Networking is more than just a moment; it’s an opportunity to build lasting relationships that can elevate your brand and drive real results. 

In this webinar, we’ll explore how to design networking experiences that engage and resonate with your audience, whether you’re hosting a single event or creating a series of gatherings. We’ll dive into the strategies that make networking effective and authentic, ensuring every connection counts. 

Key Takeaways:

• Strategies for designing impactful networking experiences tailored to various audiences and event types. 
• Insights on what drives audience engagement, how to fulfill their needs, and ways to measure success beyond attendance.
• Best practices for representing your brand and making impactful connections that last.

The post Networking Events Done Right appeared first on American Marketing Association.

The key to all of this? Event engagement. It’s not enough to know how many attendees you’ve pulled into your event. A truly effective strategy requires maximizing engagement and acting on your treasure trove of engagement data to boost ROI.

3 Ways Boost Event Engagement

Achieving maximum event engagement requires honing three key areas of your events: content, production, and interaction. When you focus on enhancing these components, your attendee engagement will follow.

1. Get Strategic with Your Content

The content you choose to communicate with attendees is crucial at every stage. From convincing prospects to attend to keeping them engaged during and after your event, content really is king.

To ensure your content is capturing and keeping attendees’ attention, keep in mind what your audience wants. Tailor your content to suit your target audience’s interests and pain points, and keep content delivery in mind when building your event.

A great way to shape your event? Pre- and post-event surveys. Leverage surveys to find out what your audience is interested in, how they like to learn and engage with content, and what you can do to keep their attention.

2. Don’t Skimp on Production

Unfortunately, great content is meaningless without the production quality to back it up. The production quality determines whether you have a captivated audience or a captive audience.

For most people, a PowerPoint presentation isn’t the most engaging option, but an interactive, tech-heavy session featuring multimedia content and an engaging speaker is sure to win praise.

3. Make Interactivity a Priority

Your attendees want more than to simply attend your event, soak up a lecture or two, and leave. They want an interactive event  that allows them to experience and connect with your content, other attendees, exhibitors and sponsors, and your brand in meaningful ways.

How do you achieve this? Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

• Use engagement tools to encourage active participation in your event, including polls, live chat during sessions, Q&A sessions, breakout rooms, and more. All these tools can be conveniently built into your event management platform.
• Get your attendees networking! Make sure you allocate plenty of time for attendees to network during small group discussions, networking sessions, breakouts, games, dinners, and more. It’s a great way to break up the more serious aspects of your event while keeping attendees completely engaged.
• Keep in touch with attendees through post-event engagement channels. Whatever method you choose – emails, surveys, social media content, community forums, etc. – make sure you’re keeping attendees engaged after your event has wrapped so you can capitalize on all the great momentum achieved during the event.

Keeping Up with Demands for Digital Engagement

More and more, attendees expect a digital-first approach to engagement. From gamification to on-demand content, attendees aren’t being quiet about their demands. Whether you’re hosting an in-person or virtual event, digital engagement must be at the heart of your strategy.

On the bright side, more digital engagement means more opportunities for extended engagement (if you can get it right). Here are three digital trends fueling this transition:

1. Video Reigns Supreme

If you haven’t heard, video as a marketing channel is huge. If events (one of the most effective marketing channels out there) can be effectively combined with this immense appetite for video content, we have a winning engagement strategy.

2. Online Networking Is the New Normal

Online networking and social media platforms have made everyone comfortable with meeting and connecting online.

What does this mean for marketers? A stronger community with more opportunities to meet! Get your attendees talking before, during, and after your events using things like your event’s mobile app, appointment scheduling, and community forums.

3. Continuous Engagement with Digital Experiences

Embracing the trend toward digital means embracing where the physical and digital overlap. More and more, attendees are comfortable with this overlap. From scanning QR codes at the registration desk to connecting their event agenda to their smartwatches, attendees are embracing the power of digital experiences.

Because of this, attendees not only expect but encourage continuous engagement. Keep in touch with your attendees before, during, after, and between your events to maintain your momentum.

Keep them interested in on-demand content, get them into community forums, get them to attend a webinar, and leverage every digital option in your arsenal to keep them engaged and interacting with your brand until your next event.

Want to learn more about how you can boost your event engagement, including tips to help you measure, report on, and optimize engagement? Check out the complete eBook, Dialing Up Your Event Engagement!

The post A Marketer’s Guide to Boosting Event Engagement appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Marketing principles, like most things in life, are ever-changing. While the marketing “funnel” that’s been so popular in recent years is still effective in many ways, account-based marketing (ABM) is gaining traction in the marketing world.

ABM turns the traditional lead generation funnel on its head, taking a more targeted approach to messaging to cultivate more engaged prospects. When coupled with the power of event data, ABM is a game-changer for marketers.

Why Event Data Matters to Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
So, what does ABM have to do with events? The value of events as a marketing channel has been proven time and again.

Events allow for the collection of highly personalized attendee data. This data provides valuable insight into how your target audience is engaging with your brand and what most interests them on a granular level.

Not to mention the power of face-to-face interactions with prospects. “When you pair that potential with the opportunity to create deep engagement and capture first-party intent data in a condensed period, it makes events a must,” according to Myllisa Patterson, VP of Demand Generation at Cvent.

With this wealth of event data at your disposal, marketers can speed up the “awareness-to- purchase” journey by targeting specific accounts with personalized, data-driven messaging that’s characteristic of account-based marketing.

What Is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a strategy that puts your prospects first, taking a targeted approach to generating and nurturing leads. Marketers who successfully implement an ABM strategy begin by identifying accounts within a particular market that have a high potential for conversion.

From this point on, marketers concentrate their resources on these accounts, creating tailor- made content that meets prospects’ unique needs. This allows for more effective nurturing, engaging prospects in a personalized marketing experience that lends itself to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

Tips to Build Your ABM Strategy
Not sure how to implement ABM into your existing marketing strategy? Let’s explore what it takes to craft an effective ABM strategy.

1. Identify and Research Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
When selecting accounts with high conversion potential, begin by identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). This starts with analyzing your existing customers and identifying characteristics common to your greatest success stories. This can include industry, organization size, location, and more.

A great source of this information? Events. Your pool of attendees, including all the great event data you’ve collected about their industries, job roles, and interests, can be invaluable to crafting a picture of your ICP.

You should also expand your ICP search to include the types of prospects your competitors are targeting. From here, begin researching each company on your list to identify key decision- makers and buyer personas, unique pain points and value propositions, and any current solutions they use that you’ll need to compete against.

2. Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams
An effective ABM strategy requires collaboration between marketing and sales. Your sales team will likely have many answers to the questions you’re asking while identifying your ICP, including the needs and challenges of specific prospects and the effectiveness of previous marketing campaigns.

You should also take this opportunity to align with your sales team on your goals and KPIs, allowing you to work together to meet broader organizational goals, provide a more cohesive messaging experience for customers, and craft events that offer a high ROI.

3. Develop Personalized Messaging for Each Account
With your target accounts identified, you can begin developing personalized marketing journeys for each, creating content that speaks directly to each prospect’s unique needs and role in purchasing decisions.

Event data, once again, can be instrumental at this stage. Not only can it help inform your account selection, but it can and should inform your messaging. With the right event data, including resources like attendee surveys, you can use event feedback to inform your messaging and talk to your prospects about topics you know they care about.

With the right tech, you can collect and manage all this data in one place, allowing you to seamlessly move through the process of transforming data into messaging and messaging into conversions.

4. Take a Multi-Channel Approach
As with most marketing strategies, a multi-channel approach is a must for ABM. This can include all the usual suspects, from emails and social media to… you guessed it: events. Not only can you use event data to inform your marketing strategy, but events themselves have the power to nurture prospects and get them closer to the purchasing stage.

With each channel you leverage, your messaging should always be personalized to each account, which will likely mean creating unique content for each channel. This can be a hefty time commitment, so it’s important that you’re targeting the right accounts with the right messaging.

5. Design Your Events Around Your ABM Strategy
As noted, your messaging should be unique to each prospect. But when you’re creating event communications, how can you personalize content for every attendee? It comes down to the power of your event tech.

With the right tech by your side, you can craft event marketing materials with unique messaging for specific audience segments. This can include:
• Creating a personalized experience for different registration types
• Crafting promotional messaging for specific attendees based on their registration data
• Promoting event experiences and content that will interest particular attendees
• Ensuring post-event follow-up content is personalized to attendees’ experiences during the event

By adopting an ABM mindset while designing your events, you can ensure that you’re targeting attendees strategically, leading them closer to the buying stage. All the while, you’ll be mining that event data for use in future outreach.

Testing and Optimizing Your ABM Approach
As with any marketing strategy, you’ll need to measure your success with ABM and work on optimizing your approach. This can require pressure testing some of your messaging or marketing channels to see what’s working (or not).

Keep your marketing and sales KPIs in mind when evaluating your tactics. Conversion rates, revenue generated, event registrations, and more can be analyzed to determine how well your ABM strategy is performing.

Different messaging, channels, offers, or event types may resonate better with different accounts. It’s up to you to stay diligent in testing and optimizing your ABM strategy and ensuring you’re leveraging the right data – including event data – to inform your tactics.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage event data to maximize your account-based management strategy?

Check out this on-demand webinar, Your ABM Strategy & Event Data: A Match Made in Heaven, for insights from the event experts at Cvent.

The post A Guide to Boosting Your ABM Strategy With Event Data appeared first on American Marketing Association.

If you have not reevaluated your virtual event strategy since the onset of the pandemic, you may be missing out on the enormous opportunity to connect with your target audience, build brand awareness, and drive better conversion through your marketing funnel. Perceptions of what’s possible with hosting virtual events and webinars have changed over the past few years. At the onset of the pandemic and the closure of in-person events, organizations scrambled to find virtual solutions to reach their audiences safely, while continuing to meet business objectives. Whether it was using an existing virtual events solution purchased by their IT department, attempting to use a virtual meeting solution to reach large audiences, or selecting the most popular brand around, marketers have come to learn that there are many other requirements for creating an effective virtual experience that most pre-pandemic event platforms cannot support.

Today, webinars, virtual events, and hybrid experiences play an even bigger role in how companies build awareness, launch products, generate leads, and engage customers. In a recent BlueJeans survey, 88% of respondents agreed that the future of events is hybrid, for both attendees and presenters.  It’s now up to marketers to identify the best delivery method for each event, whether it’s a corporate announcement, sales webinar, training, conference, or customer event.

As you are looking to level-up your virtual event and webinar strategy, make sure you are asking these 5 questions to ensure you have the right platform in place to achieve the maximum return on your investment. 

How easy is it to join an event?

As a basic rule, participants must be able to join your event fast and without any hassle.   Requiring attendees to download a desktop or mobile app is a thing of the past and creates an unnecessary barrier to participate. Send out invitations and gather attendee data prior to the event and select a platform with a browser-based viewing experience to let them join with just one click.

If you would like your event to reach a broader audience, consider streaming it to social platforms like Facebook or YouTube, or consider embedding the live or recorded event onto your website for a fully branded experience, making it easy for a viewer to join and engage with your content.

How interactive is the platform for audiences?

If attendees are willing to invest time in attending your presentation, make sure they’ll have an engaging session from start to finish. The outdated, one-to-many webinar model no longer commands the attention of a large audience. Consider an any-to-many communication experience that brings all active participants into the conversation.

Webinars and virtual events are especially valuable when participants are focused and engrossed in the content. Create a healthy and engaging dialogue with them and capture their feedback via event chats, Q&As, and polls. Doing this can give you a wealth of data that you can use to identify leads and follow up with top candidates.

 How easy is it to manage an event?

Without a doubt, your ability to manage your event with confidence and provide customized features to each participant segment is critical to an event’s success. With a world-class platform, you have visibility into all audience and presenter requests, and you can control what attendees see and hear — features that legacy webinar products typically don’t provide.

Choose a platform that offers up to four distinct user experience options: attendee, presenter, moderator, and producer. Customized features, settings, and interfaces enable presenters to deliver content, attendees to consume it, producers to manage on-screen transitions, and moderators to control all communications and event logistics.

Does it provide data insights into attendees and automation for capturing leads?

Replacing your old-school webinar platform with a modern solution can provide you with analytics of your event and attendees — and, importantly, insights to generate valuable sales leads. Through polls, you can send product-specific questions to evaluate buyer behavior, enabling you to qualify leads in real time.You should also be able to capture leads by gating your event with a registration form. After the event, embed the recording on a gated landing page so you can continue to capture leads and disseminate the event content.

Post-event analytics, the event recording, transcripts of chats, and other details are critical to maximize post-event follow up. To gain additional insights into the attentiveness of your participants during an event, consider a solution that comes with an attendee engagement monitor. This type of tracking can allow you to measure audience attentiveness based on duration, participation, and focus. The results can be extremely useful in helping you improve your events and follow up with the most engaged leads. Ensure your platform can integrate with your customer outreach applications and CRM for easy lead scoring and pipeline growth.

Are there “wow” factors?

Does your webinar look like a virtual meeting with a powerpoint being shared? If so, it’s time to step up your production quality.  Having an event solution that comes with advanced production tools puts you at a great advantage. It allows you to create stunning, high-quality video content that engages your audiences, elevates your content, and puts your brand at the center.

It can be expensive to hire a production team and integrate multiple AV solutions together for TV-quality broadcasts though, putting an already tight virtual event budget at risk of exploding. By using an all-in-one solution that brings together the best of live video, content sharing, and streaming capabilities into a single, easy-to-use service, you can save time, money, and labor resources to create a production-grade event that will wow your audience and elevate your brand.

Transform Your Events With a Superior Video Streaming Solution

In this era of virtual and hybrid events, attendees are expecting more. Ease of participation, engaging content, and high-quality broadcasting are musts if you want to create memorable events.

So break away from worn-out webinar products and embrace a modern, virtual events solution that includes production tools that will wow your audience. The best of these solutions support flexible user environments, provide engaging participation features, and give moderators total control.

BlueJeans Events is a webinar and virtual events solution with easy-to-use production tools that helps companies engage audiences and elevate their brand while generating customer insights to drive the business forward. Find out how this globally trusted virtual events platform can transform your webinars and virtual events today.

The post How to Level-up your Virtual Events & Webinars in a Post-Covid Era appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Historically, events have proven to be a key marketing activity. In fact, 74% of marketers agree that events were their most important demand generation tactic (Forrester Research).

As we move towards more live events post-pandemic, one of the largest strategic business development and lead generation channels for your organization has undergone a digital transformation.

Despite the effectiveness of events like trade shows, marketers are only scratching the surface of the possible ROI—both for themselves and their organizations.

Strategies for the New Trade Show Landscape

Measuring satisfaction is a key performance indicator (KPI) for event marketers. And while this qualitative feedback can provide some insight into the success of your events, you must elevate your strategies to clearly demonstrate financial return if you are to maximize the impact of your events—and get recognized for your efforts.

“What gets measured, gets managed,” so the saying goes. Taking your program (and impact) to the next level means harnessing quantitative data, in concert with qualitative feedback, to clearly understand what is working and why, as well as how to optimize.

Now, let’s look at the other KPIs that will help you truly get a full 360-degree view of your trade show.

Essential Trade Show KPIs for the Modern Marketer

We’ve boiled this down to a short list. But tracking and reporting on these KPIs should give you a clearer and more comprehensive view of the effectiveness of your trade shows. And the best part? It’ll allow you to better prove the value of your programs (and demonstrate your personal impact).

• Appointments: the total number of appointments at your trade show is an effective KPI. Why? Because this clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of your pre-event marketing activities, your sales team’s effectiveness, and overall messaging and event strategy.
• Booth Traffic: volume is key here. Check-ins provide clear insights into your booth and sales team effectiveness. We know there are other factors at play (attendance, booth location) but when comparing total check-ins to qualified leads, this helps you understand the quality of the show’s attendee pool.
• MQLs/SQLs: qualified leads are a true marker that help provide insight into the quality of the overall trade show attendees and are the first step in determining your overall ROI.
• Opportunities and Pipeline:  as marketers, we love to show how many opps we’ve generated for the sales team. They provide insight into the business potential of the contacts made as well as the effectiveness of your follow-up.  
• Revenue Generated: a favorite of the C-Suite. This demonstrates the quality of your opportunities and the top-line financial impact of the events. It’s critical to track revenue generated so that you can measure ROI.
• ROI: Return-on-investment is the magic number. The cost of your event compared to the revenue generated. You may also choose to include qualitative insights in your reports (quotes from sales team) to help paint a picture of softer ROI—such as brand awareness.

Using Tech Integrations to Power Your Efforts

Technology integrations act as sort of a super-supplement to your existing tech. Their impact can be all the difference in the world. Companies that integrate their event management, marketing, and sales technologies can potentially see a massive increase in revenue versus those with disconnected technology.

As you review your current set-up regarding the tech you own and integrations, it’s important to invest in and integrate platforms that support key sales and marketing activities — scheduling, promotion, follow-up, etc. — for pre-, during-, and post-show activities. We’ve identified a few key integrations that will support your efforts:

• Customer Relationship Management—CRM: This acts as your key hub for all customer data and enables effective tracking and follow-up.
• Event Management Platform: An integrated, all-in-one platform to manage budgets, resources, reporting, content, and beyond.
• Lead Capture: a consistent, easy to use, lead capture tool that is used at all your event ensures all leads are captured and tracked.
• Appointment-Setting: Find a single tool to set and manage your trade show booth visits and other appointments. This will drastically reduce administration and increases lead volumes.
• Marketing Automation Platform (MAP): in a time of low staffing, automating key marketing activities is critical. This tech also allows for a more personalized, relevant nurture steam that increases opportunities and revenue.

Booth Differentiators

Sometimes, all the booths at a trade show remind us of the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In a word, “overwhelming” to attendees. But our goal as marketers is to overcome the overwhelming and stand out amongst our rivals on the floor.

Here are a few tips to consider as you plan out your booth strategy:

• Be clear. Clearly tell people what you do and how you help so that they know they should stop and pay attention.
• Be different. In a world where attendees visit only 14% of all booths, standing out and making an impact are the difference between driving traffic in droves and blending in with all the rest.
• Use a theme. In a crowded marketplace, using a theme throughout your communications makes you easier to remember.
• Use storytelling. Stories allow us to experience things without experiencing them. When we use a story to sell, we help people experience the new world they’ll create when they invest in our products and services.
• Create a temporary workspace. The average attendee doesn’t spend much time at any one booth. By turning your booth into a temporary workspace you’ll extend that time and your conversation.
• Have a call to action (CTA). Don’t leave attendees guessing as to how they should interact with you. Have a clear call to action to ensure there is a next step.

Post Trade Show Follow-Up

Post show follow-up is where you transform opportunities into dollars. It’s also where many organizations fail to produce the return they deserve. Most leads generated at events are never contacted. What’s worse, most companies wait way too long to make its first attempt to call a lead. Categorizing your leads (A, B, C, etc.) will help you prioritize “hot” vs. “warm” and “cold.”

Categorizing is extremely important as data show that many times the first company to present a solution usually wins the deal. Regardless of other factors. The simple A-B-C three-tiered strategy will help ensure timely, personalized, and relevant follow-up that will help you win more deals.

Conclusion

Optimizing and exhibiting the value of your trade shows has only grown more difficult and complex. By honing your strategies, employing technology solutions, and following the steps outlined above, your marketing efforts will take a giant leap in the right direction.

Because, by clearly demonstrating that your events are driving sales and contributing to the overall business goals, you’ll be in an optimal position to get recognized (and rewarded) for your trade show ROI.

Read more about how to power your trade shows in Cvent’s “Ultimate Guide to Trade Show Marketing.”

The post Next Gen Trade Shows: Maximize Your Opportunities appeared first on American Marketing Association.

In the new event landscape, marketers have many opportunities to create and capture value. Why? Because their opportunities have been multiplied across event formats. Meetings, conferences, and trade shows can now be virtual, in-person, or hybrid. While each of these  each format has its benefits and limitations.

The key is understanding what attendees and sponsors want out of an event (value). That way, you can maximize ROI through direct revenue like tickets sales and sponsorships and other forms of ROI like sales pipeline, brand equity, and knowledge transfer. Value-based ticketing and pricing methods will help you deliver on the promise of creating real value for attendees and sponsors. Now it’s time to apply these lessons to your events program.

Knowing Your Event Formats and Their Potential

Virtual events: Virtual events have transformed the industry and can provide exponential reach and scale. They are unique and powerful in that they can attract attendees from a variety of backgrounds, roles, and functions—and, best of all, thousands of people can attend these events from all across the globe. They also offer organizations the opportunity to extend the value of event content beyond the event itself. While the audience may be larger, virtual events have less depth of engagement than in-person events. People may multitask, direct connections can be harder to forge, and attention spans are limited. The audience may be less willing to pay for the event since their commitment to the experience is lower than if they were to attend in person.

In-person events:  In-person events are a tried-and true-format and will continue to be a staple in event programs. As long as people are able to meet in person, they will. They foster meaningful relationships with and among attendees and sponsors, strengthen relationships that can lead to stronger business partnerships, create lasting connections between people who share an experience at the same venue. In-person events offer greater depth of engagement with a more limited breadth of engagement—as they are limited only to those who can make the trip. The audience is typically more willing to pay for a ticket to attend in person for the depth of engagement the event will provide.

Hybrid events: Hybrid events provide planners the best of both worlds. Combining virtual and in-person formats offers a depth of engagement in person while reaching a broad audience virtually. The result is a flexible experience for any attendee, with more ticketing options. The challenge is to deliver value to all attendee groups since virtual and in-person experiences will be unique. Producing effective hybrid events increases complexity and requires more resources.

At the same time, planners can tailor event content to each audience to maximize both engagement and ROI. Hybrid events also provide flexible ticketing options depending on the experience an individual chooses. For example, some in-person attendees of a hybrid event may be willing to pay a higher price for access to on-demand content to complement their onsite experience.

Now that you understand the benefits and limitations of virtual, in-person, and hybrid events, you can think about finding and creating value for attendees, sponsors, and your organization.

The Ticketing & Pricing Question

All of the new event formats make this ticketing & pricing question a bit more complex, it requires thinking beyond actual ticket sales to maximize value and ROI of your events.

To effectively price and ticket your events, you must first define their value—for attendees, sponsors, and the organization itself. And as we mentioned earlier, the value props for all of these event types differ.

You can then maximize that value by mapping it to relevant attendee, sponsor, and organizational goals. Maximizing value leads to higher ROI for your organization and a more rewarding experience for your audiences.

Many organizations focus on ticket sales as the key driver of ROI, but ticket sales are just one slice of a much larger ROI pie. Here are five benefits that contribute to event ROI:

• Direct revenue
• Attributed revenue
• Attributed sales pipeline
• Brand equity
• Knowledge exchange

When assessing the full value of your events, consider all the benefits they provide to the organization along with the costs. There are many things beyond direct revenue that impact how much money an event will make. It can take time for these to come to fruition, but it’s important to include them in ROI.

A Final Thought

While you can highlight event value in objective terms (number and type of sessions, speakers, exhibitors), what matters most is how your stakeholders perceive the event. Imagine yourself in the shoes of attendees, sponsors, and internal stakeholders. By asking about their needs and desires before and after the event, you will discover how your event can help them succeed and achieve their goals.

When considering event format and value, answer the following questions with as much detail as possible:

• What will attendees get out of the event?
• What are the benefits to sponsors?
• How does this event bring value to the business or organization?

The path to new revenue streams and “hidden ROI” in the new event landscape can be difficult to navigate without the right resources.

For more about finding success in this new era of events, we invite you to download Cvent’s new eBook, How to Ticket and Price Virtual, Hybrid, and In-person Events.

Key Takeaways

The post Ticketing and Pricing Events in 2022: Your Guide to ROI appeared first on American Marketing Association.

In this report, you can learn:

The post Optimize Your Technology And Strategy For A Virtual And Hybrid Events-Dominated Future appeared first on American Marketing Association.

This is it: The moment you and your fans have been waiting for. It’s officially time to launch your show! 

You’ve probably spent a ton of time, money, and effort creating your show—but you’re not quite done yet. Before you go live, you need to have a plan in place for your show’s launch and promotion. A huge part of that plan is making sure to target the specific audience who will be most interested in your series and what it covers.

Let’s break down the work that goes into promoting a video series or podcast, from launch and beyond. This topic is pretty top of mind for us as we’ve been through this entire checklist quite recently with the launch of our latest series, Show Business.

Alert! Want access to our shareable checklist? Register for Show Business to access over two hours of video content and several free show planning resources!

Plan the scale and initial goal of your launch

On a scale of pencil dive to cannonball, how big of a splash are you trying to make with your show’s launch?

Poolside analogies aside, the scale of your launch is the first thing you’ll want to nail down before you get into the specifics of your show’s promotion strategy. Here you’ll want to consider things like budget, resources, and bandwidth and how each of those will impact your launch goals.

Speaking of goals—what exactly are you trying to achieve right out of the gate? A large launch designed to reach as many relevant eyeballs as possible in order to drive leads will require a different approach than a soft launch intended to test the waters and gather feedback. Knowing what your primary initial goal is will help you as you plan.

Here are a few major things to keep in mind:

“Your release cadence will impact how you promote your show. If you launch your entire series at once for your audience to binge, then you’re going to want to promote the entire series. Think about the broad messages and what you’ll be talking about to get people excited to watch all of it. If you’re doing a release cadence that’s ongoing, you’ll want to promote the series as a whole—but also the specific episode that’s available now, as well as a teaser for what’s coming next.”

Dan Mills, Head of Wistia Studios

Tip: Planning your show’s release can be tricky—but we’ve got you covered. Check out our guide to episodic content release to set your strategy.

Promote your show across owned properties

Once you launch your series, it’s time to flip on all the switches, set the phasers to blast, and go all-in on your show. So, how are you going to do that? Start with your owned properties.

Website

When someone visits your website, they should know immediately that you’ve launched a show. You should give your show top-level placement, marquee billing across your website. This might include a banner or pop-up on the homepage, launching a dedicated webpage for your content, and adding the show to your navigation menu so folks can easily find it. 

Blog

Next up is your blog. If you run an active blog, you should create posts that support the launch of your series. Introduce the series with an announcement post, interview guests about their experience, go behind the scenes, and share content that will spark conversations with your audience. And don’t forget to add video to your blog posts! This can be a great place to repurpose existing clips and snippets to introduce readers to your show.

Email

Finally, we can’t forget about email as a promotional tool. You’ve got to let your existing customers and fans know that your show exists. Send an announcement to relevant email lists; many times, this is a warm audience who will be excited to learn about what you’ve got going on.

You should also continue building a dedicated list of subscribers. One cool way to do this is by collecting emails using teaser content for your series. You can reach out to this new list when you have new episodes or even sweeten the pot with exclusive content. Whatever you do, and no matter who you’re emailing, make sure you provide value and put a smile on their face with the content you’re sending them.

Maintain ongoing show promotion

Now that your show is out into the world, it’s time to focus on ongoing promotion and audience engagement. Here are a few of our favorite channels to consistently promote show content.

Social Media

Social media is a natural place to promote your show. Social platforms are highly engaging, which pairs nicely with video and audio content. And many platforms offer advanced targeting capabilities, which make it easy to get in front of a niche audience.

However, you’ll want to be mindful of how much you give away on social. Take a note from the Netflix promotion playbook; the company generally leverages social only to create initial awareness and drives people back to the company website to learn more and watch the full trailers.

“The way to get the best of both worlds and really leverage your social media accounts is to use platforms like YouTube and Instagram for your clips and trailers and then drive your audience to your website where your audience lives. This way, the shorter content, your clips and trailers, do all the hard work for you. By not requiring a huge attention span on social media, you’re not losing audiences who might otherwise drop off, but you’re getting the full value of a long engagement in an environment that you control on your website.”

Phil Nottingham, Brand Strategist

On your actual launch day, be sure to go BIG on social media. We recommend making your channels all about your new show on launch day—and even for a few days after to keep the momentum going! This lets your audience know how excited you are about the launch and keeps your new show on their radar.

Email Marketing

After your initial email announcement, focus on building and nurturing a dedicated subscriber list. As we said earlier, you can reach out to these people when you have new episodes. Just make sure that the content you’re sending is always relevant and of interest to them.

“Behavior-based drip campaigns are especially helpful if you drop all of your episodes at once. Automation helps you to keep track of where viewers are in the series to ensure you’re sending relevant and timely content.”

If you have a marketing automation solution, you can take promotion a step further by feeding your video data into your contact database. This will allow you to set up behavior-based drip campaigns to encourage viewers to finish your show. For example, you could set up a workflow that emails people to complete an episode if they watched less than 75%. Or you could set up a workflow that nudges people to watch the next episode if they finished an episode and dropped off.

Sales Enablement

Set your team up for success with dedicated sales enablement materials. This could be as simple as a one-pager with high-level messaging, top takeaways, and sample copy for folks to easily share the show across their own channels.

To prepare for Show Business, we held a virtual training session with our entire sales team to walk everyone through our full promotion plan. This helped them understand the customer journey and better understand what their prospects and customers would be experiencing. We also answered questions they had upfront to better prepare them for conversations.

Paid Advertising

If you’ve got a little bit of budget to play with, experiment with paid campaigns to drive folks into your show experience. Advertising can be a great way to reach net-new audiences or to re-engage existing viewers through retargeting.

“One of the best ways to do this is through display ads that are hyper-targeted to the folks that you’re trying to get to watch your show. We did this when we developed our show Rev Ops and Hops, whose audience we didn’t have in our email database. By using display and social ads, we were able to track an audience to a piece of content and start targeting a very specific niche.

As a result of these efforts, we were able to pick up an entirely new audience that we could sell our products to but also who could consume our content, and we never would have been able to do that without a show that was specifically targeted for them.”

Guest Promo

Guest promo kits are a surefire way to expand your reach beyond your own audiences. We created custom promo kits for each guest on Show Business. The kit contained custom artwork, pull quotes, and sample copy for social media. The hope is that your guests feel like part of your team and will be motivated to use that copy on their own channels. If they do: Voila! There’s a whole new audience for you.

Here’s an example of a promo asset we created for our podcast Talking Too Loud.

Track show promotion success

While the heaviest of the lifting may now be done, show promotion doesn’t stop after launch! Measure the success of your show promotion over time with these handy tips.

Track links with UTM codes

Urchin tracking module codes (or UTM for short) are custom strings of text that you can add to the end of a link to track things like source, medium, campaign name, and more.

Here’s an example of a UTM code for this post:

ForShow Business, we created custom links for different promotional channels including social media, email, our internal sales team, external show talent, and public relations.

If you’re sharing your show on multiple channels and through multiple campaigns, UTM codes can help you easily segment your data in Google Analytics to track show performance. The key to making the most of UTM codes is to be consistent. You’ll want your entire team to use the same naming convention and letter case for the various fields.

Show launch dashboard

We highly recommend building a dedicated analytics dashboard to track show performance starting with your launch. This can be a dashboard in a free solution like Google Analytics or something more robust like Databox that pulls in data from multiple sources. Talk to the teams involved with the launch and figure out what metrics are important. Then, figure out which tool will pull all of that data together into one place for easy monitoring and greater transparency.

Consistency is key for show promotion

The best marketing campaigns include multiple touchpoints to keep your content top of mind. Think through all of your available marketing channels and take the time to plan meaningful and engaging communications that will bring people in starting on launch day and continue afterward.

“People have to hear something over and over again before they actually pay attention to it, so don’t be afraid to cross-promote things. Your content should really be 20% creation, 80% promotion. 80% of your energy should be on how you promote it. How do you promote it the first time, how do you promote it to different audiences, how do you get people to care about it inside your company as well as outside of your company, and how do you keep doing that over time?”

There you have it—our complete guide to show promotion! Hungry for more? Be sure to watch Show Business for access to our free, standalone show promotion checklist.

CTA: Watch Show Business

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The first stage begins days and weeks before live events even start. It often occurs in the home where consumers anticipate atmospheres by learning about behavioral expectations as well as making material props such as costumes and flags. Firms can facilitate preparations for atmosphere by providing web-based resources that allow people to find out where they can share experiences that anticipate and contribute to the event build-up. 
 
For the second stage, atmospheres require activation among smaller groups. Similar to a sports team or music group warming up before an event, consumers also rehearse songs and gestures as a way to align behaviors and emotions before an event begins. Firms can facilitate these activities by ensuring that places like stadiums and concert halls are surrounded by smaller venues that cater to consumers’ desires to meet and build excitement before they progress to the main event. 
 
In the third stage, once smaller groups have built a sense of anticipatory excitement, firms must often work to unify these groups into larger crowds. One way to do this is to stage formal rituals: from the Olympic Opening Ceremony to the All Blacks’ ‘haka,’ formal rituals provide intense moments of interpersonal connection that align emotions and behaviors as an event begins. 
 
In the fourth stage, following an event, shared emotions and memories of atmosphere are stored in merchandise and memorabilia. By reminding supporters of the emotional highs of atmospheres, these objects help to inspire repeated visits to events.
 
Successful social atmospheres require cooperation between firms and consumers. Yet as much as firms can facilitate the creation of social atmospheres, they can also damage atmospheres by dazzling consumers with music, lights, and pyrotechnics. These generic stimuli can drown-out the organic expressions of pleasure and excitement produced by people participating in crowd behaviors.
 
Importantly, consumers want to create atmospheres themselves, with their own meaningful rituals that are often passed down through generations. Although firms may welcome an upsurge in the popularity of the events they stage, they must understand how tensions can arise between longstanding devotees and more casual consumers such as tourists. Preparing tourists or visitors to understand the expectations for participating in creating atmospheres can help preserve atmospheres and avoid tensions between groups. 
 
Finally, large events must manage myriad risks and safety precautions, yet we show this can often limit atmospheres. Successful event management requires that service and security staff acquire local knowledge of crowd behavior so that that shared emotions and behaviors are not disrupted. 
 
Although the reopening of entertainment venues heralds hope for the entertainment industry and consumers emerging from lockdowns, firms that facilitate social atmospheres effectively are more likely to benefit from enhanced customer experiences, customer loyalty, and the possibility to create iconic sites to which visitors will return time and again.

Read the full article. 

From: Tim Hill, Robin Canniford, and Giana Eckhardt, “Social Atmospheres: How Interaction Ritual Chains Create Effervescent Experiences of Place,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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