Attract More Attendees with Paid Advertising Tactics feat Silvio Perez

Alyssa: Hello everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events that we've got here? I am your host for today's episode. My name is Alyssa.

I am super excited for today's podcast and mostly because I get to introduce you to our guest speaker. His name is Sylvia Perez. You might know him from his work at Metadata.

Or from his famous educational YouTube videos.

Silvio, welcome to the show! Super excited to have you.

Silvio: Thank you for having me, Alyssa. I'm pumped. I have a million things and ideas to talk about in, in terms of this topic. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to help promote some pretty large events like Transform X, which is like one of the largest AI conferences I help promote DEMAND for Metadata and a whole bunch of other ones. So I'm really excited to just get into the tactical things around what event planners can be doing.

Alyssa: I love it. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about your credentials and why we've chosen Silvio.

He has an extensive background in marketing, with a particular emphasis on paid advertising.

So I think we're gonna talk a little bit about that today.

He previously worked at Metadata. He was a head of product innovation and performance marketing there. He also just launched his first business, AdConversion where he is now helping B2B marketers. Hopefully many of you on this podcast today, our listeners can identify in that space, but that is through educational content, and how digital products help create demand, how they generate leads and they scale revenue with paid advertising.

Silvio was also the author of Google Ads Profits, and he's a former, head of product innovation at Metadata.

So, uh, really big figure in our space here and super excited to have you here today, Silvio. I know we've already mentioned that, but I'd love to just start off and go a little bit deeper in your story and add to these credentials here. Kind of walk us through your career journey and how you ended up where you are today.

Silvio: Yeah, absolutely. So for me, it all started with my own business when I was in college, it was like the very, very first business I ever started and it was actually a DJ business. And when I was in college, like everybody, I needed leads in sales, so parties to DJ with my cousin. And I remember going to Google and I searched DJ near me and I looked at the top of the page and I remember seeing these little ads and I was like, wait a second, you can buy that spot to show up, but somebody actually searches a certain query.

And that was Google Ads. And that's how I got started with Google Ads and I realized, wow, I can pay for that. So I created a free Google Ads account. I was spending $10 a day on a credit card in college trying to literally looking at every single click, under a microscopic lens because I didn't have any money.

And I'll never forget it, my first actual lead I got for 89 cents, it was a kids' Halloween party that turned into $650 cash for four hours of work on the weekend.

Alyssa: It's a pretty good ROI right there!

Silvio: Pretty great ROI and ever since then, I have been absolutely obsessed and hooked. And from the DJ business, I ended up working in different agencies, in-house, also as a white label contractor.

So those are the people that are behind the scenes actually fulfilling on the work for agencies. A lot of people don't know actually, when you work with an agency, they're not actually necessarily doing the work.

Alyssa: Agencies plus agencies, plus more agencies. Yeah. The web of agency.

Silvio: A hundred percent. And I was like the last guy in the totem pole actually doing all the campaign creation and optimization.

Uh, from there, I've also worked in-house as well, as a paid media manager at a company called Youfit for a bit, and all their campaigns stumbled into the B2B SaaS world when I was consulting in freelancing. And from there I started working with one B2B SaaS company. Did a good job, got referred, and before you knew it, my whole portfolio was B2B SaaS.

And then, got introduced with a company called Metadata. And then I of helped them automate B2B advertising and build campaigns and channels. So I helped them integrate their Google Ads products, worked with tons of different SaaS companies. And, fast forward today, I've just stumbled on and focused on B2B advertising specifically in and that niche.

Alyssa: And that's what you do today at AdConversion is that right?

Silvio: Yeah. AdConversion originally was just me one man agency consulting, working with different companies. And now actually in May, I'm transforming it from just a consultancy to a digital advertising academy. And the whole goal is to help transform B2B marketers and teach them how to scale paid ads for free, regardless of their skill level.

Alyssa: It's amazing. I think that we're onto something here with all great entrepreneurs. Start with a DJ business cuz I, you are not the first person I've talked to were they just had that hustle. Yeah. The hustle mentality of a DJ professional is really, yeah, we're latching onto something here, but, for all of our followers who are listening, clearly Silvio has just a little bit of experience in this space.

What I find really interesting, and for those of you who are maybe listening for the first time, My own background, was in helping Cvent promote its event program. So I, am a little bit of an event marketer by trade. I go beyond that now in my own experience, but what I struggled with and what I consistently have many of our customers coming to me with is how many emails is the right number of emails to get to our event?

And I think what's interesting is we need to start thinking about going beyond email. And so what I've employed Silvio to bring to the table in this conversation with is some ideas, some new tactics, some very practical tips that allow all of our event marketers, our event planners, who are consistently saying the emails aren't working.

How do we expand our knowledge of marketing to be more omni-channel, and to leverage some of these lesser known tactics to the event marketing space so that we can break beyond, the traditional and the norm.

So, Silvio, I think that lends us to a really great first question is how do we kind of break through that noise?

There are so many channels and so many tactics, that can be candidly very overwhelming to somebody who is not a traditional marketer or who has not always kept up with that space, and that can be especially true for event marketing. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in events. It can be a seemingly a mountain to keep up with.

So how do you start to break through that noise and keep up with just the sheer amount of information that's in the marketing?

Silvio: You can't scale complicated. That's the first thing to understand. So just by already trying to tackle on five channels or do something that you heard on LinkedIn, it's most likely gonna be a recipe for failure, especially if you're praying you and you're getting started. So I highly recommend that you just focus on one thing at a time, one channel at a time, one campaign at a time, and you just do that really well.

So for example, when I first got started in paid advertising in general, there's so many channels. For me to try to become a master and expert at every single one at the same time is just not practical. So I just focused on Google Ads in the very beginning, and I got really good at Google Ads and I learned it inside and out.

And then from there I start to expand to Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, and you kind of just take that same path. So first, do some research. Look online, ask your peers what's worked for them. I think LinkedIn is amazing at finding people that are in similar spaces that you can share intel with, and just get an idea of where you wanna start.

I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of ideas from this podcast in terms like when I get into the tactics and I'm gonna most likely go over a lot of tactics, so don't feel like you have to do every single one right away, just of the ones that I've mentioned, choose the one that resonates the most with you and start there.

Alyssa: How do you think about, your audiences and their relevancy to all of these different channels of opportunity? Are some audiences more at, let's say, for Facebook versus Instagram versus TikTok? I could think about the generational divide. That seems like an obvious one, but are there other nuances there when you're thinking about building your audience.

Silvio: Yeah. So even taking a step back, certain channels are more powerful at certain things, right? So it's not only the channel this is working can get a little bit more nuanced, but it's within the channel you have different targeting options, which kind of completely changes the dynamic.

Generally speaking, for what works for events - Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube are the big three in terms of what I've seen work really well. And the reason why is because with those channels you're able to, especially YouTube, you're able to get in front of people, based on interest. So in market-based behaviors.

So ideally you're gonna wanna try to focus on the channels that allow you the targeting options to get in front of the right profile. So this is where a lot of people focus on LinkedIn first. But also are interested in what you're promoting. So trying to reach people who are in market as much as possible is gonna be key versus going after people that are completely unaware and they're not in market as a starting point.

So when thinking through the channels like, take into consideration, number one, your audience. Who are you going after and where do they hang out online? For example, if I'm going after developers, Reddit is a good opportunity for me because they're very active there.

But if I was going after this actual niche, I worked in very obscure biopharma and I was going after pharmaceutical research. right? It's probably not the best thing for me, but LinkedIn would be great. So first and foremost, consider who you're going after.

The second thing is your offer itself. What are you promoting? In this case, we're promoting an event, which is great in the sense that it's widespread and most people can sign up for it. It's not like a demo request or something like that, where you are gonna need to go after people who have some sort of brand affinity. And then once you've done that and you've narrowed it on the channel, then I recommend that you just create a free ad account for that channel that you're considering.

So maybe you're thinking between Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Create a free ad account and then play around with the targeting options and just do some research and see what's available and put it together of like, how can you actually get in front of your ideal customer?

Alyssa: I think what's really interesting and as a step that I've, I have watched our customers miss is deeply knowing your audience. Who is it that you're trying to get to your event? And not only who, but what are all of the different types of people that come to your event, right? Like typically at an event, you have multiple personas that are coming to that experience.

Whether that is the way that they like to engage with that event, their levels within the organization. I could say that's very true for a conference, right? Where it's multi objective, multi goal, multi-personalities that are coming there. And oftentimes we do see that as a misstep in the planning phases of an event.

So I think what you just, testified to Silvio is really pertinent here, is really getting intimate with your audience and understanding, what makes them tick, what resonates with them, and then where do they hang out? Where are their web spaces and where might you meet them on those channels?

Silvio: Yep. So you first develop your actual persona, which you have to lock in on, but then it's taking a step further from a paid perspective and creating your ad persona. So for example, I might want to get in front of developers at certain companies, but maybe I don't have the targeting options available.

So by taking a step further and developing your ad persona is you're taking that audience that you wanna go after, and then you're trying to build the profile of targeting options to actually be able to get in front of them. And this is where you can use the native targeting options available within the platform.

Or you can use like third party tools, like, when I worked at Metadata, something like that to help you get in front of that.

Alyssa: Very interesting. Okay. I wanna switch gears a little bit on testing. I will say this is something that, again, as an event marketer, We're always just kind of like, go, go, go. The event is happening, we've gotta do it. We're not necessarily always testing and learning all the time. You don't always have the luxury because you have this deadline of the event that's staring you right in the face.

But that is an important thing to do. Would you say that there's new lessons learned for, I would say modern paid advertising, that we should be employing in not just our marketing campaigns, but our event marketing campaign specifically?

Silvio: Yeah, absolutely. You should a hundred percent be testing. If you're running unpaid social, you should be testing carousels and conversation ads. I've seen those work really well. So in terms of testing, really making sure that you're testing different ad types so you're not just relying on one.

So typically I've noticed most companies will just rely on image ads in feed, as an example. Really wanna make sure that you're testing different ad types to see which ones resonate. Carousels work really well. Conversation ads work really well. And then as well as you want to test your actual offer.

So how are you getting people to opt in for your event? So for example, are you driving them to a registration page where they actually sign up on an actual website or are you using a lead gen form? A lead gen form is a native form that pops up on the platform where it prefills the majority of information and it makes it a lot more seamless for them to sign up to your event.

Generally speaking, I've seen lead gen forms outperform landing pages, and it's usually like a go-to for me when it comes to promoting events.

Alyssa: Many of our followers are probably gonna be like, whoa, I'm overwhelmed. Is there an individual in an organization that they might look to that we would say, hey, go find this person cuz they can help you.

This might be a subject matter expert at your organization, or is there an approach to outsourcing some of this?

Silvio: Yeah, absolutely. if you don't have someone internally that's like a paid resource to stand this up for you. You can just go to upwork.com, you can find a paid media contractor. That's usually what I would recommend people start with versus a big agency where you're locked into a contract.

As a starting point, I would recommend working with a freelancer directly, and then they can help you implement these different things. But in terms of keeping it really simple, just if you take anything away and you can just create one campaign for each ad type, so that way you allow yourself to see what's actually working versus just putting everything within the same campaign.

You can set your budgets for that, and then from there you can actually build all your ads within it, promoting the event. In terms of like advanced things, and I'm trying not to go too into the weeds, but when you do plan out your event and your campaigns, and this is, we're having obviously some sort of resource internally is really helpful, is if you know your event is six months out, something that I've done in the past that's really powerful is you can tailor your creative based on your timeframes. So you can have creative that is made for the first month of promotion, the second month, third month. And then you're switching out your creative based on the timeline and how much longer you have until the event to help build more urgency. And it's very common where you're gonna notice the majority of your submissions will come towards the end where people actually take action.

Alyssa: Well, I find that very interesting that you can plan all this stuff out in advance because that is the mentality for most of the individuals that at least I interface with on a day-to-day basis where they love to plan things. They love to have it set it and forget it and get it all organized and then let it play out as opposed to being reactive in real time.

So I think this is, I don't wanna say a benefit, but an opportunity that you have in the digital spaces that you do have the luxury of being able to plan in these environments. And there is a component of, once you have the plan in place, you can execute the entire thing. And it does help when you have more, subject matter experts that are supporting you along the way, whether that be a digital marketer in-house or somebody who's outsourced to help make sure that everything's running smoothly for you.

But it's interesting that, this notion of planning things in advance is common between both digital marketers and the event planners that I work with.

Silvio: It's like the old adage like, prepare to plan or plan to fail, and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you do, you'll never be a pro without a process. And whether it's paid or events or anything, it's not just something that, you kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.

Like you have to go within it with with some sort of game plan in place. And the trap most digital marketers fall into is they test for the sake of testing, but they don't test for the sake of learning. So they throw too much too soon, too fast, and they don't actually understand what's happening. So really slowing down so you can speed up is really critical. And just taking that time. It could be a simple spreadsheet where you're just planning out, here's what I'm thinking in terms of the campaigns that I wanna launch, the audiences I wanna target. And then equally important, the exclusions of who I don't want to show my ad to.

And just thinking through those different variables so that way when you go into the actual campaign manager, you have some sort of blueprint that you're working off of that's gonna really help you and make it a lot less overwhelming. because you have some sort of guideline that you're following versus you're going in there, there's a bunch of buttons, you're not sure what everything is and where to start.

that's overwhelming. So just mapping everything out, it could be as simply as possible as a starting point, will really help you.

Alyssa: Yeah, really taking the approach of a scientist, right? Keeping things clean and tidy, that you can monitor and measure progress. Not too much multi variant testing, for the newbies to this very complex world and what could be very complicated if you try to take on too much. I love how you started this conversation, Silvio, where it's do one good thing great.

As opposed to trying to do everything and then dropping the ball. I think that's a critical piece of advice that if you're interested in going beyond email, pick a paid social strategy that you're interested in, that you feel resonates with your audience and you know where your audience lies, and test it out and see what's working, and then add to your portfolio.

Silvio: Yeah, and when it comes to paid ads, I'm a firm believer that the best paid advertisers, they think like investors and they execute like scientists. So they're always thinking like an investor in the sense of, how can I understand the return on my investment? Do I have the necessary tracking in place? Am I tracking conversion so I can understand our people taking the action that I want them to do? What does that look like in terms of the quality of registrations that are coming through? Who's signing up for my event? Is it the right profile fit or is it now? Do we have a concentration risk in terms of our investments?

So this becomes, do we have all of our registrations coming from one campaign? Maybe we need to diversify or one ad type, and we can start to scale horizontally and try different ad types, and then eventually when we're ready, different channels and different things like that. So taking that mindset, I think is very critical because if you think like an investor from the outset, you're gonna make sure you have the necessary tracking and visibility in place.

It can be as simply as possible as just setting up conversion tracking in your ad account, but then you're also gonna take it a step further in terms of the execution where because you're executing like a scientist and you're formulating these hypotheses and you wanna understand, is it actually working and you're testing your assumptions, the way you'll build your campaigns will be more structured and methodical in the sense of separating things so that you can see, yes, I spent this much money on this, it drove this outcome.

Let's scale it or let's pause it.

Alyssa: It almost has a natural effect on your planning ability.

Okay. Let's get nerdy for a few minutes here and talk a little bit about dark social and the halo effect, which candidly are new terms to me. I think they will be new terms to many people on this podcast. So I'd love for you to define those, but also talk to me about, what's next and how we can better.

Silvio: Dark social, as simply put is all the things that happen that you cannot. So it is people talking about your company or your event in a Slack group. In a private community, it's word of mouth and referrals of people emailing each other saying, Hey, I recommend that you check out Cvent for this. It's all those unmeasurable actions that we know that happen that attribution software today just can't measure.

So it's majority of how B2B buying is done, in terms of I want to buy a certain piece of software. I'll go to a friend, I'll ask for a referral. He'll tell me that. So it's all those immeasurable actions. it's people, I mean, it even extends outside of, just dark social in the sense of people, that are on WhatsApp and they're talking to each other on Messenger and they're sharing recommendations.

So the way I think about it is just think of it as like word of mouth, but through social.

Alyssa: So how do you measure those results in performance? Is there any way to capture that?

Silvio: There are some things that you can do to help measure, but it's not exact, like some really tactical things. For example, if you're running a podcast is where if you have some sort of call tracking software, so like gong or chorus, you can set up keyword alerts so anytime somebody mentions your podcast name and a discovery call, you get notified.

So there's like something like that you can do. You can set up tools like Phantom Buster to notify you every time that your company gets mentioned on LinkedIn. Those are other things that you can do to get a better understanding and a lay of the land of how far you're coming up to measure those qualitative things.

And then on, honestly, on the quantitative side, like in terms of the numbers, the main thing that you can do is measuring the spillover. So the overall performance, the blended performance, which is paid and. and just seeing overall is paid and organic performance increasing in terms of overall demo requests, overall opportunities, and then is your blended cost for acquisition going down.

So the amount that you're spending on these campaigns divided by your overall performance.

Alyssa: Interesting. Very interesting. It feels like this is like the next maturation of marketing, if you will, is being able to measure these types of things through whatever means of technology are out there, but it seems like this is the big buzzy thing that's going on, at least that I've heard.

Silvio: It's not new too, like it's, forever as well. Like the, there's also brand list studies that companies will try to run to try to measure this stuff and like the spillover in terms of keeping it really simple and practical what I do with companies that I've worked with is we set up two views.

So one is an individual channel performance view in the sense of what you can directly associate. So I spent a thousand bucks on this LinkedIn campaign. They drove this many registrations, those many registrations became this many MQLs, so on and so forth throughout the life cycle. That's one view for whatever you are able to directly attribute.

But then I also have another view, which is overall, what's the overall volume look like in terms of leads, MQLs, whatever your stages are, opportunities, revenue, and then you can just take the total cost within that timeframe. So let's say you spent $10,000, last month, and you divide that by all the overall pipeline that you created, and now you have a blended performance view that you can measure.

Alyssa: Very interesting. An area where our listeners can certainly grow is getting tighter on these types of views of performance across the board. That's good. that's a humbling moment, right? It's not just events that's lacking behind everybody's trying to figure these things.

Silvio: Everybody can improve there for sure.

Alyssa: Okay, so let's get like super practical for the end of this conversation. Silvio, I wanna talk, and you mentioned this in the beginning, that you have actually done some good, campaign work for other very large scale events. I don't remember the name of the one that you had called out there.

Silvio: Transform X was one.

Alyssa: Transform X.

Yep. So if, if somebody was to come to you and be like, help us promote this event. you got, a three or a six month timeline, or you have an unlimited timeline, right? Help us plan this. What is an ideal promotion strategy for an event program in for 2023?

Silvio: Yeah. So first, I would get very clear on who are we going after. That would be my first step. What's the persona we're going after? Then from there, I would start to think about what's the channels that I'm going to choose? Generally speaking, from most B2B organizations, it's gonna be LinkedIn.

It's gonna be Facebook, and it's gonna be Google. And when I say Google, Google Search/YouTube. And from there I would take into consideration the budget and then the timeframe. So in this case, if I have six months, great. The more time you can give yourself, the better, especially when it comes to promotion, like the old saying, the worst time to market when you're launched, there's never, the sooner you get started the better.

So essentially, with the ICP in mind, the channels in mind. Then from there I'll start to actually devise like the ad personas. So for example, if I'm considering Google Search or YouTube or LinkedIn, I'll play around with the targeting options and get, a lay of the land of how am I gonna actually get in front of this, ICP.

And then from there what I'll do is I'll flight my campaigns based on how close we are to the event. Because the creative needed will change. So for example, if we're six months out, we'll probably keep it more high level benefit oriented, right? If we can split our campaigns by multiple personas, that's usually really powerful.

If you do know those different personas you're going after for your event. So for example, with DEMAND, going after demand gen managers, but we're also going after marketing operations people. We can create different campaigns targeting those personas with relevant creative. I would only highly recommend you do that though if you have talk tracks and material that is truly unique to that persona, that it makes that additional effort worth it.

Alyssa: The end-to-end experience acknowledges that messaging, right?

Silvio: Exactly. Because most people, we share the same problems and we derive the same benefits, so it doesn't really make sense for you to go through all additional work, especially on the campaign. if it's not truly unique, it's not gonna really drive a notable difference.

But in terms some really practical things on LinkedIn, I would be doing event ads. So you can create a LinkedIn event and then you can actually promote that event as an ad type. That's really powerful. I recommend you do that. It also allows you to build a retargeting pool of people that have engaged with your events and registered or viewed your event. And then you can retarget those people in the future for future campaigns.

So try to drive demo requests from your event registrations and things like. I would be doing carousels. I would be illustrating different speakers within my event and highlighting them. So each speaker would get their own carousel pane. That's really powerful.

And then I would also be doing conversation ads.

So the conversation ads, this is like a, think about it. Like if Drift and InMail had a baby, it would be a conversation ad. So it's this type of message, ad format that you can use, and you can have it come from someone that's ideally notable and reputable. So one thing that you can do that's really powerful is if you can get the speakers to be the sender of your conversation ad, that's awesome because now it's like the speaker is inviting them to the event from themself.

That's really cool. If you can't swing that, then just somebody that is ideally a industry peer. So if I, going back to like Transform X, if I'm going after data scientists and people were in AI, I want my sender to be somebody that's notable in the AI. Ideally a celebrity, but if not just like industry peers.

Alyssa: Somewhat of an influencer in the space.

Silvio: That's ideal.

You know, because at the end of the day, like the most impactful thing is who the message is coming from first and foremost in terms of actually getting it opened. So those are some like really practical things I would be thinking about on LinkedIn Retargeting as well. You wanna make sure you're maximizing that across channels, so whatever you decide to use, with email and if you're just relying on email, if you have a 20 to 40% open rate, that means 80 to 60% of the people are never actually opening your email and seeing your promotion.

So with retargeting, you can get in front of all of your different people that have visited your website, interact with you online somehow, and guarantee that they actually get to see your actual ad and offer, which is really critical.

Alyssa: So follow up question to all of this, given this landscape of events that our teams are now juggling, different event types, not just in-person events, not just conferences, they've got virtual events. Many of our organizations now have webinars under their belt, too.

Would you recommend the same tactics, that we just rattled off here? Or are there any additional things to think through? For the virtual space specifically, where the barrier to entry is lower, but there's just less commitment to participating and there's certainly burnout when it comes to receiving so many offers to participate in so many virtual events.

It just seems harder to get that click right now. Anything to overcome that?

Silvio: Yeah. This, it's, it is a deeper conversation in terms of your actual creative, so most folks, they struggle because they don't do enough creative testing and that's why their, ads look like everybody else. So I would really focus in on when you're thinking through your ads, number one, that you have enough of them, ideally like three to five per campaign.

So they're not just seeing the same ad again on repeat, and then you fatigue your audience and create a bad experience. But really think through the concepts of your ad first. So the overall look and feel, and try to focus first on creating ads that look radically different. So for example, a meme ad versus a carousel to different speakers, versus a conversation that really focus in on that first.

So like it's a unique experience to the viewer. So they're seeing something radically different in their feed, versus just a lot of the same where most companies, they'll have one image ad with their conference and then they'll have three variations of copy, but it's like marginally different.

And then they're like, okay, yeah, I'm tuning you out.

Alyssa: Yeah, it's the old adage of make it stand out essentially.

Silvio: Exactly. A hundred percent. and then the other thing as well you can do to help on that regard is if you're constantly adding value to your audience where they're not just receiving offers from you all the time, it's really helpful.

So if you do have some sort of content promotion strategy in place, ideally, having a paid component is really powerful, where you're constantly promotion, like you're promoting that content to your retargeting audience. So when they see your brand, it's not just always, hey, buy my stuff, sign up for my events.

It's you're giving value and every now and then you're also asking them to sign up for a demo or sign up for an event. So it's a mix.

Alyssa: Yeah. You're not constantly asking for stuff as opposed to you're giving stuff away too. To your point, that you're adding value. Interesting.

Silvio: And taking it a step further too, I think the true treat the problem, not the symptom to that question is, think about the events that you're promoting. Are they promotion worthy in the first place think there's a big shift towards quality over just straight up quantity, and really thinking through this event, especially the resources that go behind it, and not just falling into the trap, oh, we have to get more leads, so we're gonna just create some webinar and push it and promote it, get a little bit more methodical on the events that you are promoting so that way when an event does come from your company, people are excited and they're willing to sign up.

Alyssa: I love that. I think that is a great way to wrap this conversation, that it truly is a quality versus quantity conversation and really focusing on the quality.

I mean, we started this conversation with focusing on one, not focusing on everything, right? So getting really good at the stuff that we're good at.

And then expanding beyond that once you've mastered something.

Silvio, any parting words for the audience, whether it's related to our conversation here today? Maybe some final advice for the listeners. What do you want to leave the audience with?

Silvio: I would just say, it's very easy to get overwhelmed when it comes to really anything, but especially paid. There's so many different things you can do. Just going back to whatever you decide, choose one channel and test one campaign, and let it run and make sure you have the necessary tracking in place to see if it's working, and then just start there and start to scale over time.

But if you do nothing else and you just start to implement retargeting campaigns and you start to deliver retargeting ads for your events to people that know you like and trust you, so you can expand the reach outside of email, I think you'll be in a much better place.

Alyssa: Awesome. Thank you so much, Silvio. Really, enjoyed this conversation today. Listeners, we hope you enjoyed the chat today as well. found some inspiration, maybe some actionable takeaways that could inspire your own programs, your own marketing strategy. as you work towards that more innovative approach to driving demand for your events.

Of course, if you do have any topics or people or recommendations for our 2023 season DM us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or as always, send us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Once again, my name is Alyssa. Thanks for tuning in to great events. Have a great rest of the week.