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. 

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.

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?

Let's face it the events industry is no exception to the challenges we're facing right now with the Corona Virus - in fact we're one of the industries being hit the hardest. Hearing about Mobile World Congress, IMEX Frankfurt and SWSX cancelling just as a couple of examples .. of course creates this anxiety for the whole industry. 

I've been in the events industry for over 20 years now and I've seen some of the difficult times with September 11, SARS in 2002, the Credit Crunch and now COVID-19 is causing the storm. Those that survived these challenging cycles know that strong, positive action, firm decisions, effective planning, flexibility and openness are crucial for survival! 

With events being cancelled and others being postponed until H2 or even next year, I feel a positive fighting spirit is needed to help us get through. So in true resilient style taught by my event industry Jedi's and other mentors along the way, these are 18 actions that we can take today to pick ourselves up, push forward and come out stronger.

This post is split in three parts:

1. Considering cancellation or postponement of your event(s)
2. 18 ideas on what to do now that you postponed/cancelled your event
3. Very important resources you must check now / subscribe

You've heard us say before that automation isn't just for marketing teams - automation is something that applies to the whole organisation and honestly we seriously believe that if there's one function within B2B businesses that will benefit the most it's got to be sales!

Selling delegate places and sponsorship packages in this day and age, doesn't necessarily require a lot of phone calling, but instead a lot of desk research, hours on end checking LinkedIn for contacts and for the more experienced sales pro, hours checking social networks and communities hunting for the right conversations to participate in to connect with "interested and engaged" individuals.

We have met hundreds of marketing teams and sales teams over the years, and these are the tools that some of the best sales individuals use ( understandably they don't want anyone else to know about their ammunition!) 

We want to empower B2B event sales teams to become much more efficient and hit their targets by using tools and tech that they can start using immediately.

There is nothing fancy about event sales automation to be honest - it's all about having some common sense first and using technology as an enabler, second.

True that technology makes your life easier, but you can achieve similar results without it.

With this blog I want to stimulate your creative cells and give you specific tips and templates to think about how you the marketer OR the sales exec will find efficiencies in your day to day job.

What is event sales automation?

See this as a copy-and-paste exercise on steroids. ;-)

If your organisation wants to compete against new and exciting events that are constantly coming up in your sector and want to preserve your market share, or even compete against already established organisation, the events team will need to evolve and keep evolving into a really strong and resilient team of superheroes.

Right after Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet, despite also being a social media site. This means that the importance to build and promote an online video presence has gained more relevance over the past couple of years and will continue to do so.

B2B companies are now seriously using videos as part of their overall marketing strategy and B2B events have been recording tons of video content at their events far longer BUT they are no way near as savvy when it comes to capitalising on it.

That is why we have come up with 6 simple tips to optimise your B2B YouTube presence:

Your event has been launched, everyone is excited, you have received plenty of interest and registrations have started to come through. GREAT.

BUT, at some point registrations slow down and suddenly 3 weeks have gone by and you have received NO registrations at all!

You hit the PANIC button, and everyone gets concerned.

What to do?

It is fair to say that LinkedIn Groups have lost steam and have become a junkyard of spam and can hardly be distinguished from the already crowded feed.

BUT there is one group that is run properly, vetted well and always has a very good source of discussions for event professionals worldwide The Event Planning and Event Management Group.

A recent discussion on the LinkedIn group got some momentum and I thought it would be worth sharing here.

An event prof user asked the question:
I’m just starting to design our exhibition stands for next year and wondered if anyone had any good tips or tricks for attracting people to your stand?

Since it is a question we are constantly asked and part and parcel of our day to day work, I wanted to share how we approach this question and objective.

Launching a paid per click campaign is not as simple as paying an agency to do it or getting a member staff to simply spend a couple of hundred bucks on it and off they go.

Before you launch a PPC campaign there are certain aspects that you need to cover, we split this into 4 key areas:

1. Required PPC settings for your websites
2. Required settings for your Landing Pages to guarantee PPC campaign success
3. Required assets and materials before you launch a PPC campaign
4. How to monitor and track responses of your PPC campaign 

This is a guide that will tell you exactly what to do at each of these 4 stages, if you follow them you will ensure that your campaign is successful and more importantly, trackable.

How do you promote your B2B event through video? I am talking about doing things beyond the usual boring panning of lanyards at the registration area, lots of people going through the doors, shaking hands, speakers on stage and packed rooms.

My intention here is to offer some different perspectives and specific ideas that you can implement immediately.

By the way, think about posting these videos on your website, twitter, social media, email messages with it and more importantly on LinkedIn!

Before you watch the videos please:

1. They are intended as inspiration.
2. Watch them with an open mind.
3. Take into account that American audiences dare to take more risks in terms of pushing the boundaries.
4. Yeeahhh yeahhh yeahhh, I know your audience is a bit different. Just watch them and hopefully from the whole list there is some inspiration.

B2B event lead generation is an essential component of event marketing. Many event business leaders and marketers allow their campaigns to be killed too early or dismiss future ones outright simply because “the leads the campaign is generating are crap”.

The goal here is to explain that on any normal lead generation campaign, around 66% of the leads  generated will not be good or even relevant at all. So if only 33% of the total leads generated are good then you're not doing bad at all -  you are well within the benchmark.

So what is deemed as a good or bad response from a lead generation campaign?

Here are the top take aways from the video with some good examples:

It is a fact, there are event and media organisations that are having a difficult time with HubSpot and think that "HubSpot does not work, and that inbound marketing is a big scam".

After running more than 50 inbound and content marketing implementations in events and media, most of them with HubSpot, we have looked at a variety of factors as to why it works for some companies and not for others?

These are the reasons WHY:

B2B event marketing is a vast topic, spanning from how to get people to attend events, how to get them to buy from your B2B brand when you sponsor or organise an event and how to secure sponsorship for your own B2B event. It's a topic that interests event organisers, event marketers and B2B brand marketers in equal measure.