#DMEXCO #Marketing Attack Plan for the #1 Adtech Event in Europe 2017

Author deviation: Crazy #Blockchain summer. This is how I would describe the TNW Conference >> DMEXCO timeframe of this year.

Not only the Adtech, but the whole internet environment is evolving into the next level of web connectivity. Businesses of all industries are now being challenged to either evolve or fade away and dissapear in a few years. Actually whole industries are being challenged on a daily basis. How did this come to be?

Well, blockchain has been around over decade, but it is only in the last 4 months that it exploded into wide popularity and adoption, on a global scale. When I get into the situation of my father asking me why haven’t I told him to buy Bitcoins, instead of keeping his savings in the bank, I realized that I underestimated that trend :).

Ethereum, NEO, DAO, EOS – the blockchain-based languages underlying most of the new ICO coins are supported by the big corporations and governments, as well. Next to see is large market adoption. The gold rush has just started with every second industry and startup launching their own ICO into the grand battle of coins 🙂 I have been involved into few myself.

My personal view is that any coin/ token/ ICO project does not make sense without a strong supporting community behind, and actual adopters/buyers, of course. It may attract a few BTCs, ETHs speculants for a while and they’d leave soon after. Welcome back to the ‘1997 – 2000 Dot com bubble. But, well, on the other hand, Amazon and Google also started at that time… 🙂 So there will be leaders into multiple industries that will emerge from the current Blockchain Gold Rush period.

So Brandvertisor is pivoting towards something, which I had been thinking for over a year – exactly to adopt blockchain. Too bad I did not had enough skills, dev team and courage to start at least writing on that aspect last summer, instead of starting when everyone else did.. “Decentralized Advertising Marketplace“. Expect news on that in the next few months, as I would focus on what’s worth into a Blockchain project: supporting community.

Some successful Adtech ICO launches in the summer: Adex, Adchain >> Adtoken, Lydian Coin.

Maybe DMEXCO might happen to build DMEX COIN/ DMEX COMMUNITY as a Decentralized Advertising Community 🙂 ?
It would be the perfect time and platform to unite the Adtech community so that we could finally come up with Adtech standards?

Back to the main topic: DMEXCO 2017 Conference Marketing Attack Plan. This is a B2B event I would strongly consider, as everyone is there to buy/sell/exchange some traffic, know-how and future collaboration. Nobody goes there to make small deals with hundreds of end users, right? 🙂

50 000 attendees. 1050 exhibitors. hundreds of speakers and a startup village. That makes a good number of potential partnerships. Too bad I couldn’t invest a whole month of preparation for this, as it could be a business growth to next level, if you are prepared to nail it with building key partnerships and deal on the spot. Too bad DMEXCO doesn’t have a list with attendees, so you need to compile those manually. 🙁

A few simple rules I am using myself, which may be useful to you, too, in case you’d be attenging:

Take your time on reading carefully emails & the newsletters of the organizers. Their guidance will save you a lot of time and mistakes in the process as usually it is pretty clear and simply explained.. referring to the old TNW preparation article.
Do your homework: research the Cologne startup ecosystem: coworking spaces in Google Maps, Cologne investors and startups on Linkedin.
Linkedin B2B leads research:

– here you can search by Location/ Keywords/ Profession with no limitations even on free accounts

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4332334 – DMEXCO Linkedin group

DMEXCO Linkedin Posts:

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=dmexco&origin=SWITCH_SEARCH_VERTICAL – DMEXCO posts

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23dmexco&origin=GLOBAL_SEARCH_HEADER – #DMEXCO posts
Facebook event research:

https://www.facebook.com/events/364505837273714/
This is the right link with most of the Going & Interested, as they have few smaller ones as well.
If you want to keep the conversation strictly business, just copy their Facebook profile names & find them on Linkedin.
Prepare 2-4 B2B messages, depending on what you want to achieve :

short, medium and long one. Think over different scenarios: e.g. just asking for a beer meet up/ explaining how you could be of help with specific examples/ composing custom message for each worthy contact, directed at his specific needs. The last one makes most sense to me but is enormous time consuming.
Google research:

http://service.dmexco.de/dmexco2017_Floor_Plan – here you can find all company exhibitors for free.

I. Google: *Company* DMEXCO 2017 , *Company* DMEXCO 2017 schedule, *Company* DMEXCO booking

II. Out of 1050 exhibitors, at least 2/3 have a contact form or a blog post, hopefully 🙂
#DMEXCO checklist. You can find it either in the website or in the App :
http://service.dmexco.de/dmexco2017_checklist_Get_Ready_With_Us
In-App exercises:

Browse the “Exposition” list and choose/STAR/ the ones you’d like to book a meeting with:

You can mail/call a booking directly through the App:
Check on the “Downloads” page, it has all the info for both Visitors & Exhibitors:
https://dmexco.com/download/

Floor plan:
Check list DMEXCO 2017:

Site /Entrances/ plan:
It seems events like #PureParty would be the best ones to test German beers and exchange some business cards:
B2B leads aggregation & management:

Build template messages for each type of contact: investor message, client message, startup message. If you could invest 2 hours per day to write a custom line over the template message for the contacts you actually want to meet, then I promise you, IT WORKS!

Keep constantly replying, answering and engaging with the ones who add you back, and even more with the ones who reply you back :).

Add responses and active ones into PipeDrive funnel, this way you can easily read the messages and follow-up any time in the future.
Sample for conferences funnel is :
Linkedin/Twitter Add > Responded > Scheduled > Follow up After Conference > Scheduled call > Closed > Upsell

Keep checking your Linkedin messages as well as My Network > Connections section > (sort by) Recently added.

Make Google Docs Sheet file/pipelines lists with Investors / Angels / Startups / Company name etc.
I just figured out this one so twist it for your specific needs, but you need accounting of your networking :):

Write a nice valuable and helpful article like this one eventually will become….
(mail me at nedkov@brandvertisor.com with any suggestions and feedback on how to improve mine.)

Then export your Linkedin and Google+ takeout contacts. Twitter and Facebook make it very hard to do that, if you merge them with yahoo email account, it might work, but I won’t guarantee as I haven’t tested it yet. Collect all the emails in a single excel and remove the duplicates.

Build Facebook custom audience with the collected emails: Create Audience > Custom Audience > Customer File

Start advertising > keep tracking what’s going on > constantly improve. Begin targeting other conferences interests, visitors who checked locally in Cologne, people who liked your page and their friends obviously. Keep changing, keep playing.
On Terrain/Extras :

Prepare 200+ Business Cards

A Lighter!

#DMEXCO T-Shirt might break the ice 😉
Lucky #13 Services Packages:

B2B Leads Generation Package

Events Lead Generation Package

Software/ Startups / White Label Marketing Strategy.

If you wonder who would be a good fit to manage that for your company, you can always get in touch : nedkov@brandvertisor.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nedkonedkov/

Good Attitude. Drink Responsibly. Build up your networking to next level and grow lifetime partnerships. Prost!