Inside RealSelf’s community-led summit

A traditional B2B conference isn’t always the most compelling: bland hotel ballrooms, bone-chilling air conditioning, generic meandering keynotes, and panel after panel trying to tick every box while ticking almost none.

So for its Real Talk Summit in New York City in May, RealSelf, the 20-year-old aesthetic treatment community and resource-sharing platform, decided to flip the script. It approached the event with what CEO Minou Clark described as “community-led marketing.”

“I realized we’re not really speaking to the space holistically in that format, and RealSelf is uniquely positioned as the connective tissue between the doctor brand side of the space and the consumer community that RealSelf is built on,” she said. “We have the luxury of being able to speak to both sides of the equation.”

Community first

The Real Talk Summit was full of engaging activations like acupuncture and ear seeding, along with panels focusing on today’s biggest beauty and wellness topics. According to RealSelf, the event garnered $1.5 million in earned media value (publicity or exposure a brand gains organically) in a single day. Clark thinks the engaging and topical panels—which covered topics like “AI in aesthetics” and GLP-1s—plus the integrated brand activations, drove the performance.

“There’s so many different players in this multiverse of beauty and we really didn’t want the panels to feel like QVC,” she said.

Brand activations and panels had more “peer-to-peer integrations,” said Clark, and included a diverse roster of doctors, treatment providers, creators, and press, which allowed for more friendly and organic interactions among attendees.

Mutually beneficial

“When you design a community-led direction, it exists before, during, and after the event,” said Valerie Bihet, founder and CEO of event production company the Vibe Agency, in an email to Revenue Brew. “The attendees are not showing up to collect cards, but to engage with one another they have already had a touchpoint with.”

Clark said brands benefited from this type of engagement because it allowed them to “educate consumers on the technology, the data, the science behind whatever their product or treatment was and then they could share those market insights back to their marketing team and use it as marketing collateral.”

She added it was beneficial to have more women on stage to represent the consumer. Bihet agreed, noting that women drive an “enormous share of decision-making as consumers,” and building an experience that speaks to them is “simply a very good strategy.”

Eye on the prize

B2B events take all shapes and sizes, but being laser-focused on a key demographic will help set yours apart from the crowd. The practice of revenue enablement is our bread and butter here at Rev Brew, but it’s an expansive category. Our latest IRL event in NYC put the focus on AI for sellers, with peer-to-peer conversations and practical demos forming the backbone of a lively and thought-provoking event. The focus for the next one? Stay tuned!