Six Steps to Secure your Next Speaking Opportunity in the Financial Industry

Securing speaking engagements at financial tradeshows is great exposure for your company and a key to better marketing to banks, credit unions, payments providers and other financial audiences. Work with your financial public relations team to determine the best conferences and key message points for your company. If it is a priority for you, it should be a central part of your balanced PR plan and calendar.

I. Identify target associations, conferences, vendor user meetings as well as leverage your company’s organizational involvement.

II. Determine your ultimate goal.

  • Do you want to focus on high-level topics for your CEO or technical topics for product managers?
  • Are you promoting a specific product launch?
  • What types of executives do you want to reach?
  • Is the main goal to increase sales, generate leads, position your company executives as industry thought leaders or all three?

6 Best Practices to Secure Your Speaking Engagement

To increase your chances of being selected, you should strongly consider one or more of the following tactics:

1. Include a customer as a co-presenter to discuss their best practices.

2. Include an analyst or research group member as a co-presenter to add research/data.

3. Enter more than one submission for consideration.

  • Multiple submissions provide a variety of choices for conference directors, thus increasing the chance that one will be a topic they are specifically looking to include. Additionally, one may be selected for one conference and another selected for a future conference.

4. Include statistics and/or graphs and charts in your submission.

  • Research is typically desired, and neat graphs and charts will indicate the speaker’s ability to provide an excellent presentation with graphics.

5. If a member of the association, be sure to indicate it on the submission form.

6. Develop a high quality Speaker Kit that includes the following:

  • Executive biography highlighting articles published, association and committee memberships, board service and industry recognition
  • Photographs, including executive headshot, roundtable shots, and action shots during presentations
  • Speaking history, if possible, to include speaker’s past engagements to demonstrate his/her ability to present meaningful and interesting content
  • Applicable published articles on proposed topics
  • Video reel, if available
  • Past speaking engagement scorecards, if available
  • Analyst and/or financial institutions references
  • Online landing page with all of above documents available

By using these tactics and working with your PR team, you will find the best speaking opportunities in the financial industry, increase your company’s awareness, and improve your marketing to banks and other financial institutions.

 

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