Most user conferences point the spotlight inward. The agenda is filled with the product roadmap, customer love, and plenty of hype. None of that is wrong, but it rarely earns attention from the press or registers across the broader industry. The bigger opportunity is to treat the conference as a campaign rather than an event, and to make it matter beyond your own user base. We recently wrapped KB4-CON, KnowBe4's annual conference on human risk management, and pulled together the lessons that turned a user event into an industry moment.
Start Early
Planning four to five months out can feel aggressive for your busy schedule and competing priorities, but you’ll be grateful later. Start by reaching out to reporters, identifying story angles, sharing early research, and walking the team through your strategy and recommendations. As the date nears, shift toward promotion to build anticipation. By the time the doors open, you're posting live from the floor so the people who stayed home feel the pull of missing out. We thought we'd started too early. We hadn't. The work ran right up to the day the conference opened.
Lead With Substance
Much of the agenda will follow a corporate talk track to maintain consistent branding. Media coverage comes from the substance around it. Rather than leading with the brand's narrative with the media, take macro industry themes and ground them in specific topics, backed by real research and the researchers behind it. New threat research gave reporters a storyline that already mattered to their readers, not a product pitch. It's also why freelancers came on site: they saw stories for the range of publications they write for, not a single announcement. We lined up several announcements for different audiences too, across research, product, and a new platform, so each reporter found something that mapped to their beat. The throughline is keeping the stories industry-relevant instead of product-promotional.
Make It Visual
Keynotes and slides rarely pull a camera. A broadcast angle has to give viewers something to see, and that turned out to be key. At KB4-CON we built our own Broadcast Alley, a dedicated space for interviews and demos. The strongest hook was a hands-on deepfake experience media could try for themselves. Our job is making it compelling enough to pitch to local broadcasts and get it syndicated.
Encourage Other Voices
It's your conference, but the most credible voices aren't your own. Customers and partners on site help tell their own story and yours at the same time, in a far more organic way than a post on LinkedIn. That in-person presence is harder to secure than a written testimonial and many times more convincing. It also captures a customer voice that's tough to get any other way.
Cultivate Year-Round Relationships
Treat your media partners holistically, as relationships that run year-round rather than as show-week transactions. We engaged TheCUBE and TechStrong throughout the year through a blend of earned and sponsored touchpoints, so the conference was one moment in an ongoing relationship.
Match Your Stage of Growth
Aim at the outlets that map to where your company actually is in its growth. A later-stage company can bring a partner like NASDAQ or another listing market on site to elevate the moment. An earlier-stage company has its own real options, including Substack authors, podcasters, and freelancers who deliver valuable coverage. The point is to match the outlet to your stage rather than reach for the biggest name in the room.
Repeat As Necessary
This year's KB4-CON was the biggest in KnowBe4's history: attendance up 47% to just under 2,000, with 42 media interviews across three days. We just wrapped, and we're already planning a bigger 2027.
Interested in making the most of your next event? Drop us a line at newbiz@treblepr.com.