How to Integrate Virtual Events into your Digital Marketing Strategy – with Aleksandra Panyukhina | DMR #240

Full transcript:

Aleksandra Panyukhina 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 214, how to integrate virtual events into your digital marketing strategy

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Digital Marketing Radio with David.

Aleksandra Panyukhina 0:12
Hi, I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio with a show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top of that is tools, tactics and trends shared by today’s modern marketing masters. I’m sure that you’re well aware of the value of virtual events, builds great relationships with industry thought leaders foster an engaged community around your content and drive more revenue. But where do virtual events sit in relation to the rest of your marketing mix? And how can you better leverage the content generated and the relationships made as a result of your virtual events? Those questions and more are covered in this episode 240 of Digital Marketing Radio, how to integrate virtual events into your digital marketing strategy. Joining me today is a lady who specialised in event marketing for the last five years or so. She’s a former head of event marketing for sem rush or sem rush, and the current head of events and experiences for parser lab. Welcome to DMR. Aleksandra Panyukhina.

Hi, David.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me today.

Yeah, thanks for coming along them, you can find Alexander over a parser lab.com. So Alexandra, a lot of people are getting zoomed out at the woman. So have virtual events got harder to run over lockdown, or are they better than ever,

I feel it can be both, depending on how you look at it. Of course, event marketers have become better at actually planning the events at executing them from technology standpoint of view. But then there is a problem of actually capturing attention of your audience. Because of course, there is some fatigue, there is finally spring weather outside. And there is also a lot of work that everyone has to do. There is also hope for in person events to return. So some people may decide to wait maybe until later in the year to attend some of the in person events. But to be honest, I believe in the potential of virtual also because they can finally be fully integrated and do the whole marketing mix. And they’re not anymore this standalone channel that you cannot really track because there is an offline elements, they are finally tracked along with all of your other channels, you can finally really track and understand how the customer journey goes through the events. So there are tonnes and tonnes of opportunities. It’s just about using them.

Okay, see use the word Finally, I think three times they’re finally integrated. Finally, part of the customer mix and the whole marketing mix as well. So have the production and way that virtual events are done changed significantly over the last year, I believe

so. So a year ago, precisely a year ago, that’s when the whole change happened. And everybody was pivoting their events to virtual or doing cancellation dealing with all of the contracts. The first idea was okay, what can we do, we can transform to virtual, let’s take all of our speakers put them on zoom and just broadcast for 12 hours during three days, because that’s what our programme was supposed to be. Right now, I believe there are fewer and fewer events like that there are more adapted to the reality of people wanting to have shorter, more kind of niche focused content that is also spread across different days or also available in different formats. There are different platforms being used that kind of kind of maybe not tackle all of the senses, but at least provide some of the engagement that everybody was talking about that it’s lost when you’re moved to virtual, actually there can be engagement, you just have to dig a little deeper and come up with some not so common solutions.

So you talk about engagement there. But you also mentioned about perhaps spreading the event over a few days. Is it not easier to get more engagement by having a longer event and having the event all as one?

What’s what I find and also a kind of from the overall industry perception. People right now are not able to dedicate their full day to the events unless it’s really something huge. Like for example, inbounds I think it gets they’ve got quite a lot of engagement. And it was stretched across I think three days full of contents with different sessions. But compared to in person events, when you would go actually on a business trip to attend these events or you’re concentrated on it. Right now. Nobody really gets a day off to attend an online conference. You kind of have to combine that with your everyday duties and some of the meetings and the emails and other responsibilities you have that you can have also as not a worker but Kind of a family member, or a friends. So you really need to fit it in your schedule. That’s why the kind of the time and also the formats come in place. Maybe people can’t just watch anymore, they can’t watch on the screen, but they actually want to listen to it. Or they also want to get the recap in a written form afterwards. So that’s where the connection was all of the other contents, formats and other channels comes in place.

I like the thinking that actually a virtual event doesn’t have to be just a one off, it can perhaps be your series as well. I remember a couple of years ago, I partnered with a few big Mar tech brands to produce a big live stream series that became a book, but I did a live stream for an hour and a half, once every day for five days in a row is that is that something along the lines of what you’re advocating?

It can be that but what I’m definitely advocating even if it is an hour and half that is very, very long for an event. And then you need to keep up the dynamic. And the kind of the rule of thumb is that every 15 minutes or so you need to switch either the speaker or the topic or the way of presentation. So there has to be some change happening, let’s say on screen, the Tech Talk formula of this 18 minute long conversation actually has something in it because that’s the attention span that you can actually keep and listen. And it’s more than enough to convey a message and add value to whoever is listening or watching you right now. I’ve also found that even 10 minutes stretches work quite well, if you really nail down on what you’re talking about. The problem that some of the events do is they will start off with a 15 minute introduction, talking about why this topic is important. If people already tuned in, and they know that it is important, they don’t need to listen about it, they just want to get the content right away. And good speaker, really an expert in their field can share in 10 minutes, that golden nugget of information that will be helpful and can move the needle for someone who’s working in that particular industry.

That’s great advice there as well. And you don’t necessarily have to replicate a traditional conference formats. And because you’re doing it online, you can do it in a very, very different way. So what does that mean, then in terms of why brands do virtual conferences? So what are the main benefits that a brand would do it is it to keep the brand top of mind so that when someone’s ready to make a purchase, then that’s the brand that they’ll consider?

Well, I guess there are certain different benefits actually. And they define why virtual events will not be over once in person comes back. First benefit is the reach, doing virtual you can reach so many more people and many more locations that you would do with in person at really now kind of the sky’s the limit right or timezone is the limit of who can tune in to your events. But again, you can play around with that and repurpose whatever you produce during the live events as the recordings or repurpose in in different formats do also reach people in different countries and different languages and different timezones. That’s one benefits, then the costs, of course, virtual or not for free, they do cost something and if you really want to create a nice experience that will be top notch from the production standpoint of view. And also from the attendee experience, it will cost you quite some money, but it will still be less than an in person event, just because the rental costs for the venue for food for insurance for all of the other small details that add up quite quite a few 1000s on top of your budget. So that’s number two, I would say and then also the content that you can produce through the virtual event that can then fuel all of your other channels that can support you for quite some quite a long time. As a brand, whatever you’re sharing on social media or if you need more content for your blog, or if you need some expert interviews, you can create it all during your events and then use afterwards. So with the virtual events, there has been a was the in person event sorry. You would also create some constants you would record the sessions still on It was not probably used as much. And it did not create that much of the content as a virtual now,

I’m a Johnson saying in the chat, the golden rule of all la marketing promotion needs to be dw mt Don’t waste my time. The first step of optimization is always to optimise the delivery of what people want. How do you establish what people want to begin with and what content you should be delivering as part of your virtual event?

Well, as people talk to people, you really need to stay on top of things. That’s been my advice and talk to your customers. Because if you’re a brand, and you’re producing the events, you want your customers to enjoy it, and you want proby the people who are likely to become your customers to come to it, therefore you need to understand what they want. Actually, people really like talking about their interests, or what they would like to see. So going out there, asking people running service surveys, is a really good way to get the understanding of what’s kind of cooking in the industry, following the kind of hot topics and trends as well, because that’s what people care about as of right now. But then also doing some thinking and some work on how you tie it all with what your brand delivers. And how it ties with your values is your value proposition or what is coming up on your roadmap, maybe.

And it’s sometimes a lot easier to get people to sign up than it is to get people to attend to watch the virtual event. So how do you convert people from being interested in attending your event to actually attend it? Because I’ve seen attendance rates as little as 10% of people that actually sign up? And that’s a bit sad. You think that loads of people are gonna sign up on what’s your virtual event? So how do you encourage that?

Yeah, that’s truly sad. If it’s 10%, that’s so much work, just gets wasted?

Well, what percentage should we use aiming for?

Well, I’m kind of 40 to 50% attendance rate for free virtual events seems like a healthy rate. If you go above 50, and 6070, you’re doing good job. And then if we talk about some more exclusive experiences, maybe like a VIP event or event for your customers or prospects, then it can be as high as 80 90%. But the key to all of this is the proper communication with your attendees. And also kind of delivering the message of why it’s valuable to attend life. What what there will be unique kind of you need to create this fear of missing out, right. So people understand that they want to join that they need to join, because otherwise they just won’t get the value out of it.

So what are a couple of examples of things that you’ve seen work in the past as reasons why people would want to join live,

one of the easiest, probably ways that works is so to say, sharing the responsibility or like the even rather ownership of the event with the registered attendees. So if you ask people for their input for the agenda, who they want to see as speakers, what questions they want to ask what topics they want to see covered, and then you share it on social or a message them actually that Oh, based on your inputs, we’ve added this speaker to the agenda, or we will be covering this topic, or during our brainstorming session, we would love you to be a featured attendee into actually come on screen and share your experience. They feel heard and they feel that organisers care about delivering the value specifically for them. That is extra piece of work. And that’s takes more time than Normally, you know, just said the webinar was your own speaker from the company. landing page from zoom. That’s it done. Yeah, you can go that way. Or you can go a little bit more complex way, but get more attendees actually to feel valued and to join life. That’s one way. Second ways I mentioned communication, what I find it’s very important to have the real person talking to the attendees before the event. So all of my emails before the event they go from me or from maybe the moderator, if it’s a well known face, from our company of overall in the industry, they will be sharing what is going to happen during the event, what to expect or what to prepare. And my kind of formula is send the reminder like the confirmation upon the registration. That also has to be personal, not just the standard automatic passage and then connects 10 days to one week before the events one day before the event and then on the day. That’s actually the matter of experimentation 3015, or even five minutes before the event, depending on complexity of your login process, which I hope is not complex, and you just use magic links. That’s the way to get more live attendees as well, just to make the login process easier, that’s works. That works really well, because you stay on top of people’s inbox, you stay on top of their calendar. And they also feel connected to you, especially if you kind of started the conversation asked for their feedback in your emails.

We also touched on the importance of using content elsewhere content afterwards. So what are some examples of great uses of the content that you create as a result of the virtual events used elsewhere.

So apart from the video recordings, which is quite an obvious thing to produce, but you can also repurpose this videos, not just store them on your website as on demand content, but you can actually cut them in pieces and add subtitles, create short clips, to use across your social media, or maybe share with customers or if it actually had the customer presenting, you can almost use it as a video foundation for a case study or some other interviews. So really, there are lots of ways that you can play around with that. My advice here for the proper repurposing, especially the video content, kind of create the events and the live session with repurpose in mind. So you need to understand what bits and pieces of it you will be able to use afterwards. So that you don’t end up with a session of 20 minutes and you’re like, well, it only goes as a whole, you can’t really cut out anything. So maybe planning out in advance some phrases or something like this. And then also coming back to different formats, you can always extract the audio, or actually recorded at once and then use it as a podcast. If you have a virtual event has lots of serious you can even create like mini posca series based on that event. Specifically, it will be a way to drive more people to your website and potentially explore are there materials but also a way to promote the next edition of your event because people who found your podcast and listen to it and subscribe, maybe they will be more eager to attend the event live next time, because they feel the value that you deliver. And then also the written contents. And there, you’re unlimited in the ways you want to use it, you can create the blog post, it can be a wrap up of the whole event, it can be an interview based on the session that you had with someone and you just use the transcript and adapted to the written format. Or you can actually create the ebook based on the key takeaways from the event or on some inputs and kind of ideas created during some brainstorming sessions. One kind of small pro tip here in order for you to repurpose the content after the event, you need to make sure that you’re good from the legal perspective and that you include the repurposing of content in multiple formats, after the events in the agreements that you signed with your speakers, so that you don’t end up in lots of great content, but no agreements to actually use even the recording of it.

While that is a great pro tip, as you say there as well. So if you get them to sign something like saying that they’re happy for you to use the content elsewhere afterwards, does that mean that you could also potentially use a video clip of them in an ad and a paid out as well? Or do you have to say explicitly that you intend to do that?

To me, you have to say that explicitly. And if the clip is so good that you want to use it in a paid ad, I would actually circle back and ensure that everybody’s good, and if needed to get the agreement for that. Because the events are all about relationships, and it’s very easy to kind of shatter them. We don’t want that to happen. So I think it’s important to get all this agreements, even if you feel like all that would be too much to ask right now. But we want to use it later. And maybe we’ll agree afterwards or we’ll we’ll try and see what happens. That’s can be a way to lose this person as your speaker and as an expert who is ready to work with you in the future.

That’s that’s a very good answer, because it’s all very well to legally be okay. And to say, look, you signed it to say that I could use it in any way in any way. But actually, if they didn’t intend that really, then you’re Potentially burning that relationship. And that could be more damaging to you than the value of an ad that you get out of over the short term. So great, great thought there. So let’s segue into part two of our discussion. So it’s now time for Alexander’s thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE, so Alexandra, share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value the moment and why that tools important for you, I

guess, I will go with notion that may not be that secret. But it’s not that popular among marketers, I think I know, lots of software engineers and product managers use it. But I found immense value in it. At parcela. We use it as a kind of company wide database, and we have everything in its notes from the meetings or planning. I have my events, calendar, the whole process, it adds up a lot of transparency. It can become complex, but as soon as you understand the structure, then it’s huge value, because everything is interconnected. And it’s just one place where you can find everything.

David Bain 21:03
Brilliant. And what’s the website address for them?

Aleksandra Panyukhina 21:06
It’s notion dot s Oh,

superb stuff. Okay, well, moving on from something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use that as NEXT ON THE LIST. So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon?

How am I say I love that voice and the voice?

David Bain 21:23
That’s me just

Aleksandra Panyukhina 21:25
incredible. Well, I’m the tool that I’m really looking forward to bring on board and start using as golf cars.io. That’s events platform that has been designed specifically for b2b marketers. So all of the analytics, the different formats of the sessions that you can run and the way it works, and integrates with different other tools that has been designed for as marketers in mind. So it’s pretty helpful. The team is really cool. So they’re happy to work on some of the needs that you might have. I’m quite excited about using it and running all of our events on it

roughly Okay, well, let us know how you get on with this. But let’s move on to this or that route. So this is the quick response. Ryan 10. quick questions here. Just 2 rules. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready?

Yes, I am.

David Bain 22:23
Tick Tock or Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn,

Aleksandra Panyukhina 22:28
or LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast,

podcast, traffic or leads.

That’s a harsh one. And when I say the closed one deals, and this let’s see both

David Bain 22:45
paid search or SEO,

Aleksandra Panyukhina 22:48
SEO,

ads or influencers, influencers, Google ads or Facebook ads?

Depends, you mentioned about this answer.

David Bain 23:02
Oh, that’s getting right, isn’t it? Okay. No more it depends. Email marketing or chat marketing,

Aleksandra Panyukhina 23:10
email marketing,

more tech stack or all in one platform.

Mar tech stack,

and one to one or scale?

One to one.

Okay, I will have to change at the beginning. I don’t like to use the word board or the pins more than once. Yeah. So I think the one that intrigued me was traffic or leads, that’s the one that you seem to struggle with quite a bit. Why is that?

Well, because neither defines the actual business outcome and the revenue that you’re gonna get at the ends, like if you’re driving tonnes of traffic, but your website is really bad. And it’s not converting, you’re not adding anything, you know, adding value, you’re only spending budget on ads, probably. And if you’re talking about the leads, leads, kind of off its own, do not guarantee the outcome either, like if we talk about MPLS, you can get 1000. But if your conversion rate is less than 1%, here ended up with nothing. So it’s really more about the outcomes to me than just about this, like your it’s not about having huge top of the funnel, but it’s actually probably kind of making it very equalised. Like if you look at the top of the funnel, middle and what converts at the end, so you don’t want it to be really huge and top and then really narrow down at the bottom. But you’d rather look at how to improve the quality or of what comes in.

So are you talking about supply What really matters is just profitability. Yeah. Okay.

Unknown Speaker 24:49
Let’s move on to the $10,000 question. If

Aleksandra Panyukhina 24:53
I was to give you $10,000 and you had to spend over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you You measure success,

I would double down on the thought leadership of all of the employees and a kind of a your personal brand on social media, and particularly on the platform where all of your audiences, so I would kind of run the internal bootcamp of people learning how to use best, the platform, how to create best content, that will also position them as experts, and raise more awareness of the company. And I would use this $10,000 to maybe invest in some equipment to improve how our live streams look. And also use it as an incentive for people who drive most of the kind of awareness mentions impressions and engagement on their posts, especially if we’re limited was a few days that might be challenging to do, because it takes a little bit time. But I hope we can negotiate with you to $10,000 and the timing, and so on. I’m pretty good at negotiating. That’s what you do is Vince.

So you started off with the phrase thought leadership, if I basically brand that you’re talking to hasn’t really produced a significant volume of thought leadership content before and they’re not really sure where to start off with how do you decide what theatre thought leadership content to actually produce initially?

Well, there are, I think, two ways to go about this thought leadership to not to print it, because if you pretend that doesn’t help, you have to be the expert in what you’re talking about. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel natural, and whoever is actually an expert will feel it. So in this case, you can be basically acts as a platform for the other thought leaders. So you can provide them the platform to speak up, share their thoughts and kind of build up that community. So this way you serve as the platform. And if you have a thought leader within the your company, or maybe an expert who is ready to work with you may be really like influencer marketing already, or they’re joining your company. That would be another way to go. So really attract or build up their expertise internally?

And is this just long term brand awareness that you’re trying to build up? Or is it possible to actually drive sales? As a result of doing this? For instance? Is it possible to publish thought leadership content on Facebook? And then maybe retarget people with a view to beacon customers? Or are they the intention simply brand authority?

Well, there’s definitely a way to connect the dots and use that to drive to drive revenue, basically, at the end of the day, because what it takes like for people to actually talk with you, and trust your solution, if you’re my own solution provider is to understand that you know what you’re doing, you’re not just in this business, to, to sell but not deliver value, but you actually specialise on this, you know what you’re doing, you are respected in this in the community of experts of thought leaders, they are ready to work with you, you yourself really produce interesting contents. And yeah, then there is this trust, and they are more open also to connect and talk with some of your representatives, and also to consider your solution. And when they will be maybe even presenting your solution internally, your thought leadership will be an additional argument in favour off choosing you because these guys, they know what they’re doing, or they have, they will be able to actually help us navigate it. It won’t just be the solution. But it will also be the expertise that comes visit

because you definitely demonstrate thought leadership when talking about virtual events on LinkedIn. I’m seeing your posts all the time. And so that’s that’s certainly wonderful that you’re doing there as well. How often do you publish posts on LinkedIn? And how do you decide what to write?

Well, I publish a couple times a week, sometimes almost every day. So it’s at least three times. And sometimes it can be even like six times depending on how much inspiration I have, and how much time I have as well. So what I try is I think my this golden niche of what I post and what resonates most with people are very practical tips of what you can do to really improve your performance or improve your next event or maybe some ideas to consider something that is not very common. So I don’t specialise on inspirational posts, like you can do it around the virtual events, but I’d rather say okay, what type of For new swag you can actually use was virtual events or here is the list of companies who can create, like run the direct mail campaign for your event and deliver everything on time. So this is something that this is information that I get from my own research. So it’s quite unique. And I guess that’s also why it resonates with people. So I do not usually share like their articles, or something else. It’s usually my own observations or my own findings.

Lovely. Yeah. And the fact that their native posts, I guess, LinkedIn will give them more organic reach as well, you’ll get more interaction from that as well. But but great job from your thought leadership, let’s finish off by focusing on someone else who deserves it. So that is a MAGICAL MARKETER. So who’s an up-and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

I would name my kind of follow events, marketing kaulig, from informa director of global events, there, Catherine franksen, Catherine is doing amazing job was running the events in forma, but also kind of elevating the importance of events and events as a marketing channel. So she’s my counterpart on LinkedIn, and I truly enjoy her posts. So if you like what I write, I would really really recommend checking out content that Catherine creates, I think it’s great and it’s really connects the dots of events and marketing, which I love

your counterpart, never your competitor.

Never. Well, we’ll see for that, you know, never say never, people never say

look, this was episode 240 Digital Marketing Radio. We’re Alexandra Penny kina from parser lab shared wonderful tips about virtual events, including how to get attendees involved in the production of your event. If you do that you could increase your percentage people actually attend events as well. The fact that you should email personally and tell people what to expect expect by attending the event use magic links make it easy for people to attend the events as well. plan to use subtitles on your content. Once you repurpose your content, you short clips afterwards, you can plan to include things like case studies, as a result of producing your event there as well. You shared mirro.com, and notion.so. As your SECRET SOFTWARE. Go Casta IO as your NEXT ON THE LIST and Catherine Franks and as your MAGICAL MARKETER, everything you mentioned today, Alexandra will be in the show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. And of course in the description over on YouTube. I was Andrew what’s the best way for someone to say hi to you on social media.

As you mentioned, I’m very active on LinkedIn. So that’s the best platform to connect with me.

Super Bowl I will include that in the show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. I’ve been your host David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com wherever you’re watching, wherever you’re listening, please let us know what you thought feedback is fantabulous. So make sure you’re subscribed of course subscribe on the YouTube channel subscribe on whatever podcast plat forum you happen to love as well. Until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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