Marketers, Do This Instead Of Events
I hate why I’m writing this post (spoiler: COVID-19), but I’ve had conversations with many friends in B2B marketing who feel a bit lost right now. They’re simultaneously canceling events they worked hard to plan, devising alternative marketing roadmaps, and navigating their company’s shifting priorities. It’s scary and exhausting. The circumstances are unprecedented and there’s no blueprint on what to do. But the answer is not to do nothing.
As a person who has spent the last decade producing tech events, I understand the value of in-person events and the all-important ROI they achieve for brands (I also know how devastating it is to cancel them, having done just that in recent weeks). However, I’m also a B2B influencer marketing expert who’s learned how to harness the impact of digital brand storytelling and recreate the benefits of in-person events online.
I wanted to write this post to share some practical tips for fellow B2B marketers on how to reallocate your energy and marketing budget to something that will digitize your event strategies, generate mass brand exposure, and provide long term value - B2B influencer marketing and content creation.
A Safe Bet
The truth is that even before COVID-19, many of our clients began shifting budgets away from in-person events towards influencer activations as a means to achieve mass exposure, reach new audiences, and catapult engagement to a whole new level. And it’s working.
A recent report by Influencer Marketing Hub revealed that out of the 4,000 respondents, including agencies, brands, and other industry professionals, 84% said they have increased content output in the last two years and 91% believe influencer marketing is an effective approach. Those are some staggering stats.
Investing in your company’s digital footprint is a long-term play and a solid investment that can’t be stripped by forces out of your control. As the current pandemic tragically highlights, in-person events have a level of fragility that simply doesn’t exist online. It’s wise to reallocate your event budget and bring your in-person events online ASAP.
It’s All About The Content
To start, lets explore content formats available and commonly leveraged by industry thought leaders. Here are some of my favorites:
Videos (interviews, demos, produced segments, live broadcast, etc.)
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Webinars
Demos
Office Tours
Social Amplification & Tweet Chats
And more
Now, any brand can generate the above forms of content.
The power in the approach I’m talking about, however, comes from when industry trendsetters produce the content themselves, leveraging their expertise and expert opinion to put their fresh take on a brand's topics of importance, solutions, and products. Through this approach, tech influencers can generate a narrative of how a brand fits into the broader ecosystem, illuminating the point with case studies. Not only does this lend to authenticity, but it also provides the opportunity for a brand to reach tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of new industry professionals represented in the influencers follower base.
Taking it to the next level, the magic really starts to happen when you engage a whole team of thought leaders, all contributing their unique content to the campaign. Not only do they all produce and market their own content, but they work as a team to engage with and share each other's work, creating an ecosystem of force amplification and mass exposure. Now we’re talking about reaching potentially millions of industry professionals interested in topical subjects important to your brand. This approach positions your company as a leader in online conversations and reinforces your role in the ecosystem.
Also, think about this. All of the content your brand is generating and publishing internally (blog posts, announcements, research reports, etc.) gets a massive lift by the influencer team sharing across their channels and engaging with your posts, harnessing organic channel growth and driving traffic.
Digitizing In-Person Events
Relating this back to the whole notion of bringing your in-person events online, I want to jam through a few examples of how the benefits of event participation can effectively - and oftentimes more advantageously - be replicated online.
1. Keynote Presentations & Panel Discussions
Speaking engagements, such as keynotes or panel discussions, are kind of the low hanging fruit when it comes to digital translation. Through video interviews, podcasts, blog posts, webinars, live broadcasts (think LinkedIn Live, Periscope, etc), and more, the same content that would have been shared on stage during a speaking engagement can be captured digitally and distributed to a significantly larger audience online.
EXAMPLE: I have countless examples of this, but one of my favorites was a panel discussion on women in tech we shot at our client's headquarters for the sole purpose of digital distribution. You can check it out here. We also took the opportunity to film a series of executive interviews while on-site.
2. Product Demos
Events provide the rare opportunity to showcase a company’s latest-and-greatest tech products and solutions. Videos can be incredibly effective at demonstrating new tech while enabling virality and engagement and can be produced with a professional crew or quick and easy on a mobile device with light editing. Live broadcasting demos (ie LinkedIn Live) and in-depth reviews via blog post with photos are also great ways to share demos online. Produced through the lens of an industry thought leader, demos can take on a whole new narrative and be incredibly impactful.
EXAMPLE: We’ve worked with clients to bring teams of tech influencers to the labs at their headquarters to experience tech demos, generating a suite of content that was used for real-time posting as well as evergreen content leveraged by the brand throughout the year.
3. Research Reports, Announcements & Launches
Events also facilitate the opportunity to make news announcements and launch products and research. But what better way than to amplify your announcements, products, and research by leveraging industry thought leaders and trendsetters?!
We recommend thought leader generated deep dive content, such as blog posts, podcasts, or video interviews to support your launch and drive traffic to your website. Meanwhile, the influencer team will be leveraged to force amplify your brand channels, sharing and engaging in the company’s posts boosting organic channel growth and engagement.
Pro Tip: Content featuring partners and use cases are powerful ways to get brand messaging across and bring to life the hard work and values of a company.
EXAMPLE: Again, I have literally countless examples of influencer campaigns to drive traffic, below are screenshots of an activation that leveraged short video clips provided by our client's partners to drive back to a series of data-driven blog posts.
4. Generating Brand Exposure
Through impressive booths and sponsorship branding, in-person events are an undeniable opportunity to impress current and prospective clients, and get exposure and reach new audiences. The good news about the B2B influencer marketing approach is that exposure and massive reach are the name of the game. After creating meaningful and compelling content, in a B2B influencer approach, the content is then shared to an audience that exponentially exceeds what's possible at an in-person event.
According to the previously mentioned influencer report, ⅔ respondents are going to increase their influencer marketing budget in the next 12 months. It’s no wonder companies are heavily investing when 72% report that the quality of customers from influencer marketing campaigns is better than other forms of marketing.
5. And Finally, Crushing The Competition
Who’s kidding who. Extravagant booths, keynotes, and flashy tech demos are designed to one-up the competition. In the digital space we call crushing the competition winning Share of Voice (SoV). Winning SoV means that you’re generating high engagement and taking the spotlight away from the competition online.
In the B2B influencer marketing game, dominating topical online conversations is key. With the right team and strategy in place, your brand can dominate topical hashtags and lead topical narratives.
If urgency to dominate and lead the online conversations around topics of importance to your brand isn’t enough, think about this. The top tech influencers are already in high demand. The faster you get your B2B influencer marketing into place, the faster you’ll be able to establish relationships with your top influencer choices before your competition gets to them first.
I hope you found some useful tips here. If you want to chat further about how to leverage any of the ideas mentioned in this post, please InMail me. I would love to chat.
Good luck and stay safe out there.
Chelsea Larson-Andrews, TechMode Co-Founder