How We Use Conferences As A Strategic Weapon For Company Growth

It took us about six months to pull off our first conference. Little did we know how those six months would end up changing our small company Skift in all possible ways.

When we first started thinking about creating a different type of conference in the travel industry, in March 2014, this is what I wrote out as rough notes (and emailed to myself, as I always do when thinking through new ideas):

“Skift’s Global Forum is the first conference focused on the top strategists, marketers, technologists and creatives in travel, the people defining the Future of Travel in 2014 and beyond. Skift is changing how the travel industry looks at itself and how it projects itself to the world. Our Global Forum will take that mission to a live event, and help you understand the changing megatrends in travel across sectors, across geographies, and across functional silos in travel industry. Carefully curated program and speakers to inspire you about the world’s largest industry and its creative promise.”

“We believe the business Future of Travel is at the intersection of technology and marketing. We believe the creative Future of Travel is at the intersection of user experience and design.”

“We are the world’s largest industry, high time we have a Global Forum that starts acting like it.”

Those few key phrases above that were meant for the Forum ended up changing our company COMPANY’S positioning since then. It crystallized Skift’s audience: marketers, strategists, and technologists. It gave us the intersections at which Skift covers the future of travel: tech, marketing, user experience, and design. It gave us marching orders: show the larger world the creative promise of the world’s largest industry. And it gave us our biggest clarion call: “Travel is the world’s largest industry. Let’s start acting like it!”

The Forum isn’t a just a line of business for us. It is the distillation of everything we work for.

That is how we think of our conferences and what they mean to us, as a strategic weapon beyond the usual another-product-line-for-media-companies-looking-to-diversify-revenues type homilies everyone else in media talks about.

We are NOT an events company, but how can we not be one where everything we do converges at our events?

For us, the Forums are the biggest lever we could have been handed, for us to take ourselves to the next level and build our businesses strategically as a result.

Here are five ways we think about our Forums as a strategic weapon:

• We use our Forums in a few different ways to woo talent. The biggest one: we use it as a deal-closing mechanism in trying to hire talent, particularly senior talent. We hired our President this way and probably dozen other people, as a result of people seeing our brand come to life at our Skift forums. It has a huge effect on people because of the effort we put into them and the feedback, loyalty and the fanbase nature of the attendees and speakers that these candidates see with their own eyes. So we time a lot of our global hires around the cycles of our Forums — right before or right after — in U.S. and other parts of the world.
• In the same vein, we use it as a great onboarding vehicle, especially for our sales people who get to see this new company they have just joined come to life, understand the brand they will be pitching and get all the captive leads in a room, literally. This is probably the biggest use we have put our Forums to, outside of the business of running them as revenue generators.
• From a culture building perspective we use it as a huge bonding experience, better than anything else we do. For our team to see live the results of the hard work that they do all through the year, is exhilarating and nothing like it to make them realize the value of the work that they’re creating. I put this in a memo two years ago:

“Every year there are two seminal moments at Skift that keep our curiosity journey fresh: one is our flagship Skift Global Forum in NYC every fall The intensity and dedicated effort each one of you puts into making it the best freakin’ travel conference on the planet, and the feeling of pride you get seeing your work brought to life, is among the biggest professional highs you will ever experience. All of our collective efforts has quickly made it the ONE gathering of all the people defining and building the future of travel. For those who are new to Skift, I can guarantee that at the company dinner the last night of the Forum, when you are dead tired, you will feel that collective high and will get why we put the superhuman effort into the Forum and the importance of this achievement to the team.”

• From a growth and expansion perspective we use our Forums as a strategic way to enter a region or country. We usually start by hiring an editorial person, then we hire a salesperson, and then we bring in one of our Forums as a way to expand into the region. It helps these new regional employees work towards something tangible, it rallies the market around a conference, and the momentum that we generate after thdse Forums helps us build our business in the region. It has worked for us amazingly well in Europe, through our two London hires and through our Skift Forum Europe that is now in its third year in 2019.
• From an editorial and research perspective, over the past six years of running Skift I’ve seen clearly that the largest consumer and tech changes converge in travel. We use our Forums — especially our flagship Skift Global Forum — to inform and build out our Travel Megatrends for the subsequent year (s). The CEOs and industry leaders — from inside and outside of travel sector — who step onto the stage share their visions of the future of travel. These are the leaders who understand the larger context in which travel operates, and people who think — and act — about the future as much as we do every day. We use our Forums as a connect-the-dots platform to help build these Megatrends, and all of our Editorial and Research teams are tasked with tuning in to the discussions with that framework in mind.

At end of a successful conference, that feeling of exhaustion, exhilaration, satisfaction, and excitement of possibilities ahead, there is nothing like it.

Media companies are only & only human capital and events like our Forums are a test of human endurance & a celebration of human achievement. That’s why it works for us so well.

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Rafat Ali is the CEO and founder of Skift, the global travel intelligence company: News, Analysis, Research and conferences on online travel, airlines, hotels, tourism, cruises, startups, tech and more. Subscribe to the daily newsletter and you will be a lot smarter about the future of travel, we guarantee it!

Previously, he was the founder of paidContent, which he sold to Guardian Media Group in 2008.