By Maria Geokezas, director of client services for Heinz Marketing
Last March, we brought a new kind of event to Seattle. Our B2B Marketing Roundup featured marketing automation content from industry leaders like Eloqua, Full Circle CRM and Netprospex and brought over 70 B2B sales and marketing professionals to the Columbia Tower Club for an afternoon of education and networking.
The event was rated highly by all who attended, so we decided to do it again – a little differently. This time our theme is “Social Marketing Redefined” and we are excited to have a host of sponsors that truly get where social marketing is going: LinkedIn, FullCircle CRM, Netprospex, Hand Crank Films and 9Slides. Registrations are coming in strong. We are happy with both the quantity and quality of the people who are planning on attending the event. So, we thought we’d show off our success with a mini-case study. We are marketers after all!
Practice what you preach
In this blog we have countless articles and offer tons of advice on B2B sales and marketing strategy, planning and execution. All that doesn’t matter if you don’t actually do what you say. And this event put our strategy and team to the test.
Gather the Facts
From the get-go, we knew there was demand for this kind of event. Even though Seattle is one of the best performing cities (ranked 13th by The Atlantic 4/29/13), with a vibrant mid-market economy and active entrepreneurial and small business communities there is a lack of organized events, resources and training for those of us involved in the B2B economy. To better understand competing factors, we investigated all the other marketing and sales organizations to see if they were planning any events in the Seattle area this fall. We also checked with the City of Seattle event calendar to make sure we wouldn’t be met with competition from one of the national associations. The stage was set for October 10th.
Identify Your Target
One of marketing’s key tenets is to start with a well-defined target market. For this event, we knew we wanted to attract B2B Sales and Marketing leaders in the Seattle metro area. We are lucky to have a healthy opt-in database that we’ve grown over the years through our SEO, blog and social strategy. To augment that list, we worked with a couple partners to help us 1) identify local people in our database (most of our file only contains name and email address), and 2) find new people, outside of our database, that fit our target criteria. After all this work, we had what looked like a solid list of prospects, over 2,500.
Set Your Goals
After understanding the make-up of our in-house list as well as outside lists and social channels, we started sizing the opportunity. Based on the volume of prospects we were able to identify in the market, we calculated that we should at least be able to convert 2.5% of them. With a targeted approach and good content, we should be able to get 80-100 people to the event.
Build It and They Will Come
It may have worked for Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, but we would never advise that our clients take this approach. Here is our plan for driving registrations and attendance.
Content strategy: For this event to be successful, we knew we had to offer content that would be timely and important enough to motivate B2B sales and marketing pro’s to leave their busy work day and spend an afternoon with us. The theme of the event, “Social Marketing Redefined” came about because we were hearing concerns from business leaders. They are investing a lot in social activities but are not sure what these activities really do for the business. There is more pressure building for sales and marketing professionals to demonstrate the ROI of the time and tools they spend on social activities.
Good content can’t stand alone. We needed the right experts – thought leaders – to deliver this message. That’s when we brought in the teams at LinkedIn Sales Solutions, FullCircle CRM and Netprospex to help put on a great event. To round out the content, we tapped local thought leaders like Carmen Arnevik, Uri Bar-Joseph, Aseem Badshah, and Laleh Hassibi to give us real-life examples of how they are using and demonstrating value of their social activities in their B2B marketing and sales initiatives.
Promotional strategy: Our communication plan reflects how our target audience uses different communication channels. Email is the workhorse of our integrated campaign. In addition to the targeted campaign that we are running through Eloqua, each of our team members, sponsors and speakers is reaching out to personally invite people from their professional networks. And of course we are using social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. You can’t hold a social marketing event without using social media to drive interest and registrations!
In addition, we are testing LinkedIn Sponsored posts. We identified a number of groups within LinkedIn that cover similar subject matter. LinkedIn’s targeting tools allow you to get specific, we feel we can localize our marketing effort and get in front of people in our market, who could actually attend the event in Seattle. We’ve experienced good success with sponsored posts for our clients, and are excited to see how it performs for us!
One of the biggest differences between this event and the last is the way we are leveraging content. Each of our speakers and sponsors have been interviewed. Their perspectives, a sneak peak of what they will be presenting on October 10th can be found on our blog. This was done specifically to attract prospects that are searching for social marketing related solutions and get them to register.
Offer strategy: The event is free. But, in case the registrations don’t come in as expected, we have a back-up plan. So far, we haven’t had to use it.
Put a Good Event Team in Place
Last but definitely not least, the success of this event relies on the people that pull it together. Erin Alvarez and Jackie Jordahl have done all the heavy lifting to ensure that everything is aligned.
Tracking Success
Our campaign started about a month ago. Since then, we’ve been tracking registrations and monitoring progress on a daily basis. We have a plan, but we are adjusting it as we see results roll in.
If you are interested in attending, please register in advance to reserve your spot. Space is limited at the Columbia Tower Club.
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