Global Dating Insights is a thriving community that came about in response to a clear need in the market. Simon quickly realised that even though the global dating industry was expanding very quickly, there really wasn’t a single unified place where companies could interact with each other and get insights. So, Simon and the team set out to build a community of the biggest dating companies and industry stakeholders, and have successfully achieved this by capturing most of the market over the years. Here, Simon shares some great advice and recommendations for those looking to build their own communities, especially in niche industries. You can also stream the full interview here. 

With the pandemic now behind us, community-oriented businesses are still trying to strike the right balance between traditional and virtual community build. It’s clear that there’s a renewed love and appreciation for in- person community experiences yet virtual is something we all need to embrace and enhance throughout our business models, no debate there.

One thing that all communities need to remember is that the best ones are those that are truly loved by their members. That’s the key to community success and longevity.

A great example of such a community is LeadDev. They’ve adopted a set of strategies that have allowed them to achieve exactly this. LeadDev’s community strategies were talked about in detail with Ruth Yarnit, its Founder and CEO and here we dive into the 4 different parts to their approach: 

Does the pandemic feel like a distant memory already? For many organisations, they're still finding their way around the new playing field.

During the pandemic few organisations were quick to adapt and adopt different ways to engage with their audiences, at least successfully, but those that did planted very strong community seeds that are now paying rewards.

Influence group led by Michael Owens and Michael McCarthy is one of those very organisations and this post summarises the key takeaways from a very thoughtful conversation with Michael on what has been their approach to stay connected to their audiences, partners and key stakeholders.

Today, influence group is going really strong, their approach to engaging with their audiences, building communities and the unique way in which their events are run, has led them to form a partnership with CloserStill Media.

We would really recommend watching the full interview when you have time.
Check out the full interview here.

For the high level summary and key takeaways from our conversation, read on.

Most companies find fostering engagement among virtual event attendees challenging. But it doesn't have to be. Our good friend Sasha Frieze from the Business Narrative shared some really interesting tips and concepts through a live conversation on how organisers are able to foster engagement.

Here's a summary video of the session and below you can check out the summary.

We have been drinking the online community juice for a very long time, and through the many years of working and speaking with leaders in the B2B Media and events industry, I wanted to highlight recent communities that are loved by its members.

When it comes to virtual events, the work doesn't stop once the event takes place. That's when it all begins.

You can get as much as 2x or 3x the number of registrants to your virtual event. You just need to ensure the content produced as a result of your event is repurposed into multiple bite size chunks to drive those registrations through blogs, social, email and your own community.

The key is to take the long-form content and break it into small chapters or “episodes.” Content takes the shape of a story that follows a plot and slowly reveals more to the viewer with each episode.

Creating content isn't always easy, but  it doesn't have to be complicated or costly either. By costly I mean, you don't have to be hiring production companies to do this for you.

We've been keeping our ears close to the ground and over recent months we've come across these six companies that have really embraced change and made a positive shift in the way they run their virtual events. Companies that have pulled out all the stops to ensure their digital events are way above the standard.

In our opinion they've put a stake in the ground to secure a market segment they felt very confident was theirs with physical events and recognised that if they wanted to claim the same spot with their digital events, they needed to raise the bar and deliver a digital experience beyond their audience and partner's expectations. 

What's the answer to a digital event experience beyond expectations? Yep B2B digital broadcasting! Seen by many as the future of virtual / hybrid events, here are the six companies that have taken the steps forward in this direction.

We'll be showcasing what sets these companies and their leaders apart and their approach. If you want to delve deeper we're actually talking to one of them live this week, and if this is something you've been thinking about, then you should save yourself a spot.

• What are the key traits of the leaders that have done it?
• Who are the companies that have done it
• Key learnings from the pros

Many people are falling out of love with the use of social media. It's becoming more common for people to start unfollowing friends and some companies are even putting their social media advertising spend on hold - either caused by an ethical misalignment or more recently public protests against platforms. Users are shifting the attention and use of these social media channels for other purposes other than connection.

The platforms that promised to connect us started to capitalise on our desire for connection, belonging and curiosity.
Algorithms started to control what we saw in our feeds, data was collected to improve advertising, and platforms were optimised to keep us attached to our screens.
Co-Matter

B2B companies are getting serious about online communities and to stay in the game organisations are definitely wising up to the fact that it's not in the future anymore. It's now.

The trouble is after the pandemic, the number of companies chasing the attention of your audience has dramatically increased. Anyone can (and many have), launched virtual event businesses for example and many B2B brands are now heavily focused on building and nurturing their own communities to improve brand awareness and lead generation - very with the budgets that were perhaps once yours.

A savvy event and media business professional would have gone through a process of some kind of re-invention over the past months. New product development scrums, value proposition get togethers, tech stack investments and dare I say it "virtual event pivot".

The few that may still be on the fence, I suggest ask themselves a question:

“What do you have in place to protect yourself / board / investor from a future pandemic or material disruption to the live events model?”

If you don’t have an answer to that question, your business at serious risk. Times are very tough, and very likely you have been doing everything you can, I respect that.

With this post I want to help frame the thinking and share the key pillars that have to be considered when you undergo this process.

This is no longer about digital marketing or marketing automation. It's about the digital transformation of marketing, sales and operations. It doesn't matter where you started your journey, organisations need to view this as a holistic process that comprises of 5 key stages. Miss one of them and you simply won't have a robust go-to market strategy, whatever your new re-invented business looks like.

One thing is clear, in order to increase website visits in the events world you need to spend money on advertising or you need to focus on writing value adding-content that will drive free and organic traffic.

This is where SEO comes to play. Without good SEO you simply won't be found by search engines and without SEO you'll need to pay to get the traffic you need! No one really wants that. The problem is that most people think SEO requires a lot of technical knowledge. That's absolutely not true. 

At BrightBull we're pretty proud of the content we write and our organic traffic represents more than 60% of our total. We follow very simple rules to ensure we're staying current and relevant for our audience and subsequently Google.

You do not need to hire an SEO agency!
Get your team on it.

Many B2B companies are still way behind the curve on their social media strategies and many of their team members are still not incorporating social selling tactics in their daily routines.

These are some of the key thoughts on how we view, execute ourselves and teach social media strategies to our clients.

This post is split in 6 areas: 

• 12 Tips on Successful LinkedIn Posting Strategy
• Demystifying Digital Interaction
• How do you foster commentary on LinkedIn
• Hacks to Gain More Visibility
• LinkedIn KPIs and Metrics
• Conclusion

This is a post that will help demystify some of the questions on the way people post on LinkedIn and the impact this will have on their exposure to their connections and potential connections.

11 Tips on Successful Posting Strategy

1. Post every day or at least 3 times a week

2. Use a striking headline- same principles of SEO work

3. Use long form and share as much as you can within the post

4. Do not add a hyperlink to an external page, within the post itself, add it in the comments

5. Tag people that you want to see your post (don't abuse)

6. Use hashtags to get better exposure

7. Seek commentary, ask questions

8. Add images that go with the post or add content that is of value, don't let the image come automatically from links you post.

9. Vary the content you post, use video, documents, polls, multiple images

10. If you use video, upload the video into the tool itself. It's okay to embed from YouTube

11. Replicate and repurpose on your company page and it's perfectly okay if other colleagues copy and paste your update and post it as theirs. Performs better than re-sharing (more on that below)

Demystifying Digital Interaction
Digital Interaction vs Face to Face Interaction

I thought I'd share my personal thoughts and views on the value of a digital interaction on LinkedIn - assuming that social media interaction especially on LinkedIn for all us B2B bods, can be related to a physical networking interaction with peers/colleagues.

The best approach to social media engagement especially for those in Social Selling, is to behave as close as possible to how you'd behave in a face to face interaction and conversation.

This is our view and assessment on the value of digital interactions:

Virtual events and virtual meetings,whether you love them or hate them, they are here to stay!  But attending or hosting many of these in a given day can become very same-y and let's face it pretty boring for you and for the people on the other side of the screen.

So here are some tools that will really improve the screen experience for you and the people attending your virtual meetings and events. Especially for event organisers moving almost entirely to virtual for the rest of the year, you really need to make an impression and it needs to last.

Here's a list of some great easy tools you can use right now to pimp up your virtual meeting, virtual event or webinar. They are Zoom friendly but also work with other tools too.

The time has come for B2B companies to get serious about their audiences. The barriers to entry into the virtual events, content online and communities have come down and anyone can challenge the status quo from the living room of their house.

Traditional event companies have had to think FAST on how they're going to add value to their audiences, sponsors and stay top of mind within their relevant industries - building B2B communities is now an imperative.

Our series of digital pivot events aimed to cover all of these aspects and a specific area that came up again and again was LinkedIn.

When it comes to attracting audiences to your B2B virtual events, LinkedIn is pretty much unrivalled. A business that doesn't have LinkedIn in their marketing strategy is definitely leaving money on the table.

Here is a summary of the key themes we covered in our recent chat with Regan George from fellow agency The Social Effect. As you can see, we did cover A LOT - the content and information shared is truly valuable.

This is a long post and has tips / methods / videos / interviews all revolving around the Digital Pivot for Events.

Jump to the place you see fit:

Everything we knew about how to market a physical event is now being challenged. Everything we knew about marketing a successful digital event, is being challenged too.

Anybody that is running a virtual event (be it online training, webinars, meetups) has very likely seen their leads and signups skyrocket, even if they've never run anything online before.

With no physical events to run, event organisers are trying to figure out how to run virtual events and the next question for event leaders, sales and marketing teams is:

How can we monetise / make money now?

The short answer to that is DON'T focus on simply monetising, at least not yet.

Let's be honest, it is not an easy statement to digest, we are running businesses and we all need cash to continue running them, but in this case, rushing without much thinking can be more detrimental than beneficial.

Today everyone is figuring out how best to pivot and many are not sure yet how to accomplish this, so if this is your case, these are the top three things you should focus on:

1. Protecting / safeguarding existing revenues/profit

2. Learning and iterating fast

3. Getting your partners/sponsors involved in the process

What are B2B event professionals focusing on in the next two weeks?

It's incredible how much change and intensity can happen in a matter of days.  Many of us were doing something completely different a few weeks back to what we are probably doing right now, at work, at home etc.

So first of all, if you're reading this then you're likely to be in quite a fortunate position compared to many - so we must be grateful for what we have. Of course times are tough and are only going to get tougher along with the huge amounts of uncertainty. All over the world we're waking up to a new reality. But don't let fear define you, your mindset and your state of being. 

Of course the question many are asking themselves and about their business is:

Are we going to be okay?