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If you're looking to take your community engagement to the next level, hosting events is the way to go. Here are 4 expert-backed tips to plan your community events program.
For professionals working remotely, communities are all the rage. They are trusted inner circles that help them grow, connect, interact and upskill.
But what separates a thriving online community from the rest?
Events.
A variety of community events can play a huge role not only in engaging members but also in connecting professionals and building relationships.
To understand this from an insider’s perspective, we recently spoke to Asher Mathew, CEO & co-founder, Partnership Leaders. Asher runs a community that’s dedicated to providing a space for (yes, you guessed it) partnership professionals to come together, share and gain insights, upskill and grow.
Here are the four top takeaways from the conversation:
For starters, you’ll need a marketing function to manage and run your community’s event needs. Once you have your marketing team in place, it helps to get the pulse of what your members are talking about or interested in learning.
Here’s how Asher describes his event strategy for Partnership Leaders:
“We would take the top conversations that are happening inside of PL and would say, okay I think people would want to listen to about this and so we would just run a webinar or event on the topic.”
From a quarterly perspective, Partnership Leaders’ event programs are typically broken into:
For those starting off with creating a community, is there a perfect time to consider hosting a webinar or virtual event?
Asher suggests the sooner the better, simply because of the power that events hold in getting people together.
“When you run an event, you can connect people on a panel, and then there's another relationship that those people form, so events really help you promote people's brands”, says Asher.
To truly run events that make a difference to your community members or promise value to prospective members, it pays to understand what they want. This is where it can be a great idea to, let’s say, involve your members while you’re conceptualizing your topics and sessions and get real-time inputs as you put your event together.
Asher highly recommends this approach for anyone looking to engage and grow their community with events.
“Our upcoming conference, Catalyst, is being built with its attendees - so the 150 or so people that have bought tickets already are participating in building the content for the conference! it's just a very different way of building something and making sure that you ensure value because the people are on the journey with you.”
Any event’s success is tied to its goals. For communities, events are run to engage and nurture existing members as well as to acquire new ones. When we asked Asher how he measures the success of events at Partnership Leaders, he suggested looking at events as products.
“You really need to look at event as a product and say well what is the output of the event? Yes it is about attracting new prospects and converting them into customers but the customer success view of an event is to promote people's brands, connect them at a different level and help them tell their story so that they can be viewed as a human who has rich experiences.”
He then adds that you can gauge your event’s success from these angles:
So, go ahead and consider experimenting with four strategies outlined here. By running successful events, you’ll not only help grow your community but also deepen your relationship with your existing members.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to listen to your community's feedback and adjust your approach accordingly to ensure your events continue to meet their needs and expectations!
Are you tired of hosting webinars that no one shows up to? Don't despair! With a few simple tweaks, you can boost your attendance.
For event marketers, seeing a low registration-to-attendee ratio is as heartbreaking as being stood up on a dinner date.
Think about it: you have a great topic, a solid marketing plan that is driving registrations, and a popular guest speaker as well - yet getting registrants to actually show up can be a challenge.
But fear not – the 4 tips in this article are certainly worth your time if you’re looking to jazz up that attendee-to-registration ratio.
It’s fair to assume that all your potential attendees have busy work schedules.
Hence, it’s a bit of a stretch to expect them to remember which event or webinar they registered for. This is where event marketers can leverage technology to send automated reminders, including calendar blocks.
Additionally, set up run-up emails that will be sent out a few days before, the day before, and a few hours before the event. Include details like the date, time, and how to join the webinar platform to ensure attendees know what to expect.
Here’s an example of how you can plan out your email reminders, for instance:
From an attendee’s perspective, nothing can be a bigger buzzkill than them registering for an event and then learning that it’s happening at an unearthly hour. With the digital realm, event marketers have to be mindful of time zones. So pick a webinar slot that is neither going to clash with prime-time Netflix viewing nor is going to be an unearthly hour for your attendees.
If your attendee time zones are spread out, pick a common time that is great for a majority of them.
This article by datadrivenmarketing.co indicates that the 10 AM - 12 PM PST slot could be ideal (with 11 AM being am the most popular start time). This timing is convenient because it corresponds to 2 PM EST and 8 PM in Europe, making it accessible for viewers across different time zones.
Similarly, you are not going to want to host a webinar on a day when your attendees are observing a particular holiday etc, for obvious reasons.
Since your target attendees are largely B2B professionals, the article recommends that you optimize attendance by scheduling webinars on weekdays, with Thursday being the top pick, followed by Wednesday and Tuesday.
Let’s face it; nobody likes a tedious login process, especially when it comes to events.
This is where you as an event marketer can introduce some magic into the experience, quite literally. Yes, we’re talking about Magic Links.
When these are enabled, your attendees will be provided with a distinct URL that enables instant access to your event or webinar with a simple click. This means no need for authentication, no usernames to remember; and most importantly - no passwords to forget!
The psychological phenomenon of “people want what they can’t have” is the basis of scarcity marketing.
With social media showcasing a world of experiences, around 69% of millennials feel the FOMO bug, spurring them to attend, participate, and share.
So how do you weave this into your marketing campaign effectively?
According to this article by Forbes, the right formula to create a ‘must-attend’ mindset is to make sure your campaign makes your target audience curious while giving them a compelling promise.
Here’s how you can build scarcity and FOMO in your webinar promotions:
So to quickly wrap up, creating an irresistible hook, crafting a seamless post-registration experience, stoking the fires of FOMO and tapping into the power of social proof all have the potential to spruce up attendee turnout and repair the wounds of a passionate event marketer’s broken heart!
The top 3 reasons why Pavilion's CMO Summit is a great event for marketers to attend this year.
We’ve already written about the many events in 2023 that marketers would be interested to attend, but of the many, Pavilion’s in-person CMO Summit is one to highlight.
Pavilion is a community-powered learning platform for high-growth professionals such as CEOs, GTM leaders and their teams. The company is known for its learning suite of solutions such as the structured training in Pavilion University, private, moderated peer groups and in-person events, which all aim to help current and future leaders unlock and achieve their professional potential.
March 23, 2023
San Francisco, CA
You’ll get a front-row seat to learn from leaders who have succeeded in driving results for their teams. We love that it’s no-nonsense, and straight-to-the-point. This one’s a hidden gem.
Let’s dive into what you can expect from the event.
When you attend the Summit, you’ll be in the same room from some of the most knowledgeable minds in the industry, learning strategies and getting advice from bigwigs at top Saas companies like RedHat, Postal, Demandbase, and 6sense. These expert-led educational sessions cover topics like using benchmarking data to build your budget, calculating ROI on marketing efforts, and aligning sales and marketing.
You’ll learn from Kipp Bodnar, CMO at Hubspot, about what he’s learned as part of the team that has grown HubSpot to an $800M company? And from 6sense CMO, Latane Conant about how she (and therefore you) is thinking about budget and CFO alignment, pipeline creation trends and how to adjust in a tough economic climate.
Plus, you’ll hear directly from these leaders too:
Who’d want to miss out on this? Not us, that’s for sure.
The CMO Summit’s panels enable you to get different perspectives from industry experts about a topic - it’s essentially access to complimentary consulting, and it’s a huge value. The learnings are further augmented by moderated roundtable discussions with peers.
Here are a couple of panels that we’re looking forward to:
At the CMO Summit, you’ll have plenty of chances to connect and network with marketing and demand generation leaders from around the world; there are breaks scheduled during the day as well as a networking happy hour you can look forward to. Additionally, there’s a VIP and All Access Attendee Dinner at the end of the day that you could be invited to attend.
With the industry continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, practitioners must keep pace for their businesses to stay relevant. At Pavilion’s CMO Summit, you’ll be able to learn how to win today’s race whilst running tomorrow’s through insights and advice you can’t get anywhere else.
Want to setup a solid feedback mechanism for your event, but don't know where to start? These four expert hacks are just what you need!
In the world of B2B events, success hinges on much more than simply gathering people in a room. As per our trends report, today’s attendees are hyper-focused on finding tactical value at an event. Hence, the key to making these events truly transformative lies in the feedback loops you design.
In this article, Alex Temple, Senior Corporate Relations Manager at Explori and also a PADI-certified diving instructor will help us ‘dive’ into the nitty gritty of all things feedback.
This is a must-read if you’re looking to design feedback loops that can unlock the full potential of your events.
One of the key factors to designing a solid feedback loop is to identify the goal behind your event. Why are you having the event? What do you want to help your attendees achieve through it?
Once you answer these questions, your approach to designing feedback will be more focused and aligned to your event.
“So I think the first thing would be to think about your objectives, design your questions around how we can understand how people have met the objectives that we want them to meet and then designing the survey from there and cutting out things that don't actually matter.” says Alex.
While popular customer experience metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) are important to track, they need to be viewed with context. Firstly, getting an idea of the current benchmark can help you better understand your NPS. Secondly, it helps to dig into the score and see how many attendees have voted for a particular score - this will help you better improve your events.
Alex illustrates this point with a good example. “So let's have a look at the people who scored six, let's have a look at their comments and if we can bump them up next year into your seven and eight, you know, and your sevens and eights and nines and tens, then all of a sudden you've got this massive switch swing upwards as a positive NPS.”
Talking about having a more complete understand of feedback, he states, “Use NPS as part of a suite of metrics that measure every aspect or different aspects of the event experience and then kind of bring those together so that you can actually look at it from a holistic viewpoint.”
For event marketers who are thinking of incorporating feedback into their event strategy, a great place to start is by following the feedback loop methodology, which Alex breaks into five clear steps.
When it comes to collecting feedback from attendees, involving them in the process of building their experience can have a significant impact on the quality and honesty of the feedback received. By giving them a sense of ownership in the process, attendees are more likely to provide thoughtful and insightful feedback that can help improve the overall event experience.
To this end, Alex stresses the importance of closing the loop with your audience. “The way to drive response rate and drive engagement with surveys and feedback is to complete that feedback loop. Once you have decided that you're going to make a change based on what your audience said, tell your audience that that's what you're going to do, don't hide from it.”
So as you see, measuring your events isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have! By showing the value of our events, B2B marketers can secure more budget, create better experiences, and propel businesses forward.
Prefer to consume your content via audio? Head to our podcast episode with Alex!
Tips on creating a swag kit so impressive they'll keep your business in the minds of other conference attendees long after the event is over.
When Fast Company published a piece by Elizabeth Segran asking if we can ‘finally kill off cheap, disposable conference swag?’, it really struck a nerve.
The promotional products industry body (up in arms) issued a statement challenging the piece’s thesis that people throw away most of the free goodies they receive at events. Twitterati angrily tweeted that the piece was “really out of touch with the industry of giveaways.” And other industry voices chimed in saying that everyone loves promotional products, and that they get the job done.
But Segran’s got a point.
It’s not that swag should be altogether done away with, only that which is cheap and disposable. Think about it: how many times have you thrown away a free badge or paperweight given to you? The point is that companies need to create merchandise that is so fantastic that they’ll keep your business in the minds of other conference attendees long after the event is over.
However, that’s far easier said than done, especially with challenges around cost and considerations around sustainability in the mix. So we asked Vishal Krishna, Zuddl Designer Extraordinaire, who designed Zuddl’s swag kit for IMEX, for tips on how to create your most memorable swag kit yet.
“The more specific the goals you have in mind when designing your swag kit, the better its effectiveness”, says Vishal.
In other words, all marketers have the same overarching goals when it comes to swag - namely, increase your brand visibility, awareness + recall, and amplifying lead gen efforts. But when evaluating event swag ideas, you need to unpack your big-picture goals into more specific goals. This will make it that much more actionable.
For instance, ask yourselves:
The answers to these questions will help you shape your swag kit items.
You can’t just think of anything, stamp your logo on it and then call it a day. “Ideally, you want the gifts you’re giving attendees to add some value to their lives, or at the least make their day-to-day easier”, points out Vishal.
Examples of useful, branded swag include:
“There’s no point in making items like stationary (think paper pads, diaries) because they’ll probably just be hoarded and never see the light of day”, says Vishal.
So ideally, your swag items need to be ones that come into contact with/or are seen by a lot of people on a daily basis. Your visibility doesn’t end with the campaign, and keeps going for as long as your products last and are used. It increases your reach and repeats exposure, boosting brand awareness.
Umbrellas, daily-use cosmetics, and stickers are a great example of this type of swag.
Tshirt, sweatshirts and sweatpants can seem like a great option to include in your swag kit because they can be worn in many different contexts outside of the event and because by wearing them, attendees act as walking billboards. “However, anything that requires you to customize items based on gender and size can become too complicated very quickly”, says Vishal. Here’s why:
“Don't’ go for large items,” Vishal warns. Not only will this be a logistical nightmare for you (as you’ll have to oversee shipping/delivery from place of production to the venue), but also for attendees; no one wants to lug around heavy and cumbersome pieces of merch for hours.
Ideally you want to choose items that are easy to ship and easy to carry. If items are too heavy, too large, or weirdly shaped, they’ll probably be ditched at the venue, hotel room or airport.
You can also opt to give away a virtual swag kit with goodies such as gift cards/vouchers or masterclasses/ebooks/whitepapers/ and other exclusive content. While it might not seem as exciting as something tangible, virtual merchandise comes with a lot of advantages:
More than 60% of consumers in the U.S. want businesses to improve societal and environmental issues (“Millennial and Gen-Z consumers are far more socially conscious than generations that came before” writes Segran in her piece). You can set yourself apart and make a powerful impact by prioritizing intentionality and sustainability in your branded merchandise.
To this end, virtual swag options like the ones we listed before are a good option to be more sustainable. Alternatively, check to see if you can opt for your items to be made from biodegradable, recyclable or renewable materials. Since many companies still rely on cheap, plastic promotional products, it can be quite simple to stand out from your competitors.
You will need to make a decision about how much you want to invest in your products. Eco-friendly swag can also benefit your business, but it is often more expensive than standard items.
Everyone loves feeling special, so it’s no surprise that anything personalized leads to better outcomes (80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that provide tailored experiences). But often companies decide to avoid this route as they think it involves a lot of extra effort. It doesn’t need to be. Here are two simple ways to personalize your swag:
The effort to personalize paid off, with the gambit delivering 7 opportunities and creating $155k in pipeline for Postal’s sales team.
Here’s another example:
Most companies will give away free stuff, so that alone is not enough to stand out (if that’s your aim from your swag). Try and find something that is unique and creates a memorable brand moment.
Here’s a great example of a creative conference giveaway:
When attendees at a Marketingprofs event reached the venue, they received a swag bag filled with promotional information about exhibition booths in the hall.
Directive Consulting, a B2B search marketing agency, used that opportunity in an extremely creative way. They gave attendees an exclusive key that could open a safe at their booth which had an Apple Watch to be won. Naturally, this prompted attendees to go to the booth, resulting in way more traffic than if they had simply given away a brochure.
It was a genius tactic, because it recreates the same thrill of opening a gift on Christmas morning, or opening a parcel from Amazon. Something attendees won’t forget.
While it’s important that you don’t skimp on quality, it’s also essential that you shop around for the best deal. The last thing you want to do is settle for a vendor that doesn’t have your brand color, or won’t send you samples before you make a bulk purchase.
Resources: Use our swag vendor evaluation checklist to make the right choice.
Now that you’ve got a better idea of what types of items you can put together for your swag kit, we’ll leave you with just a word of caution about what to get printed onto them. “Just stamping your logo onto products won’t do”, says Vishal. “People don’t want to be walking billboards, and they won’t wear products with logos unless the brand is aspirational or a luxury brand. So therefore, you need to incorporate a lifestyle element into your design, or make it relatable in some way, like using a pop-culture reference.”
With hundreds of businesses competing for attention at a conference, a well-designed swag kit can act as a silver bullet. A single piece of merchandise can generate tens of thousands of impressions, drive heavy booth traffic, and can result in booked meetings as well as a huge increase in opportunity value. It just requires more than choosing any item and slapping your logo on it.The more thoughtfulness you show in creating a useful or fun experience, the further it will take you with attendees.
Resources: Use our swag vendor evaluation checklist to make the right choice.
Three intriguing takeaways from a panel about 'High tech, high impact: Event Technology' that featured our Co-founder and CTO, Vedha Sayyaparaju.
Event tech today is nowhere near where it was even 6 months ago — because the industry itself is constantly evolving, and goal posts are continually shifting. Zoom fatigue might have been the primary challenge a year ago, but today it’s creating demand (as per 62% of marketers), and it’ll be something else a few months down the road.
Our Co-founder and CTO, Vedha Sayyaparaju joined other panelists at a recent discussion hosted by NXUnite to speak about High tech, high impact: Event Technology for modern associations and mission-driven businesses. Panelists discussed challenges around tech, and offered insight and advice. Here are the three top takeaways from the talk:
There’s so much tech nowadays that being able to choose from what’s available can be overwhelming. Start by analyzing your event goals, as this will help you zoom in on where and how technology can help. And this then becomes what you need to look for in the platforms you evaluate, the panelists recommend.
For instance, perhaps your registration is too cumbersome so you would look for platforms that could help with that. “Look at where your inefficiencies are - where are you spending so much time on low return or high risk” said speaker Nikki Bell, Co-Founder at Fundraising Everywhere.
Echoing an earlier point: there’s so much tech available, and as each platform is always promoting its suite of features, people can feel pressured to use every single feature that is available to them. But this is a mistake.
“You don’t need to use everything,” cautioned Vedha. “All the features on the platform you’re using may not be a fit for the goal of your event or for its agenda. So you need to really first figure out what is the experience you want to curate and then choose features that enable that.”
“Be bold”, urged the panelists. Having to navigate the modern event landscape can be scary - the industry is changing as are audiences, but organizers shouldn’t let this discourage them, and can lean on the event community for help. Here’s how:
Watch a video recording of the entire panel here!
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Webinars allow your association to bring key resources to members no matter where they are. Use these three strategies to plan your next engaging webinar.
Over the past few years, the events industry has seen a rise in the prevalence of virtual events and webinars. In the association space, meeting online means that association members can still connect and share valuable resources and knowledge even when geographically separated. The success of virtual events in facilitating communication, engaging attendees, and fostering connection has solidified their use.
Webinars allow your members to reach each other no matter where they are. Additionally, your association can seek out speakers from around the world, helping members make connections with and learn from people they may not otherwise have the opportunity to meet. In addition to providing a space for live connection, you can also record your webinars and upload the videos to your website or association management system to create a comprehensive collection of professional resources.
Your organization can take advantage of these benefits by following the necessary steps to prepare for the webinar, develop engaging content, and promote the event to your members. In this guide, we’ll walk through three strategies you can use to plan and execute a webinar your members won’t want to miss.
Taking the time to plan and prepare for your webinar is key to ensuring it runs smoothly and your members have a positive experience. But, it can be difficult to know where to start and how to navigate the basics of planning a webinar. Here are a few tips you can use to complete some of these first steps:
Once you create a detailed agenda for the event, organize at least one practice session for everyone who will speak during the webinar. Speakers will have a chance to try out their presentations without any members present, giving them an opportunity to make adjustments ahead of time. Plus, a practice run can help your association iron out any technical issues and other errors ahead of time and create smooth transitions between speakers and topics.
A unique challenge associated with virtual events is keeping attendees engaged for the entire webinar to prevent members from dropping from the call early. To engage attendees during virtual webinars, give them the space to add their input and get involved during the webinar. A few ideas to try might include:
In addition to these strategies that keep viewers engaged for the entire webinar, consider pushing the most anticipated, exciting part of the virtual event to the very end. In this case, your keynote speaker or the opportunity to ask an industry celebrity a question should be the last thing on the docket.
Ensuring your webinar is engaging and runs smoothly is essential to providing your members with an enriching, positive experience. To spread the word about your next event to more current and prospective members and to learn what you can improve for future events, make sure to leverage your association’s social media accounts.
Social media is an accessible, affordable, yet highly effective means of promoting conferences, events, and webinars. Announce the event ahead of time on all of your social media pages—generally, you should announce events at least one month in advance to ensure members can fit them into their schedules. As the event draws closer, post additional graphics to remind members to attend along with any other online marketing strategies your association uses.
Once the event wraps up, you can continue to use social media to your advantage. Encourage attendees to post about the event and engage with those posts through your association’s accounts. You can also post impactful clips from the keynote speech or resources from the event to show those who didn’t attend what they’re missing and encourage them to join future events.
Webinars are an effective tool your association can use to create additional value for its members, especially those who aren’t able to gather in person. With the right virtual event platform and association management tools, you can create a seamless, enriching experience and resource that members can reference again and again.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
So many events, so little time - so which ones are most worthwhile to attend? Which ones will drive the most ROI? This guide helps you breakdown how to choose among the many.
We’re firmly in the ‘you can never have too much of a good thing’ camp, especially when it comes to events - and marketing conferences in particular.
Getting together with marketing peers and experts, learning from each other, and making useful professional connections can be energizing, exciting, and dare we say it ‘fun’?) It’s why we’ve put together a list of top B2B marketing conferences that one can attend in 2023.
But let’s be honest. The list we’ve put together will only grow longer and longer.
However, there’s only so many marketing conferences you can attend in a year before your manager looks askance at your time off requests and your expenditure slips. So how, out of hundreds of events, do you choose the ones that will be the best value for your time and money?
The ones that help you prove ROI to your managers (ie. those that help you achieve your goals within your budget).
Here’s how to figure this out/what to take into account when making a case to management:
Why do you want to attend this conference? Is it to drive brand awareness? To drive pipeline for your sales team? To get insights and new ideas in your field, and upskill? The answer will determine what type of audience you want to reach and interact with whilst attending the conference.
To this end, do not hesitate to email conference organizers for any information they can share about the attendee profile - industry, company size and location for example, or any other factors that are important to your ICP. At a minimum, ask for a previous year’s attendee list.
In 2022, the event ecosystem evolved to see a co-existence of all formats, so this year you’ll find marketing conferences in a variety of shapes, sizes and formats. For example, while Salesforce’s Dreamforce will be held in-person at San Francisco this year, Adobe’s Summit will be hybrid, with attendees able to join virtually or at the venue in Las Vegas.
So the essential question a la Hamlet is: to travel or not to travel.
Pros: An in-person B2B marketing conference is great for marketers who are hungry to feel part of a crowd, to socialize, collaborate and network via spontaneous watercooler conversations - and thrive from it. Yes, most things can be accomplished virtually, but there is still no substitute for some in-person intangible experiences: a new relationship forged over a drink at a bar near the venue, or a level of trust that’s built from a casual conversation about sports teams or Netflix shows and a handshake for instance.
Cons: However, putting people on planes is not cheap. And spending that extra dollar for fuel, hotels, food, and drink at the event all adds up. (Plus, for eco-conscious organizations, there’s the environmental cost of transportation to reckon with). Consider whether that amount would be better spent attending a conference or marketing summit that have virtual components.
Very simply, this is the marketer’s equivalence of FOMO. If you don’t go to the marketing conferences you’ve picked out, what connections or partnerships would be lost? Or what knowledge or skill set would you miss out on?
For instance, in this age of AI and ChatGPT, marketers who don’t already know how best to leverage these tools are already a step behind the competition. Wouldn’t it be invaluable to hear experts share their successes and cautionary tales? Keep in mind that the average impact for a single cost-saving improvement idea is around $31,043.
It’s not always just a question of, “Is this event worth the money” but also “What would be the qualitative cost to your team? or “Which option gives me the comparative advantage?” which leads us neatly to our next point.
Checking to see whether your competitors, or other successful companies that you may look up to attended the marketing conference last year, and whether they were able to drive engagement from it can help you better understand the potential ROI for your business.
If you plan to attend a marketing summit as an attendee, well and good. If you can attend as a speaker, even better. To this end, check the conference website to see if they’ve put out a call for speakers, or send organizers an email explaining your interest leading a session or joining a panel.
This contributes to ROI in many ways:
Check to see what the exhibition and sponsorship package prices are for any conferences you plan to go to as an attendee. If you’re going to fly halfway around the world to attend the conference, you might as well make the most out of it.
Pros: Exhibiting enables you to increase exposure and connect with prospects on a personal level by letting them experience the product firsthand.
Cons: However, it’s expensive. Booths are priced as per size and placement so the better options can be pricey, and you’ll also have to pay for add-ons like an internet connection at the booth (yep!). And you need to factor in the costs required for booth design such as banners, standees and swag. These add up, so you should figure them out in advance.
Pros: Based on the sponsorship opportunities available - eg. gift drops at attendee hotel rooms, branding at venue touchpoints, sponsored sessions - you’ll be able to reach and connect with the audience in a way you normally would not be able to.
Additionally, as a sponsor you usually will receive an attendee mailing list aka the motherlode.
Cons: There is no guaranteed return on investments because of the complexity involved in attribution; the results of sponsorship are more tenuous than the effect of an ad campaign. The conference audience may or may not remember your brand after the event, and consequently may not follow up on a CTA from an email or a phone call.
You’ve got to be able to squeeze every drop of ROI you can.
So evaluate what kinds of content you can generate from going to the conference, for instance can you write a blog post recapping your experience and learnings from the event (we did this after attending IMEX 2022 - read our piece here). Whilst at the event, can you interview some of the speakers or other leaders of companies attending the conference for your podcast?
The more opportunities you identify to create content from the event that can be used to generate awareness, traffic and pull leads into your funnel, the more compelling the argument to attend.
As you’ve seen, when evaluating which conferences to attend this year, you’ll need to check the expenses vs. the benefits of attending. While some factors are qualitative and some quantitative, when you get down to the brass tacks, it all comes down to how much pipeline (or how many opportunities) you should be able to generate, and therefore how much you can afford to spend.
The factors that we think should go into your decision-making is not exhaustive, but it's a good start.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Unlock the full potential of your events with these 5 expert hacks for seamlessly mapping them to your marketing funnel. These tips will elevate your event marketing strategy and drive conversions.
In today's fast-paced business environment, events play a critical role in driving brand awareness, lead generation, and customer engagement. However, with so many different types of events available, it can be challenging to understand how to effectively leverage them to drive marketing success.
In this post, we'll explore 5 ways to map your events to your marketing funnel to ensure that they are aligned with your overall business goals and objectives by channelling expert insights from seasoned event marketer, Kelsey Taylor, who recently joined us for a webinar as part of our Event Heroes series!
One important factor that will help you determine your event format is the objective of your event, says Kelsey. In other words, defining the desired outcome of the event will inform you about which format will help you achieve it best.
“If you're launching a new product or have new features to share, a webinar either pre-recorded or live is a great way to deliver this message especially to your customers.”
When asked about whether there’s an ideal stage at which companies should consider mixing up their event formats, Kelsey recommended starting with simple, low-stakes events, and gradually increasing the complexity and scale of events over time. This can help organizations to build the necessary skills and infrastructure to successfully execute larger, more complex events in the future.
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“You can look at what’s working really well across your marketing functions, and where you see places where you can insert something different and test things out.”
When asked about how to create attendees who will want to continually engage with your brand, Kelsey’s pertinent advice was to think beyond just one event and rather view each event as part of a larger audience-building process.
“Continuing to think strategically and take into consideration and take good care of your attendees no matter what they attend will build that obsessive brand for your events.“
While there is no rule of thumb when it comes to setting your event budget in stone, Kelsey recommends using your average deal size as an indicator while formulating your event budget.
“If we're going to have 10 people at an event and an average deal size of let's say ten thousand dollars, we need to have at least double that in the room to make it worth it.”
While tracing the evolution of event needs, Kelsey highlighted that the bar for events is much higher compared to pre-COVID times, as attendees have limited time to offer to events, and that they’ll only look for events that give them tactical value.
“We want to ensure that we're delivering valuable actionable insights that they can take back to their teams and implement immediately, again no matter the format.
There isn't really anything worse than attending an event and really not finding any value in it!”
Want to catch the full conversation? Click here!
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Wondering where to find inspiring, insightful and expert B2B marketing content? We've curated a list of popular B2B books and podcasts that you're sure to love!
As a B2B marketer, staying up-to-date with the latest strategies and best practices is essential to your success. Now, a classic way to do this is by reading renowned books that have helped many a B2B marketer (scroll down to see our top picks!)
But since books may not be everybody’s go-to medium to learn these days, we’ve also curated some super-insightful podcasts that you can listen to no matter where you are!
So without further ado, let’s get right to it.
For our list of must-read books for every B2B marketer, we’ve put together a good mix of thought leadership, actionable takeaways and a generous serving of inspiration. So if you’ve kept your reading habit alive in this digital age, firstly, we salute you!
Set the mood, put on your reading light and zone out from the rest of the world with any of these valuable reads:
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As of December 2022, podcasts had approximately 424 million listeners worldwide! And it’s no surprise - in this world where convenience is highly regarded, podcasts have the unique ability to permeate into all kinds of daily activity - you can consume podcast content when you’re travelling, on your morning jog, during your drive to work or even when you’re in bed!
Here are the shows that made it to our list:
So there you have it, folks! Whether you prefer to learn through reading or listening, these books and podcasts offer valuable insights and strategies for B2B marketers looking to stay ahead of the game!
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
If you're a B2B marketer, here are the events you should be attending in 2023.
2023. This new year brings B2B marketers the opportunity to be better and do better than last year. This means that over the next 365 days, you can:
There are a variety of ways to do this based on your learning style - you can read articles or LinkedIn threads online, listen to a podcast or attend some of the best B2B marketing events throughout the year. The perks? Based on the format of the event, it’s highly probable that you won’t have to travel, you can eschew awkward small talk, no one can tell if you’re wearing PJs whilst attending, and you’ll come away with insights and skills that create a competitive advantage in the modern digital climate.
While there are plenty of b2b events in 2023 you could attend, we’ve whittled the list down to those we think are worth your time and attention.
<p><a href="#jan-b2b" >January 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#feb-b2b" >February 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#march-b2b" >March 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#april-b2b" >April 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#may-b2b" >May 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#june-b2b" >June 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#july-b2b" >July 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#aug-b2b" >August 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#sep-b2b" >September 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#oct-b2b" >October 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#nov-b2b" >November 2023 events</a></p>
<p><a href="#dec-b2b" >December 2023 events</a></p>
When: Jan 8-10
Event type: In-person - San Diego
Why attend: The first recommendation in our event calendar is Lead Generation World. This b2b event brings together practitioners and experts in the field to help advertisers and lead buyers successfully navigate the lead generation ecosystem.
Attendees can expect to receive highly targeted and insightful content alongside exclusive networking opportunities with companies that can support their efforts.
When: February 27 - March 1
Event type: In-person - Scottsdale, Arizona
Why attend: The three day b2b event features 80+ sessions and 20+ case studies around ABM, content strategy, demand generation, sales enablement and more, giving marketers practical hands-on insight into a variety of use-cases, and encouragement on what can be achieved.
This year, attendees can learn from inspirational marketing leaders such as:
All signs point to a highly educational and value-driven experience, that should be one of the top among the b2b events in 2023 you’d want to attend.
When: March 13-15
Event type: In-person - San Diego, CA
Why attend: As its name suggests, this event is targeted towards digital marketers and social media professionals looking to discover the best insider secrets and the latest trends, and to learn strategies and tools that will help grow their business. Here’s a glimpse of some of the sessions that will be held, and the speakers leading the discussions:
It’s a b2b event where content marketers will find tactical, no-fluff information that you're not going to learn anywhere else in the world.
When: March 21-23, 2023
Event type: Hybrid - Las Vegas and virtual
Why attend: Adobe’s conference made it onto our b2b events to attend in 2022 article, and our events in 2023 list would be incomplete without it. The 3-day conference empowers attendees to discover the latest trends with more than 200 sessions and hands-on labs across 11 tracks, from juggernaut speakers across industries.
There’s something for all stripes of B2B marketers this year, from content marketers to commerce practitioners:
Attendees will have the chance to connect directly with peers and leaders from the world’s top brands. 2023’s speakers have yet to be announced, but previous speakers include:
Bonus: Adobe also hosts a pre-conference two days before the Summit kicks off, during which you can learn more about Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.
We love the tracks’ focus and exciting speakers - it really doesn’t get better than that.
When: March 23
Event type: In-person - San Francisco, CA
Why attend: The Summit by Pavilion aims to help marketers learn the newest strategies and best practices they need to know in order to drive revenue through marketing efforts.
Attendees can expect:
By attending this b2b event, you’ll get a front-row seat to learn from leaders who have succeeded in driving results for their teams. We love that it’s no-nonsense, and straight-to-the-point. This one’s a hidden gem.
When: April 26-29
Event type: Hybrid - In-person at Banff, Canada, and there’s a Gathering Global Online Pass available to let attendees experience content on-demand from home
Why attend: Whilst there are many reasons to attend this Summit (not least its name, location or intriguingly designed event page), at number one would be how it is billed: a safe space for business and marketing professionals to unite for inspiration, application and celebration.
Attendees are in for 3 days of 20+ workshops, keynotes and intimate Q&As from 50+ thought leaders and 12 award-winning brands.
When: May 8–9
Event type: San Diego, USA
Why attend: The conference aims to be a global platform to inspire and empower marketing leaders to map the digital DNA of your consumer, foster brand loyalty and community, and unlock innovation.
And who better to learn from than this roster of A-listers from the industry!
The event focuses on 4 key themes: Strategic Leadership and Growth, Brand Loyalty, Community, and Purpose, Engaging Content and Innovative Storytelling and Data Connectivity & Creativity. Each theme features insightful sessions that guarantee attendees leave with valuable insights. Here’s an example:
With delivering value at the heart of all activities and sessions at the event, Strategic Marketing 2023 doesn’t fail to impress. Definitely one of the top B2B marketing events in 2023 you won’t want to miss.
When: May 22 – 24
Event type: In-person - Denver, CO
Why attend: The Gartner Marketing Symposium is a gathering for marketing leaders to advance their thinking as strategic leaders and learn cutting-edge marketing practices to drive efficient growth. The 2023 agenda is filled with tracks for CMOs and marketing executives, customer experience and loyalty leaders, marketing operations and analytics leaders, as well as digital marketing leaders.
Here’s a glimpse of what to expect:
Sessions will be led by the world’s leading marketing experts.
While this year’s line-up is still being finalized, if it’s anything like 2022’s roster (Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO, Accenture, General David H. Petraeus, Director, CIA (2011-2012), Nicole Malachowski, First Woman Thunderbird Pilot, and Mike Krzyzewski, Head Men's Basketball Coach, Duke University (1980 – 2022), attendees are in for a very exclusive experience.
When: May 24 - 25
Event type: Las Vegas
Why attend: Whether you’re a beginner or the leader of your team, you’ll leave with the insight you need to elevate your role through a three-pronged approach:
We love this holistic approach, especially since as an attendee, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with professionals from the world’s largest companies and most exciting startups such as Slack, Square, Adobe, Cisco, Ebay, Hubspot, Stripe, Amazon, Google, Deliveroo, Meta and Salesforce.
Sign us up!
When: June 5-7
Event type: Hybrid: In-person at Austin,TX, and Virtual
Why attend: Forrester’s B2B Summit empowers professionals with the information and insight they need to make bolder, smarter decisions in a turbulent 2023 landscape. The b2b event is laser-focused on giving marketing professionals actionable insights that they can put to use immediately to improve the bottom-line.
To this end, the event has more than 100 role-based sessions aligned to the priorities of B2B marketing and sales executives and leaders in ABM, sales enablement, product marketing, digital demand, channel marketing etc. There will be marketing opportunities to help professionals find the right solution provider for marketing needs. And there are also networking opportunities to help professionals connect with peers facing similar challenges.
It’s everything you need to know about b2b marketing in 2023 in one go.
When: June 6-7
Event type: In-person - London, England
Why attend: SaaStr is the b2b event to attend for anyone who works in SaaS, and is attended by 10,000+ SaaS executives, founders, and VCs. Over two days, attendees can take part in:
This one’s a definite ‘yes’ when you’re trying to decide which b2b events in 2023 you should attend.
When: July 18 & 19
Event type: In-person - London
Why attend: The aptly named ‘Hero Conference’ brings attendees into the same room with visionaries in the industry to learn from their victories and mistakes.
There will be deep-dives into developments in the world of digital marketing, from SEM to PPC, led by industry juggernauts. Previous event edition speakers have included:
With 4 concurrent tracks available, which means you can always find a hyper-relevant session + important product and service announcements from the biggest brands in the industry + the opportunity to network with professionals to learn what works in other industries, there’s no doubt that this event is a key resource for staying in front of the latest trends in digital marketing.
When: August 7-9
Event type: In-person - Seattle, WA
Why attend: MozCon bills itself as ‘Not Your Typical Marketing Conference’ and one look at their three-day event agenda will convince you to sign right up. Each day is filled with a great mix of activities - non-stuffy networking sessions, breaks for meals, and expert sessions delivered by the best and brightest in SEO, search marketing, mobile, conversion optimization, local search, and more. Here’s a quick glance:
When: September 6-8
Event type: In-person - SF Bay Area
Why attend: SaaStr, as everyone one in the B2B marketing world knows, is the world's largest SaaS community event on the planet, bringing together cloud and SaaS professionals from around the globe to learn from the top founders, VCs and execs in SaaS. From the CEOs of Slack and Zoom, to the founders of Datadog and Atlassian, to break-out leaders from Calendly to Flexport, everyone who's anyone comes to SaaStr.
In 2022, the event drew 10,101 attendees across 3+ days. 12,750 mentorship connections were made. 1,931 Braindates and mentorship sessions were hosted. There were 324 VCs in and 457 Founders in the Meet-a-VC Program. Plus, everyone let loose at a party hosted by DJ Duke Dumont!
2023 looks to take things up a notch with more speakers, workshops, Braindates and more. Here's what to expect this year:
When: September 5-8
Event type: In-person - Boston, MA
Why attend: Forbes called Hubspot’s annual event ‘Inbound’, “A must-attend b2b event for agency owners and marketing professionals”, so who are we to argue. The event is one of the world's largest marketing conferences, with 26,000 + attendees from 110 countries taking part.
The three day event always has tracks for Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, HubSpot Academy, and RevOps, with each featuring workshops by industry experts, fun activities, and opportunities to network. And the event always pulls in the biggest names in the world. Past speakers have included:
With speakers like these and session topics that cater to all types of B2B marketers, the conference is truly a value-driven source of knowledge and inspiration.
When: September 12–14
Event type: In-person - San Francisco
Why attend: Salesforce's massive event pulls in tens of thousands of attendees every year to a temporary “national forest” in San Francisco. And it's no surprise why. Dreamforce always features a speaker lineup of heavy-hitters and A-listers. Just look at 2022's roster:
Furthermore, with 1000+ sessions to choose from, there's no doubt you will be able to learn from some of the brightest minds and biggest thought leaders in your industry. According to a survey conducted by Salesforce, 87% of Dreamforce attendees learned something that helped to accelerate company growth, while 86% solved an organizational challenge with learnings from the event. You can't argue with those results!
Early-bird tickets are already available for 2023. Stay tuned for speaker and session announcements!
When: Sept 27-29
Event type: Hybrid: In-person in San Diego, and Virtual
Why attend: ‘Everything has changed AGAIN’ states T&C’s event website (entertainingly), and therefore the b2b event brings together the world’s smartest marketers. (flattery always works) to learn what’s new, what’s hot, and what’s actually working RIGHT NOW in digital marketing.
Attendees can expect a deep dive into evergreen pain points and channels, such as
It’s the perfect opportunity for marketers to have the content, customer-centric conversations they need to be at the forefront of the ever-evolving world of marketing.
When: October 24 – 27
Event type: Hybrid: In-person at Florida, and Virtual
Why attend: The b2b marketing conference showcases the creative thinking and inspirational strategies that the world’s top CMOs and leading brands have implemented to meet and exceed their customer needs, drive growth, and inspire change. Previous editions have featured C-suite leaders from United Airlines, Verizon, Ford, American Express, AB InBev, P&G, Shell, PepsiCo, and more.
When: TBA
Event type: In-person - Chicago
Why attend: PMM peers can come together for 2 days of networking, knowledge-sharing, keynotes, roundtables, and more. As an attendee, you will learn to
PMM professionals can expect to learn from leaders in the industry (previous editions have featured Tim Carr, Head of Oracle Advertising Product Marketing at Oracle, Natasha Janic, Senior Product Marketing Manager and Loyalty Management at Salesforce Josh Bean Senior Director, Product Marketing at Zendesk, and Divya Mehra Director of Product Marketing Expedia Group).
Stay tuned as organizers announce dates for events such as the 2023 ANA B2B Marketing Conference, and Digital Summit regional conferences.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Work smarter, not harder. Use these 6 hacks (+ ready-to-use email templates)to send the registration and attendance numbers for your user conference through the roof.
We’re not quite sure who came up with the phrase "If you build it, they will come”, but clearly it was not a B2B marketer in the 21st century.
In this era, markets are already saturated, competition is fierce, and people are extremely picky with where they choose to spend their attention and money. There is just no scenario today in which you can organize a user conference, and simply expect people to flock to your proverbial doors.
So, as with all things B2B, you’re going to need a well-thought-out plan, consistent monitoring, quite a lot of co-ordination, and a couple of excel sheets to get the results you want for your user conference, but it’ll be well the effort (just ask anyone who’s won Product Of The Day on Product Hunt #IYKYK). To this end - and to provide you with even bigger results - use the following 6 proven promotional hacks to maximize your event registration and attendance results.
Let’s get started.
Ideally, you need to start about 8 weeks before the date of your event - yes, we know, it’s tempting to think that that’s too early to start talking about the conference, but trust us, the earlier the better. Just ask Haptik!
By choosing your event promotion timeline carefully, you can maximize awareness, and increase attendance at your user conference. Break down action items into monthly, and weekly tasks - this will make it easier to execute, monitor, and optimize. Here’s a sample timeline to follow:
To make sure you’re staying on schedule, create a tracker - we've made a handy one for you here including ready-to-go email templates for all your blasts and follow-ups, thank us later).
Keep an eye on your metrics to see which activities are performing the best so you can double-down on them, and which ones are lagging behind, so you can pay a little more attention to those.
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Don’t be complacent. It’s tempting to just use the company logo and colors for your event branding, but getting your design team to come up with a unique, event-only brand that stands out is well worth the effort. Keep in mind that your target audience is already attending a couple of events every month - and probably a few every week! Great event branding helps to distinguish yours from all the others out there, and makes the experience cohesive and memorable.
Here are examples of great event branding for user conferences:
The conference brings together IBMers and experts from different fields for a variety of workshops, experiences, networking, talks, and education. The event branding for the conference aims to align with different business units and narratives, but expresses the journey from individual components to large-scale solutions and insightful discoveries.
One of the largest global conferences held, Dreamforce connects their community for three days of learning and sharing knowledge, networking, and getting inspired to ‘blaze their own trail’ - attendees are playfully known as "Trailblazers".
The event branding follows this thread, featuring national park-themed decor and design - tree canopies for a 100ft. forest installation for instance, or staff members dressed up as Park Rangers - that is high-tech, creative, unique, and definitely so distinct that it leaves its competitors in the dust.
The moral of these examples is to go big on your event branding. Sure, it’s more work, but will help you deliver your message more effectively and emotively, and drive the attention and footfall you need.
B2B marketers who use videos in their campaigns see a 34% higher conversion rate, so it’s a no-brainer to incorporate them into your promotional activities. And here are even more compelling reasons to use video in your event marketing:
Now that the case for use is quite clear, let’s narrow down the different types of videos you can create to drive interest and engagement:
MozCon’s video recap is another fantastic example, especially since it features testimonials by previous attendees. Watch it here.
The key is to use a variety of video content to attract the attention of your target audience, and then use it to connect with emotion and empathy with prospective attendees.
With basics in place such as using an event hashtag in your social media posts, you’ll be able to catapult visibility and awareness of your user conference. But to boost efficacy, use a social wall.
A social wall is a feed of aggregated user-generated content in real-time, pulled from across a variety of social media platforms. Adding it to your conference can pay off seriously down the road.
This is one of the easiest tools at your disposal to help you draw more attention, so make sure that your event platform partner has the capability to showcase user-generated content from the event on social media.
We mentioned this earlier in Hack #1 but it bears repeating: your speakers are one of the best event influencers you have at your disposal. Thanks to their credibility and reach, they can be the catalyst that makes your conference the ‘must attend’ event of the quarter. But for this to work, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to promote the conference. Here are a couple of things you can do to that end:
Create a leaderboard to incentivize sales and customer success to increase the number of registrations for the event.
By adding competition and recognition as additional motivation for sales and customer success colleagues, you can ensure that you’re getting more of the right people to your user conference. And with attribution in place, you can also track which AE was responsible for driving the most attendee registration.
This cross-functional collaboration will help keep the entire company’s eyes on opportunities to rope in more attendees. Alignment across teams is challenging, but one of the most effective ways to improve promotion results.
Protip: Don’t just rely on your CS and Sales team to drive registrations. Get everyone in the company involved! But make it easy on everyone by making a little kit/drive where everyone has easy access - include essentials like creatives they can post, a hashtag they can use.
A clearly defined promotional plan that thoughtfully utilizes your resources is really the key to getting all the right people to your user conference. You may have to tweak your strategy as you go along, but as long as you have a schedule that covers your bases and the backing of different teams in the company, you’ll be able to generate the results you want.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
A user conference agenda needs to be a careful balance of activities that deliver value for customers and the company. These 8 tips will tell you how to get it exactly right.
Have you been in a situation where you had a killer idea for a user conference, and you were sure the agenda would drive registrations in the thousands (ok hundreds! We’re no SaaStr!)? But the audience response was a lukewarm ‘meh!’?
Nothing crushes the spirit of an event marketer like poor registration (and poor turnout!), and event folks are pretty darn tough!
Most of the times when we look at building an agenda for an event, we are put in topics and themes, and panel discussion ideas that we think are of interest to the audience. But it’s more nuanced than that. A user conference agenda needs to be a careful balance of activities that deliver value for customers and the company, for instance track learning as well as product updates, roundtable discussions as well as talks by customers.
Let us look at some tricks to building an agenda that will guarantee a fantastic user conference.
Not just competition, look at how other companies are building agendas. Afterall, inspiration can strike from anywhere. And wasn’t it Picasso who said “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”? No, we are not advocating you lift an entire agenda off someone’s event, but it is certainly a good place to start looking for ideas.
Taking a look at how other B2B companies have curated their agendas allows you to discover speakers, session topics and trends that you should be familiar with but have slipped your radar, as well as to see how they’re organizing the conference days.
Take for example SaaStr 2022’s agenda. (SaaStr Annual is one of the largest B2B conferences in the world, every year bringing together 10K+ founders and entrepreneurs to learn what’s new, what’s changed, and what’s a secret in the space.)
The conference usually has something for everyone - a startup owner seeking advice on how to scale their business, a company looking for a niche B2B software solution, or your everyday B2B marketer wanting to refine their ABM strategy. The 2022 event agenda reflects this, with tracks dedicated to Growth, Scaling, Customer Success, and Team Management.
You’ll notice that each track offers a blend of
So, for instance, a Revenue Leader at Saastr 2022 could attend plenty of tactical sessions from world-known founders, and Q&A rounds.
The agenda is organized so well that each day drives new learning, new connections and immeasurable value for different persona types - as should yours.
But keep this caveat in mind: Because a competitor did it, and it was well received does not mean that a similar agenda would work for our audience as well. Your audience is yours for a reason - you offer them something no one else does - your viewpoint.
Getting your attendees to weigh in on what kind of content they want to consume, and what they’re expecting to take away from your event is exactly the direction you need to build an interesting and valuable event agenda. To this end, you can conduct a simple poll on LinkedIn or check in with your Sales and Customer Success colleagues about what customers are asking about, or even post in relevant Slack communities.
You can also gauge interest by customizing your registration form, as illustrated here:
Protip: An alternative to the text box shown in the example above is to let attendees pick the session topics they are most interested in, using a multiple-choice format. You can then use this insight to plan additional panels or discussion rooms in the agenda, and create more targeted marketing materials to hand out during the event.
PS. Involving attendees from the get-go displays thoughtfulness and commitment from the organizer’s side, and can translate to a higher level of engagement.
Your attendees are going to lose focus and energy if your webinars and event sessions last longer than a typical Netflix show episode, so it's best practice to keep them between 30 or 45-60 minutes long.
Within each webinar or event session, set aside time for an introduction, then at least 25-30 minutes for the main speech/presentation, followed by time for Q&A. Here’s an example of a structure to follow:
Schedule regular breaks in between sessions, ideally 5-10 minutes long.
This enables attendees to:
Protip: Arrange wellness or fun activities such as yoga or meditation or even a game like a scavenger hunt during some breaks as “palate cleansers" to make your event more memorable and fun.
Here’s an example of session durations at SaaStock. As you can see, they can be as short as 20 minutes.
As seen with Saastr, sometimes there are hundreds of sessions at a conference. Using tracks lets you group them under different umbrella topics - and importantly, make them visible on the agenda. This makes it easier for attendees to navigate the agenda.
As an example, here’s how Kaltura used tracks at their Virtually Live! event.
Event sessions are grouped under larger topics such as branding, ROI, and data. Attendees can jump from one track to another, but grouping them as such makes it easier to understand the agenda, and make a choice on what sessions to attend.
This might seem like a low-priority tip compared to some of the other points in this article, but you may be surprised to find out that it's actually one of the most effective.
If you talk to your email marketing colleague or the copywriter in the team, they’ll no doubt tell you the difference a well crafted subject line or phrase can have in driving people to take an action. The same principle applies here.
Taking a little bit of extra effort to make your session titles more catchy and creative can make your event agenda that bit more memorable and entice more attendees to attend them. Rocketlane's Propel 22 conference for customer onboarding and implementation professionals is a stellar example, with session topics so catchy that they immediately grip your attention, yet provide enough context to make you want to attend.
Protip: A simple way to approach session titles is to make it as specific as possible about a problem, a challenge, or a goal.
To start strong, schedule your most important speakers at the beginning of the day. They’ll be able to energize your audience and set the tone for the rest of the day, leaving them excited and interested for what is to come.
Similarly, by scheduling a high-profile speaker for the last session of the day, you can leave attendees uplifted and inspired to return for more the next day.
Aside from breaks between sessions, it’s important to give attendees the opportunity to meet one another, chat, mingle and make a new friend, business connection, or even a new investor - you just never know where a conversation will take you. To this end, it’s a must for you to organize breakout and/or networking sessions during the event schedule.
Here’s an example of how Private Equity International built in some networking time during their CFOs & COOs Forum New York 2022.
Breakout rooms: Virtual rooms in which attendees can gather can be used as spaces for socialization - for instance, you can name Rooms after topics related to the event theme, that are sure to bring together ‘birds of a feather’ groups.
Networking sessions: Use AI-powered matchmaking to connect with attendees with like-minded or complimentary goals and interests eg. investors, and startup owners.
Protip: Energy levels can flag in the middle of the day, after lunch, and in the middle of the evening. Scheduling breakout and networking sessions around these times can help to get attendees energized and ready to go again.
A well-crafted user conference agenda can go a long way to driving up attendance and participation rates. Put a little bit more effort and time when building your own (with the tips from this article), and you’re sure to see it pay off.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
We've shared our on-ground learnings and tips based on our experience of attending IMEX 2022 to help you prepare for any large-scale conference!
IMEX is one of the largest gatherings for event people across the globe. Thousands of event planners, producers, Professional Conference Organizers (PCOs), Destination Management Companies (DMCs) and event tech people from across the world gather at IMEX to find partners, figure out the next big thing in event management and check out the latest in tech powering events. IMEX America 2022, held in Las Vegas, was Zuddl’s first trade show event as sponsor participants.
Here are some of the highlights from IMEX America 2022:
I'm glad you asked.
When you participate in a third party event, your goals could be one of two broad things - brand awareness and/or generating leads. Or you could be at an event just to meet your existing customers. Either way, choosing the right event is crucial to get a positive ROI.
At IMEX America, you will meet a lot of event planners, and associations. So if event planners and associations are your ICP, IMEX is the place to be. You’ll be meeting independent event organizers as well as large event consulting organizations. Between them, they run events of any scale - from a 100 attendee get-togethers to over 15000 attendee concerts!
Another fantastic takeaway from IMEX was the hundreds of event destinations to choose from. If you are tasked with shortlisting venues for your next in-person or hybrid event, then you’ll find a lot of options to consider at IMEX.
With a lot of event tech vendors in attendance, IMEX also offered a wide array of tools and platforms for buyers to run their events. From face detection technology to audience engagement, and badge printing vendors to event hosting platforms - they were all in attendance.
Now with over 12,000 registered attendees, hundreds of hosted buyers, and tons of exhibitors, it can be a really overwhelming three days if meetings and activities are not planned out well in advance. We did our homework, and knew exactly what to expect. Even then, we weren’t able to cover as much as we would have liked.
Here are some tips to help you make the most of IMEX (or any large conference for that matter):
And by that I mean as early as four weeks before the conference begins. IMEX had a portal for buyers to contact vendors, and for vendors to run campaigns, which isn’t the best out there, but it was still something. Since IMEX is a buyer-first conference, it made sense for buyers to reach out to vendors. And each hosted buyer group had definite meeting targets to meet, so you could be sure that meetings would not be ghosted.
Most booth sponsors lock in their booths as soon as the event is announced. This helps them secure the best possible location for their budget. And at events, it is all about location location location!
Make it a priority to follow up with booth visitors and leads as soon as possible after the event. The likelihood of them remembering the conversation drops significantly as time passes by.
You will be long remembered for brilliant swag than a run-of-the-mill pen. Don’t get me wrong - pens are great, but how many conference swag pens can someone have? We took these brilliant water bottles/sippers, stickers, buttons and tote bags that flew off our shelves faster than we could restock. Now someone’s child somewhere knows of Zuddl (or Zoodle :P)
Zuddl X IMEX America 2022 1
I cannot stress this enough. I saw people changing into sneakers by the second half of the first day. These convention centers are huge, and you will need to walk from one part to the other. Comfortable feet make for comfortable days.
So there you have it folks. Hope this helps you drive more value from your events.
See you at IMEX (or some other event!) soon!
Recommended read: Here's a sneak peek of event trends in 2023 as per our latest report.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Find out how people and business organizations leverage communities, and how communities can help engage customers in order to drive long-term growth.
At the risk of sounding cliche, we’d say humans are resilient. Consider the pandemic. Things were extremely difficult for everyone, and that too on all fronts. Lives, jobs, mental health… so much was at risk.
And yet during these trying times people found many ways to bounce back. Perhaps one of the best ways to combat the ills of the pandemic was building and growing communities. The situation during the pandemic made community more necessary than it's ever been.
People who were out of jobs and needed a place that allowed them to go to help them find jobs found communities the perfect shelter. Communities helped them find empathy for what they were going through and helped them learn, for example, how to secure a job in the harsh climate. It may sound ironic, but the pandemic might have been the perfect storm.
Kishore C S, Content Lead at Zuddl, and Jared Robin, co-founder RevGenius, sat down for a fireside chat to discuss how communities have evolved, how people and business organizations leverage communities, and how communities can help engage customers in order to drive long-term growth.
Psst... if you'd rather listen to a podcast about this topic, click here.
In a wider sense of the word, communities evolved as something that’d support you, something outside of work. You had communities in schools, you had the church, you had sororities… And then there are meetup groups, there are events, and there are groups that border on being a community.
They were also shaped to be a business model, in the way events and communities brought people together. It’s just that the bridge for leveraging community for your job and your professional life has doubled down the past few years.
Thankfully, the digital revolution has made communities more far-reaching and more accessible than ever. That was clearly visible during and after the pandemic.
On social media platforms people seem to do more selling than supporting.There’s nothing wrong with selling. Everyone lives by selling something, as the 19th century author Robert Louis Stevenson observed. But when selling is the predominant activity, other factors and questions about trust come into picture.
Community as a whole has been around probably since the beginning of time, the beginning of our lives. But the way they have entered business activities is very recent. And there’s a lot of reasons why communities are fast becoming important for organizations of all sorts. But the first advantage communities hold is that of trust.
People trust others more in communities than on social platforms. It’s like people are more eager to give when engaging communities. And the goal of being active in communities isn’t to drive leads further down the sales funnel. It’s more about helping them with their current needs.
For instance, RevGenius may have a hundred people who have signed up to get into SAS sales. There will be cohorts, where we could take 50 people for a month and get them into software sales. And it’s all based on the spirit of helping - like these people won’t be paying anything.
So communities have come to be identified with the goal of helping people at zero cost, or at a very low cost sometimes.
If you have any experience with communities, you’d have clearly observed two things. One, the reach of communities is growing rapidly, thanks to the digital space. And two, communities are growing in scope; business organizations are also leveraging them internally.
With the pandemic behind us, we can look forward to in-person events that would strengthen the communities. All through, the focus is still to help community members. So if there were hybrid or digital events, the idea is to give more people around the world access to the community.
Let’s see how lots of companies are approaching building communities through events. Initially, the companies were trying to improve their understanding of the virtual world, especially to see whether things were easy to adopt for everybody.
1. Better quality: Companies have already seen enough evidence that adoption is not an issue. So now businesses are looking for better production quality at their events. They don’t want events to look like just another (boring) meeting. They want a different level of involvement and engagement as well.
2. More focus: At their own end, companies are also taking care that they keep things interesting, focused, and relevant. They are making sure the topics interest the audience. Outcomes are now at the center of these events. And ‘interactive’ is the operative word here.
3. Micro events: Companies are looking to not only get more focus but are also trying to drive productivity at the departmental level. Micro events involving communities leads to more intent, more engagement. Even big conferences are trying to be more subtle, more personal, and more engaged.
You don’t always need to have a huge headcount; a smaller but more engaged group can be more effective too. Imagine you’re doing a hybrid workshop over Zuddl. The participants are women who are in institutional or B2B sales. And because Zuddl is built for making hybrid events interactive, everyone is super engaged and active - basically going great.
Then a saleswoman (let’s call her Irene) asks a question. Her job is to sell to hospitals. Because it’s the healthcare industry, with the insurance industry overlapping, there are lots of restrictions and policy guidelines on what she can do and what she can’t. And because it’s a unique, industry-specific situation Irene is describing, the resource-person has only so many things to say.
In absence of interactivity, Irene’s questions would go unanswered, or at least under-answered. That’d have left her unsatisfied - not a good thing for events.
But the platform’s ability to get everyone engaged and interact leads to a better outcome. The other participants know what’s being discussed. So everyone begins to dig deeper. They begin sharing their experiences from different industries, thereby trying to build a wider paradigm.
Soon, the underlying commonalities between different sales situations begin to emerge. Irene is able to connect the dots by uncovering the deeper connections between the different things the other participants are sharing. The overall quality of the discussion improves, with the result that Irene has found a very good answer to her question.
Better understanding begins with better questions. And when you ask questions to people who’re close, they’ll first look at the use case and offer better answers. For instance, field marketers, who’ve been close to your customers for years, are able to niche down to the nitty-gritty in their answers. The people that look at everything best understand their community or their audience or their prospects or their customers the best.
It kinds of adds up in the way we make decisions in our daily lives. We always check with our inner circle first. A community kind of works as our extended inner circle, where the trust is the same, like as you trust your brother or your best friend.
Extend it a little. Suppose you’re traveling to some place and you’re looking to learn where you can find the best wi-fi. You’d likely head to Slack or some place where you’d see groups knowing and discussing this. And you can be sure you’ll have the right information. That’s like leveraging people in influencing type of capacities through the community.
Communities are the future
The way people are engaging in communities, the way events are shaping up and getting interactive - all this is shaping communities in a very unique way. In fact, we believe that the trends point to something interesting: communities are going to be more massive, and yet more micro.
That means the sizes of communities will continue to expand. But would that hurt the purpose of communities, namely that of helping community members? Thanks to the digital capabilities of platforms, the focus is not getting blurred. People can still reach out on a one-to-one basis and seek and offer help to very specific issues.
You’ll also see communities becoming more empowering. People will have a bigger say in the direction in which their communities are headed. That augurs well not just for businesses but also for not-for-profits and social movements. For example, communities can solve lots of social challenges. Or there could be communities that could solve the problems of individuals.
Speaking of communities, have you checked out Hybrid State of Mind? It's the place to be if you're looking for expert advice, dope insights and a whole lot of other news and views from the event industry.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Earlier this year, marketing leaders Emily Kramer and Ketan Pandit discussed fuel and engine, and how to pair them right to get the perfect marketing function. This article has the important highlights from their chat.
Today, we're throwing it back to when Emily Kramer (Cofounder MKT-1) and Ketan Pandit (Head of Marketing, Zuddl) sat down for a fireside chat to discuss the fuel and engine concept and how to pair them right to get the perfect marketing function.
We've handpicked the highlights of their session in this article; you're welcome!
Marketing, especially tech marketing, has grown complex over the years. A number of market-focused tactics have changed. Technology platforms have grown to be a great better, in that they can tell you, with a great deal of accuracy, which ad platforms work better for you. Even a number of marketing roles and titles have widened or altered beyond recognition.
And yet, lots of things about marketing have remained consistent. The foundation of marketing has not, and cannot, change. While marketing is increasingly finding a seat at the revenue table, its primary purpose and mission hasn’t changed.
With that context, it becomes both interesting and challenging for marketers to build stronger teams that, in turn, can shape the marketing function.
If you take away all the jargon from marketing and strip it down to its most essential form, you will find the fuel and engine concept in marketing expresses everything that marketing is and needs.
The fuel is the ‘what’ part of marketing. All the content you have developed, all the messages you have crafted, all the creatives your teams churn out… everything that goes out to your audience is the fuel.
The engine is the ‘how’ part of the marketing. All the channels that you use, all the distribution vehicles you deploy to get the message across, all the platforms you leverage, … all of these are a part of your marketing engine.
In brief, fuel is the all the assets you create while engine is your distribution arm.
No marketing teams are perfect, no matter how large and resource-rich the organization or how experienced the team members. The three most common patterns or problems that marketing teams face are:
This is where you have made a whole bunch of content, you have perfected the words after having spent a lot of time. But unfortunately, that content isn’t getting to anyone because you’re not focused on distribution.
The key problem: You have the ‘what’ but are missing on the ‘how’.
The website is ready for conversion flows and everything is optimized but the messaging is almost entirely absent. No matter what stage your website visitor is at, you hit them with the same message. You ignore other things and only put the request-demo message in the loop.
The key problem: You have the ‘how’ ready but the ‘what’ isn’t in place.
You have a great engine, but unfortunately it’s meant for a different business model, not yours. The messaging is neat and all ready, you’re sending it through the wrong engine.
The key problem: There’s a clear mismatch between your fuel and your engine.
Sales is focused on crushing revenue goals month after month, quarter after quarter. But what does marketing do?
Sure, marketing needs to be supporting the sales function in achieving the short-term revenue goals. But in addition to that, marketing should be able to build for long-term growth. And that’s done in a variety of ways.
It could be through the following five actions:
It is evident that what worked for some other company won’t work for yours. That’s because all organizations are different. So one thing to do is to build a framework that will work for you.
More importantly, build the right team and you can prevent or overcome all sorts of marketing challenges. So how do you build a marketing team?
Traditionally, people would suggest you hire a T-shaped person.
A T-shaped person is someone who is great in one area and has general knowledge across all the rest of the areas. Startups often do this - they get someone that’s really deep in one area, but doesn’t have much breadth.
Times are changing, and you want your hiring strategy to change accordingly.
A π shaped person is someone who is an expert in one area, and pretty competent in another area. And he has a good general knowledge across all the rest of the areas. Think of a product marketer who also can write well. Basically, you should be looking for a person with skill overlaps.
Sometimes it’s easier to hire for your own teams, and at other times it makes more sense to have a contractor or an agency.
But how do you make a choice between hiring a full-timer and hiring an agency?
Sure, you can outsource a number of people or agencies for lots of tasks. But even after you’ve signed up with the best agency, how do you make sure they deliver the right quality?
An important thing to remember is that contractors and freelancers, no matter how good, will only be as good as you can manage them and guide them. They aren’t going to be great if they’re not given guidance and context for the company.
So this is the crux: Activities that require deep expertise are best left to contractors if you’re not going to need that on a regular basis. Contractors have been working on the same thing over and over again, for a long, long time. Also, for work that’s done in spikes, i.e. at irregular intervals should be outsourced.
And with the remote working model widely accepted, it’s easier for people to work from where they want. That brings in a lot of different kinds of people you probably wouldn’t have been able to hire earlier.
As for your own teams, be really clear on goals upfront. When you’re building a startup, you want people to know what they’re working toward.
Psst... More of a listener than a reader? Listen to Emily and Ketan's conversation here.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
Here are 4 marketing lessons you'll love from our recent webinar with Dave Dabbah, CMO of Robocorp
If you’ve been following our webinars, you’ll know that we recently featured Dave Dabbah, CMO, Robocorp on a fireside chat about marketing, events and beyond. In case you missed it, you can always watch it on demand here or listen to this podcast that captures the essence of the conversation.
Tell you what, let us spoil you silly by telling you the best parts of our conversation with Dave Dabbah in this blog. It can’t get easier, can it?
Here are four lessons you can take away from our webinar with Dave Dabbah:
Let your passion and curiosity fuel you
According to Dave, it's important for marketers to let curiosity and passion drive their work. He gives his own experience as a kid to illustrate this point.
“Back in the day, my friends would get copies of Sports Illustrated while I was getting copies of Ad Age and Media Week as a child. It was fascinating, you know, cuz like you'd be reading about products and then, two months later you'd actually see the television spot, you’d feel like you had some, some inside sort of knowledge about what was happening with brand development even at a young age.”
Don’t be afraid to explore different avenues
Dave also highlights the usefulness of having worked in different roles before taking up a marketing role, highlighting how knowledge and experience in other functions can add a lot of value to storytelling.
“Having had a bit of a sales background and a business development background, sort of coming into the Silicon Valley, I felt like that really benefited me, um, a lot. And, and one of the things I tell young marketers today who are just graduating from college, is this; don't be afraid to go into sales, for, for a couple years, you know, experience what the sales people are experiencing. And that will make you a, a far better, especially B2B marketer.”
Don’t go for a one-size-fits-all approach
Some of you may already know this, but what Dave says about distinguishing the marketing needs of a big corporation from a B2B startup is worth reading multiple times.
“B2B marketing is significantly harder than marketing a consumer brand. Those are, you know, sort of two different things, entirely. A lot of what we've seen with some of the really successful big brands in the Silicon Valley and the enterprise software space over the years is [that] they end up using a lot of consumer marketing tactics to put their brands into the marketplace.
And, that's great, when you are, you know, IBM and you have, a hundred million, television budget for a 12 month period, but when you are a startup in the B2B space, how do you really get your brand message out in an effective way? I think, you know, over, over the years, that's something I've gotten, you know, pretty good at, um, trying to figure out.”
Repurposing content is the way forward
As he talks about getting back to doing events, Dave makes a great case for repurposing content as a long-term marketing strategy.
“When we got back to events during the pandemic, we were not just spending money on the event, you know, before the event or during the event, but also actually getting content out of the event that could be repurposed and reused, down the road.”
Want more of these marketing gems? Go watch the webinar on-demand now.
Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.
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