The Natural Synergy Between Inbound Marketing and Virtual Events

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⏐ The Natural Synergy Between Inbound Marketing and Virtual Events2  

 

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

A Natural Synergy 5

Events’ Secret Weapon — Logistics 6

Inherently Rich Social Networking 8

Great for SEO, Too! 10

No Intelligence Without Inbound Marketing 11

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Introduction

Virtual events are webinars, conferences, trade shows, and exhibitions where people participate online rather than, or in addition to, traveling to a physical venue. These events attempt to simulate every possible detail of the physical event experience for the visitor, who can be sitting at a computer anywhere in the world. They often employ lifelike renderings of tradeshow booths, auditoriums, pressrooms, lounges, atriums, and other spaces.

Photo courtesy of ON24

Attendees can click on a booth, for example, to enter and view products, view live or prerecorded presentations and demonstrations, chat with company staffers, and download literature. If they click on the auditorium, they can enter to view and listen to whatever presentation is happening live at that moment, and ask questions. Entering the lounge allows them to chat with other trade show visitors on various topics. As they travel from room to room, visitors will also likely see ads on the walls from show sponsors, as well as in-program guides.

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Virtual events have obvious benefits. They are much more convenient for visitors to attend than physical events. They also cost much less to attend and offer far fewer work disruptions.

Virtual events are also far less costly to produce. Such advantages explain why the virtual conference and trade show market is expected to grow at a 56% compound annual growth rate through 2015 (to $18.6 billion) even as traditional trade show spending is declining (by 46% in 2009 for tech shows).

Virtual events also offer a mother lode of behavioral data that can be collected as attendees navigate virtual exhibit halls, download collateral, and participate in live Q&As and chats.

And finally, virtual events — simply by being events — offer multiple points of engagement many other marketing tools don’t — like invitations, speaker recruitment, and publicity.

Behavioral data and multiple engagement opportunities are therefore two of the most valuable byproducts of virtual events. They are also the two marketing resources most likely to be underutilized if inbound marketing is not fully and energetically employed. That’s because — of all the tools in the marketing toolkit — inbound marketing leverages both these resources for the greatest impact.

Simply stated, inbound marketing is what you do with all the great lead intelligence that naturally flows from virtual events. And by knowing what to do with that lead intelligence, you can more effectively leverage all the points of engagement virtual events naturally offer.

The result is a synergistic win-win — more sales of the company’s products and better webinars.

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A Natural Synergy

If ever two marketing programs were made to go together, those are virtual events and inbound marketing. For one thing, events of any kind take you out of your day-to-day routine. They shake things up. And objects in motion tend to attract attention, while objects at rest, or even moving in the same continuous pattern, tend to blend into the background.

So how does calling attention to yourself help inbound marketing?

It helps because inbound marketing is all about publishing interesting content with which people self-identify and consume — and as they consume more, they convert into sales leads and eventually into customers. The more interesting the subject (you), the easier the inbound marketing job becomes.

One inbound marketing challenge for many marketers is coming up with interesting content.

What if there’s no new product to announce this quarter? What if there’s no new channel partner or technology breakthrough?

HubSpot and other marketing experts have published many tutorials on effective measures marketers can take to develop engaging content topics even when there is apparently “nothing new to write about.”

One of the most effective measures is to host an event. The simple fact that you are hosting an event is news. It instantly poses all the classic journalistic who, what, when, where, and how questions — questions you can answer in multiple ways over multiple channels — including the blogs and social networking of inbound marketing.

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Events’ Secret Weapon — Logistics

The logistical aspects alone create their own engagement opportunities. Consider, for example:

Attendee invitations: You can’t have an event and not invite people. An email with a “You’re invited to attend” subject line will likely find a receptive audience. It provides a natural way to nurture an existing relationship. Also, asking people if you can put them on your invitation list is an effective way to get new contacts to opt in to your list.

Reminders: Most of the time, sending repeat emails to the same people about the same subject is annoying. One exception is event reminders, since most everyone understands the need to remind people who haven’t yet RSVP’d. So the challenge of coming up with yet another original subject and subject line is lessened. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you have to limit yourself. In the reminder email, you can also include links to other offers, blogs, forums, or other content related to the virtual event.

Speaker, Exhibitor, and Sponsor Recruitment: One of the most effective ways of getting highly influential people to opt into your inbound marketing program is to invite them to take an active role in your event as a speaker, exhibitor, or sponsor. This is a great example of a key tenant of inbound marketing, which is that the best way to get people to help you is to help them first. Inviting someone else to use your platform to their benefit lets you leverage their networks and reputation while reducing your need to generate original content yourself. This would be much harder to do if you weren’t hosting an event. Inevitably, there will be a lot of back-and-forth conversations pre-, during and post-event to work out the details of their involvement, which also provides ample opportunities to broaden and deepen these high value relationships even further.

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Public Relations: Conferences and trade shows in particular are publicity magnets, with all the PR mechanics typically associated with these events such as press rooms, product announcements, editorial one-on-ones, media kits, media mailings, and so on. Each PR activity is also a natural stepping off point for blogs and social networking. Indeed, the line between PR and inbound marketing has become very blurry in recent years. Key industry bloggers, for example, are often as sought-after (and as credentialed) as “regular” business and trade press reporters. Meanwhile, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites have developed alongside PR Newswire and other traditional news networks as recognized PR content distribution channels.

Event Websites: Something else that becomes much easier when you host an event is publishing a website whose sole purpose is to achieve a central inbound marketing goal. That is, to get people to commit their time to you — such as through event registrations, surveys, contests, newsletters, and other avenues. As with other logistical elements, what makes event websites so potent is they are perceived as logistically necessary, hence less “pitchy” than most marketing websites. After all, people need to be able to register; they expect to learn about speakers and topics; they want to have input on those topics; and they want to have a good time. All these wants and expectations are opportunities to leverage inbound marketing methods and tools.

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Inherently Rich Social Networking

What’s just been discussed are some of the basics — i.e., the inbound marketing opportunities that arise simply because they must in order for you to hold the event. But you don’t have to stop there. In particular, you can use social networking to “liven up” the event. With social media, you can get people talking about the event, the topics, the speakers, the products, and the demos — not only with you, the host, but also with speakers, exhibitors, and, most importantly, with each other.

Some of the more obvious ways include:

LinkedIn and Facebook Discussions: Starting months before the event and continuing long after the event has passed, you and members of your network can start discussions that get people excited about the event. One advantage of LinkedIn and Facebook discussions (versus an event-hosted forum) is that LinkedIn and Facebook users may more easily find your event, where they might not have otherwise.

Event-Hosted Forums: Event planners can host special event-specific forums in which members of your target audience engage with key discussion threads. The advantage of event-specific forums (versus, say, LinkedIn or Facebook) is that visitors don’t have to discover it. The forums are instead right there as part of the virtual event itself. This also helps make the total event experience seem bigger and more credible.

Blogs: Program agendas provide a wealth of topics for blogs — both your own or as comments to articles on other blogs.

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Hashtags: Twitter provides an easy way for people to monitor and post event-related comments, related specifically to the event as a whole or to individual sponsors, speakers, exhibitors, etc. Create and share a hashtag for your event so people attending your event can easily interact with other attendees as well as find and share event tweets on Twitter.

A big reason people attend conferences and trade shows is, after all, to network. If they just wanted factual information, they could have simply read published content (not that there is anything wrong with that). Events, like inbound marketing, work by satisfying this need to network. Pre-show buzz on social media will increase attendance and make the event more satisfying for everyone involved. While the event is taking place, that buzz will make the virtual event seem more like a real event, rather than just an online library of presentations. And it can continue long after the event is over, keeping your company active and vital in people’s minds and in online discussions.

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Great for SEO, Too!

All this online activity, content, and discussion have obvious benefits in terms of SEO (search engine optimization). That’s a big part of what inbound marketing is all about: creating content to rank better in search engines so it is more likely to engage potential customers looking online for your types of products and services.

Every white paper, slide deck, YouTube video, blog post, forum post, and social network discussion is a keyword-rich target for search engines. This content should fulfill two main requirements for high SEO rankings:

1) It is semantically rich.

2) It attracts a lot of authentic inbound links from other sites.

Semantically rich means that the content is the opposite of glossaries or content farms — i.e., web pages that don’t “look” to search engines as being truly informative but only exist to provide SEO keyword targets. Search engines are more likely to view event-related content as genuine given the large amount of content, its multiple locations, the high number of contributors, the variety and complexity of the text, the time period over which it was generated, and other factors.

Authentic inbound links are links from other websites that are legitimate. Again, these are not simply links from content farms intended solely to provide relevant keywords with links to targeted web pages. A high number of authentic inbound links gives a website what SEO experts call “authority,” especially if the websites contributing those inbound links have a high authority themselves. The more authority an event website has, the higher its search ranking. A successful virtual event website is likely to have high SEO authority compared to a “non-event” website by virtue of all the inbound activity and assets discussed here — the blogs, forums, social networking, recruitment, invitations, surveys, comments, white papers, presentations, and more.

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No Intelligence Without Inbound Marketing

Virtual events and inbound marketing have the same goal: to generate sales leads. The difference is that inbound marketing also includes tools to help you develop or nurture a sales lead into an actual sale. This is where virtual events and inbound marketing complement each other the most, because virtual events can generate more lead intelligence (and opportunities to leverage it) than perhaps any other marketing activity — including physical events — if inbound marketing is also applied.

Without inbound marketing, you may not actually have any lead intelligence. All you may have is raw data — like the names, company names, and email addresses of those who have registered for an event and various sessions as well as those who visited certain rooms, attended various sessions, downloaded specific content, or left comments on various forums, blogs, and discussion threads.

The question is: what will you do with all these names? Will you simply load them into your CRM system for a follow-up sales call? If so, then chances are good that many of those leads won’t be ready to buy — and calling them now may simply put them on the defensive so they will never buy.

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This is where inbound marketing tools come into play. They help you answer questions like:

• Which people downloaded what content, visited which rooms, or displayed other specified behaviors?

• How many times did an individual download a piece of content, etc.?

• What is the sequence and timeline of conversion events for a given individual (e.g., downloaded a white paper today, attended a webinar yesterday)?

• Based on past experience and this individual’s behavior, what is his or her lead score, i.e., readiness to buy and probable sales value?

• Which pages ranked highest on key industry metrics for audience engagement?

This is true lead intelligence because it helps you decide what actions to take to move prospects further down the sales funnel — such as making them a 30-day free trial offer, perhaps, or inviting them to a future webinar. In that way, you can develop leads intelligently until sold. You can also better decide which content and channels are most attractive to certain prospects, helping you make future events, content, and channels even more engaging.

This is the ultimate win-win. There is no reason to conduct virtual events or inbound marketing as isolated or even parallel functions when it’s all just one seamless activity: inbound event marketing. And ultimately, the effectiveness of that activity will be judged based on one overarching objective: higher conversion rates of higher lead volumes.

⏐ The Natural Synergy Between Inbound Marketing and Virtual Events 

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Next Steps If you are a company interested in finding out just about everything there is to know about inbound marketing (with articles, webinars, eBooks, marketing kits, videos, infographics) be sure to visit the Inbound Marketing Hub. If you are a company interested in finding out how you can easily integrate your social marketing, SEO, PPC, and lead generation for better results, sign up for a HubSpot demo. If you are a marketer who ever wonders what the best time is to publish blog posts, update your Facebook status, post tweets, and send emails, wonder no more! Check out our research-based, on-demand webinar, “The Science of Timing.” If you are a company that wants to know how to optimize your website to get found by more prospects and convert more of them into leads and paying customers, be sure to sign up for a free Inbound Marketing Assessment.  If you are a company that is interested in growing your business and generating leads, use HubSpot’s free 30-day trial to learn how HubSpot’s software can help you.