Audience marketing is your cheat code

Here's to breaking the norms, and trashing 'best practices'

This week I’m writing just off the heels of Exit Five’s inaugural Drive event. And if you’ve been on LinkedIn at all this week, you already know what I’m talking about.

The feed was buzzing to say the least. And I just kept coming back to an overwhelming feeling of the E5 team beating the odds. That feeling has been so stuck in my head that I can’t imagine writing this week’s newsletter covering any other topic.

For anyone who might not be familiar, Exit Five is a B2B marketing community with 4,000+ members. A place to grow your skills, your network, and your knowledge—because no one went to school for B2B marketing.

Here’s the thing, this event goes against all “best practices” which makes me love it even more.

Marketers have been conditioned to believe events can only be successful if structured one way. And that means:

• Pulling in sponsors to offset the costs

• Those sponsors work a booth with aggressive goals to scan your badge at the expense of fostering an actual convo/relationship

• Packing the rooms with as many attendees as possible

• Running a multi-track content structure

• All in a Marriott in San Francisco or New York (or something similar, don’t come for me in the comments. You get what I’m saying!)

And all of that ‘best practice’ advice overlooks one critical element.

Audience marketing.

I wrote about this back in April after Goldenhour, too. But with this one critical element, if done well, you can essentially toss ‘best practices’ out the window for good.

See the thing about Exit Five, it’s founded by Dave Gerhardt. Though he jokingly chalks himself up to “just being a thought leader” these days, he’s grown his career from Intern to CMO at companies like HubSpot, Drift, Privy, and others. And after years of sharing his wins, learnings, fails openly on LinkedIn (think of these as deposits), a few months back he makes a post announcing a big swing—hosting Exit Five’s first in person event (think of this as a withdraw).

The relationship between deposits and withdraws is something not often linked to event marketing, but this was a case study on exactly how to pull it off.

Dave’s spent years making deposits to his community of followers, and naturally his followers have ballooned over time, but the value he’s providing has only increased. Everyone feels, sees, and experiences the value of those deposits. So naturally when it comes time to make an ask, his community shows up. And crazy fast.

Drive sold out in 24 hours.

And not only that, but because of these deposits Drive was able to pull an audience from Australia, to the Netherlands, to Puerto Rico, and San Francisco all to the quaint town of Burlington, Vermont. The most nontraditional of conference destinations.

There were 3 sponsors, but no badge scans.
There was one track—9 speakers, 2 breakout sessions.

The breakout sessions all moderated by attendees selected from the crowd. 1 hour each day to actually network with peers sharing similar challenges and opportunities. Not overpowered by slide decks or biased moderators involved in the event.

There were no raves. No stages where the audience sits in pitch black enamoring the keynote speakers. No forced meeting halls, or vendor tchotchkes in exchange for a demo.

A valuable in-person experience.

And now, all 200+ of us are raving about it on social, sharing high NPS scores, and meta but, even I am writing this Substack about an event. The E5 team has beat the odds. By that I mean the odds of breaking out of the status quo of ‘how to run the best B2B event your audience will rave about’.

And a huge piece of that breakout undoubtedly has to be accredited to audience marketing. If you’re thinking about hosting an event for yourself, sure the event itself might be successful on it’s own, but think about ways in which you could replicate this playbook, too. It’s about the deposits.

And if we’re being honest, most B2B SaaS brands today only write about themselves, make asks of the community only when it benefits the brand, and only give back when it’s truthfully self-serving.

So…

Conferences are out, micro-events are in.
Deposit 5x for every 1x withdraw.
Make memorable marketing.

And here’s to being in the thick of events season.

See you next week!
Kaylee