by echristensen42

Where is everybody – where’s my ROI? Tips and Tricks to attract the right audience at your event

If you read my previous blog entry, you may still be looking for the best way to find the golden audience that makes you best friends with the sales teams. Here are some suggestions I have collected over the years:

Plan with the end in mind

Don’t just set a date, build a 3-touch-strategy together with your stakeholders (the sales teams in most cases).
The theme and message has to promote and strengthen the conversations that your sales teams are having with their target prospects. Don’t push some new message or vision down their throats if this is not what their targets are interested in.
Be flexible – if the conversation has moved over the 8-10 weeks of planning before the event, make sure to have alternatives ready to add to the speaker list.

Email marketing – and other channels

Don’t publish it all at once, when you start the invite process – build an engagement staircase with at least 3 touches.
Expand your email campaign with social media engagement through dedicated, branded Linkedin groups, with a short, recognizable and easy to remember hashtag to use across channels before, during and after the event.
Another great tip is to prepare your tweets and posts so that your colleagues across the company can share without sounding like a marketing machine.
Make it personal, local, fun – whatever their preference is.

For your email campaign – here are the three touches I would recommend:

Launch the idea of an event and pre-announce the date. Get the theme out there to gauge interest from your target audience. If you have a star speaker name, don’t let the cat out of the sack just yet. Have a call-to-action button for “sign me up” or “tell me more” – and make sure there is a response on the second one.

First real invite – allowing people to sign up based on an agenda with topics and speakers that are “glocal” – have a global vision but either are local or have local recognition. Always have a button “sign me up” and “tell me more” to encourage a dialogue.

Now let the cat out of the sack. Make a big boom invite only promoting date, theme, agenda and your star.

Less is more – let people click through if they want to deep dive into agenda or speaker profiles etc. That way you can capture who is interested so that your sales teams can follow up with personal emails or telephone calls.

Still not there? Time to call the cavallery

And if all fails – if you have not met your quality registration target – go the extra mile – engage with your sales teams, show them the gap between their expectation on the attending audience and their sales target accounts.

Give them a cheat sheet with talking points about the event. Remember, you know everything about how great it will be – but they probably don’t event know the speakers or content in detail yet. Get them excited, build a dashboard or some other gamification element to let them compete with each other (and make sure there is a decent prize for the winner, so get that on the budget from the very beginning).

Help them help you succeed.

04.19.15

by echristensen42

The “ambassadorization” of business

Human civilization emerged from tribes – as individuals the early humans would not have survived. The same applies today . No one can survive in a silo, be it a company, an industry, an organization or a department.

Once you realize that, you understand the power of relationships as the foundation of successfully connecting your needs to those of others upon who you are depending. That is why the current mantra in modern marketing is engagement. Every process, every action, every transaction is connected. If you push, someone or something has to move backwards. If you pull, someone or something is moving towards you. Pushing and pulling at the same time creates engagement. When you engage your audience, your partners or your employees, you create a tribe.

At the Speed of Change event in Oslo on April 16, 2015 (organized by Salesforce), trendspotter Arnt Eriksen focused on the power of tribes that develop into movements which ultimately could change the world. You could claim that the Arab Spring – using Facebook as it’s vehicle – started as a tribe and ended as a movement. Similary, Apple started building a tribe, a community of followers who wanted to think differently about computing. And ended up changing the world by engaging with them, changing them into devoted followers (tribes) and making them it’s strongest, devoted and forgiving ambassadors.

(Artist: Maja Eriksson) (Artist: Maja Eriksson)

When you have a purpose that can unite your tribe – such as the Arab Spring – and you have the vehicle to engage with each other – such as Facebook or other social channels – you can become successful as a business in the digital age.

“Convert strangers into customers – and nurture them into ambassadors” (Arnt Eriksen)

09.09.13

by echristensen42

The ROI of Social Media – or how to convince your boss

Social Media is engagement – if you don’t get it yet, I hope you will very soon. But engagement is very hard to measure, so even if you do get it, your boss might not appreciate the value of your efforts.

That is why you need to create a social media engagement strategy around metrics and value add = ROI. You need to have a conversation.

The traditional way of counting is through “fluffy” things like Facebook Fans/Likes or number of retweets – which I think is just a natural extension of marketing’s best friend: click-through rate on email blasts. It’s hard to leave your comfort zone, even if you are an innovative marketer who really wants to embrace social.

What does it cost you, if you do NOT have a social media engagement strategy? Here is a link to a free eBook with some good statistics and methods.

At Sweden Social Web Camp (SSWC)) on Tjärö island in August, we tried to look at ROI benefits versus costs. What it boils down to, is tangible, measurable and very convincing:

Email marketing on its own is not engagement. And it’s getting harder and harder to use on a large scale. Let’s talk instead.

Soft and Hard: Facts & Figures

Finally, here is a link to all the slides I presented at SSWC – there are some wonderful charts and hard numbers from salesforce.com’s extensive customer research. You can use them in your own context. Or take them to your superiors to get at least as much – if not more – budget for your social media engagement as your colleagues in traditional email marketing.

12.07.12

by echristensen42

Social – the ultimate acronym

Did you ever think about the best way to describe what social disruption is all about? To move the discussion away from the channel (not social=Facebook page or social=Twitter account) and to what really matters, I have come up with this inspired by JP Rangashwami @jobsworth :

s = sincere

o = open

c = collaborative

i = interested

a = authentic

l = likeable

There are many excellent examples of organisations, companies and individuals who can subscribe to all of the above. One great example is the Danish TV&Broadband provider YouSee

Another – from the other side of the world, Toyota

But even if you only identify yourself with a subset of these letters, I would still categorize you as “social”. Let me elaborate:

Sincere

If you don’t mean it, don’t post it. Or retweet it. Or spread it. As a company or an individual it must be what you stand for.

Open

Be open to feedback and suggestions. Make yourself approachable and transparent and make sure to engage when someone reaches out. If you don’t they will stop trying. And that was not the intention.

Collaborative

At the end of the day, you and your audience are in the same boat. If you do not collaborate on moving the boat forward, you will ride in circles. Join initiatives that make sense to the common goal and be generous in sharing them to evangelize.

I nterested

Do you care? Do you want the audience to care? Show it. Respond, engage, reflect. Don’t just retweet other people’s content. Show who you are and that you care by commenting and making suggestions.

A uthentic

Your brand equals the sum of conversations about your brand, a @Radian6 executive told us when they joined salesforce.com – and we embraced that. So we joined the conversation to listen and engage – never hiding who we are and who we work for. But we joined as individuals – being true to our selves.

L ikable

It’s easy to be angry, to criticize, to rant. But let the others do that – those who want to interact with you and your company don’t need to hear what you are upset about, they want you to share their pains, not yours. Be the kind of person/company you would like to invite for dinner and enjoy having at your table.

Social disruption means that you as an individual or as a company engage along these lines, by showing that you care, by being true to yourself, by sharing for the benefit of a common objective: Ultimately, the success of everyone involved. – that is being social.

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