaching out to applicants.
During those long hours, I began to develop four fundamental questions to ask myself when sorting applications into the “yes” or “no” stack, and I want to share those four questions with you:
1. Did you take time and effort to explain your story completely?
It’s disheartening to see people throw away an opportunity to win over the evaluators. Applications where you’re given the chance to tell someone about your story should take more than a sentence or single word, or, big oops, left blank entirely.
This is your chance to tell your story. Give the application reviewer a story and let them imagine how it would be presented on stage.
If you’re the hero of the story, explain the challenges that you overcame.
Be a storyteller in your application. J.K. Rowling could have summed up all the Harry Potter novels by simply writing, “Harry Potter went to school and learned how to overcome challenges.” Instead, she expanded this story into seven complete novels, detailing the events that unfolded and inviting you into the life, experiences and thoughts of Harry, not just offering the world a simplified plot.
The art of storytelling — even in a speaking application — is important and will set you apart from the hundreds of other applicants.
The effort that you put into your application is a preview of the effort that you’ll put into the content you present.
If we ask for a video and your reply is, “I have one, but I can’t find it,” we’re not going to go look for it. If you write, “Will provide video upon request” under the section where we requested a video, your application will likely be disregarded altogether.
