Using Meetup for marketing?

Meetup is an exciting place if you have got a super laser focus topic and able to gather link minded people.

You can achieve a good marketing effort for your companies at the same time benefit your community members. We're running a community for around 800 entrepreneurs, 70-90 people turn up every month.

We can see a slow but organic growth where people begin quality business relationships.

Even in my relatively quiet home town of Perth, Western Australia, there are always multiple events on each week which I could attend. As a startup founder and developer, I possibly have wider interests than most.

I am endlessly time-poor and any event I go to is judged harshly on what it offers.

So, number one question is if you are marketing to an audience who have time on their hands? Physical meetups are a time-inefficient way to meet people - you are consuming a lot of their time for the small amount of time you spend in marketing.

There may be an unaddressed need - you can go onto the Meetup platform and enter your interests and it will identify if there's a meetup in your area or if you propose a new meetup, how many people are interested. From my membership experiences, people attending are about 2 - 10% of those signed up for a given meetup group.

So, would strongly discourage anyone from creating new meetups unless you have a really clear gap to fill for big audience.

What I'd look for is the opportunity to present as a guest at one or more meetup events that overlap with your product/expertise - most regular groups are short of presenters. Remember you have to make it 90% or more about delivering value/knowledge and very little about you or your pitch (unless it's explicitly a pitch night).

If you can present or pitch something you're working on at an event that is already popular then it seems like it could be a good thing to try if you don't put on a hard sell.

It's certainly a way to reach a new audience, it can be great for local people to discover you. But you also have to put on a good event on an ongoing basis. It's an option, not necessarily an easy one.

It is a great way to meet locals who share the same interest, but it's a long term strategy which may or may not pay off depending on what you're selling. It takes a lot of time to build an audience on it.