How OilComm 2015 Boosted Exhibitor Referred Registrations by 19% with Feathr

OilComm – a Remarkable Event

OilComm is a conference and exposition owned by Access Intelligence, a for-profit B2B event and media company based in Rockville, MD with approximately 100 conferences, trade shows and publications. OilComm brings together more than one thousand professionals from the Oil & Gas industry each year. And with a track record of 15 years, it’s the go-to event for professionals in this industry.

Fighting a 60% Industry-Wide Hit

OilComm 2015 would be the 15th consecutive installment of the event – a remarkable achievement. But 2015 was a very difficult year for the oil and gas market, with crude oil prices dropping roughly 60% from high to low between 2014 and 2015. And OilComm was seeing the result of that industry wide hit through low registration numbers.

Crude oil prices, and thus the oil industry, took a big hit between 2014 and 2015.

OilComm needed a way to address the problem. And the plan was to use one of the strongest assets they did still have – relationships with exhibitors. But traditional methods for generating exhibitor referred attendance were cumbersome and on a downward trend.

“We needed a way to more effectively leverage an important attendee acquisition channel for us – exhibitor referrals. Traditional PDF or printed passes were a pain to create and deliver, and didn’t have great uptake from our exhibitors. We needed something better.”

The OilComm team turned to Feathr after learning about Feathr’s strong ROI from colleagues at Access Intelligence who had already used Feathr for other events.

Implementing Performance-Optimized Referral Campaigns with Feathr

It was immediately apparent that Feathr would be a good fit for OilComm’s needs. The OilComm team took advantage of all tools within Feathr, while giving particular attention to the Referral Marketing tool.

About Feathr’s Referral Marketing tool

Feathr’s Referral Marketing tool expands your digital reach by leveraging the audiences of your exhibitors, sponsors, speakers, or other partners.

The logic is simple. Your exhibitors and sponsors want access to your event’s audience because it is made up of their potential customers. Similarly, the audience of your sponsors and exhibitors is made of your potential attendees.

Leveraging this dynamic is the root of Feathr’s Referral Marketing tool.

You start by using the tool to build a beautiful one-page site featuring highlights of your event like the location, schedule, speakers, etc.

Feathr then creates a unique version of that one-page site for each exhibitor, sponsor, or speaker that co-brands the page with their logo, description, etc.

Kevin Smith, a speaker at New York Comic Con, featured on his unique landing page

Each exhibitor, sponsor, or speaker is then sent a link to their unique version of the landing page, that they in turn distribute to their audience via email, social, etc.

This gets you net-new exposure to relevant audiences to boost registrations and expands your overall digital reach.

The Feathr platform was up and running for OilComm in less than a day. Feathr aggregated and imported data for all of OilComm’s exhibitors and created the beautiful co-branded landing page that would serve as the promotional collateral for OilComm’s exhibitors to distribute.

Then the e-mail campaigns began allowing the OilComm team to easily share these landing pages with all of their exhibitors at once.

“Feathr empowered me as the marketer for OilComm. Not only could I see a clear path to boosting attendance, but the platform was super easy to use – allowing me to be self-sufficient and run my campaigns as often as I needed to. Plus, I could see the results of the campaigns in real-time.”

Short Timeframe, Impressive Results

Feathr campaigns were active for just 12 weeks leading up to OilComm 2015 and the results were astounding. Compared to OilComm 2014, OilComm 2015 saw a 19% increase in exhibitor-referred attendance.

The kicker? Registrations generated by Feathr’s Referral Marketing campaigns generated a whopping 33% of OilComm’s total registrations.

“I knew that our Feathr campaigns were working well – exhibitors would stop me at the show to comment on how much they liked their landing page. But when I did my post-show recap, I really saw how effective the campaigns were. 33% of total registrations – not bad for our first year on the platform!”