Tactical tips to help you run impactful and successful user conferences, no matter the format.
Here’s how Zylo drove 46% growth in new pipeline from SaaSMe 2023
Every year, Zylo, the leader in SaaS management hosts SaaSMe, a multi-day conference dedicated to assisting IT and business leaders drive responsible growth through smarter SaaS management.
Day 1 of the conference is open to all who want to learn more about optimizing their SaaS portfolio, while Day 2 is dedicated to helping current customers dive deeper into deriving even more value from Zylo. Here's how Zylo delivered value to SaaSMe 2023 attendees and built relationships that turned into 46% growth in pipeline within just 2 months after the conference.
Here are 3 things that Zylo did which led to incredible growth in pipeline:
Despite having over 1000 registrations at SaaSMe, Zylo effectively understood the pain points and goals of each attendee by employing event engagement scoring.
They achieved this by first intelligently aligning session scoring with Zylo's value pillars.
Then Zylo analyzed each prospect’s attendance at sessions and engagement activity within each session.
This made it simple to see which were the prospect’s primary interests or concerns in SaaS management - for instance security, or licensing.
By leveraging Zuddl’s Salesforce integration, Zylo’s Sales team had easy access to information on the sessions that prospects and customers were most interested in at SaaSMe 2023 and questions or concerns on their mind. This insight, combined with existing account data, enabled them to reach out with personalized messages and content aligned with a prospect's interests—such as security for those engaged in SaaS security sessions.
Furthermore, Zylo also ensured that the right seller connected with the right prospect. For instance, because Day 2 of SaaSMe was customer-centric, only customer success executives were assigned follow-up with customers. Here too, because of the Salesforce integration, CS executives had more insight into a customer’s goals and challenges and could recommend additional Zylo service offerings.
Team Zylo, using Zuddl's built-in video production tool - Studio, were able to create SaaSMe 2023 branded video highlights within days after the conference. This meant that their Sales team could use the videos in their outreach to prospects and customers - a simple but impactful way to continue the momentum of the conference forward, cement Zylo as a partner invested in optimizing your SaaS management, and move the needle a little further towards conversion.
When the name of the game is building authentic connections and tailored solutions, Zylo's success stands as a testament to the power of meaningful engagement. Through their effective use of Zuddl’s platform features and integrations, Zylo turned their industry conference into an impressive pipeline engine for the company.
Read more about Zylo’s success here.
Virtual user conferences come with their own challenges, but with the right technology, event marketers can not only overcome them but also put up a truly masterful virtual experience. Here’s how.
Crafting a virtual user conference is more than just organizing an event; it's about creating a memorable digital journey for every attendee.
And as an event marketer, you know all too well that putting together an impactful virtual user conference comes with its own challenges.
The good news is that these challenges can be overcome when you have the right conference technology partner on your side.
So let’s break down the top challenges and see how the right event tech can help you obliterate them!
Every participant at your user conference, be it a customer, partner, or prospect, has unique expectations from your event. But without a tailored registration processes, event communications and experiences, it becomes impossible for you to engage with them in a meaningful way.
Your brand has its own identity and voice, and your design team is probably fantastic! But even they can be stifled by limited platforms can sometimes dilute that uniqueness, making your event feel less authentic and potentially alienating your audience.
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Data drives successful events. However, limited or clunky integration can disrupt the flow, leading to manual workflows, potential errors, and missed opportunities - aka a ‘pull-your-hair-out and scream’ situation for any marketer.
The absence of a robust, integrated studio in your conference platform can be a total dampener on your user conference, rendering your sessions low-impact and your session management glitchy, with a lot of room for panic for you as well as your speakers.
Of course, we can go on and on, but we highly recommend you watch this on-demand product tour to see how your next virtual conference can be your most epic one yet!
How much scope is there for automation in B2B conferences? Is there event tech that can simplify event planning and execution for event marketers? Read this article to know more.
We're hearing it more and more: "do more with less."
With B2B marketers tasked with maintaining smaller budgets whilst maximizing ROI, especially over the past few years, everyone is feeling the pressure to prune wherever possible. But instead of taking a hatchet to your resources, marketers and event organizers would be well advised to lean hard into more sustainable (and affordable) solutions wherever possible.
By which we mean: automation.
Automation is of course not a new phenomenon. People have been crying themselves hoarse about robots taking over our jobs for a decade
But most companies have quickly stopped crying once they realize how automation can unlock value and efficiencies across business processes. Recent research from Accenture underscores how investment in intelligent automation has helped companies grow their businesses five times faster.
So when it comes to B2B conferences (regardless of the format), it’s not really a question of whether to use automation or not, but instead a question of where it can provide the most value.
Event marketers need to ask themselves several questions.
To help out, we’re specifying the different ways you should be leveraging automation - if you’re not already that is:
The pre-event stage is crucial in setting the tone for the conference and generating excitement among potential attendees. Automation can help event planners manage several key tasks during this stage, including:
And automate WhatsApp messaging as well Sending updates to registrants’ WhatsApp accounts is an especially efficient way to reach them where they are.
When attendees are actively engaged with the conference content, automation can help event planners manage several tasks during this stage. Here’s how:
It’s a misconception to think that once the event is over, your work is too. Post-event is an extremely important phase in the event lifecycle as it’s when marketers can gather valuable feedback from attendees and share conference content. Automation can make this easier by helping event planners manage several key tasks during this stage, including:
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It’s not difficult to see the various ways in which automation can make life easier and better for marketers and event planners. By streamlining workflows, reducing human error, and providing attendees with a more personalized and efficient experience, it can make all the difference when it comes to moving the needle at your next conference. But the key is to always infuse automation with the right dose of human touch - to quote Maya Angelou ,“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
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.
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