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.

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?

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

This post was updated on 24th August 2020.

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

What is value-adding content? The term refers to content you produce for which your sole intention is not to sell but to educate, inform or entertain. In my world event generated content meets the education and information purpose by default. Event organisers should not have any issue with publishing top notch relevant content in the first place. The challenge is repurposing it efficiently to drive engagement and as a result of that engagement intiate/spark/stimulate interest in future events you have coming up.

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.

This post was updated on September 15th, 2020

We all love measuring our results and every team will have a set of event marketing KPIs that they live and die by. If you’re still measuring your activities the old way and moving towards marketing the new inbound way, you’re not going to have the info you need to make smart decisions.

By the way, we have decided to refer to a virtual, hybrid or physical event just as "events", while there are defined differences in the delivery and format of each, they way you approach their marketing is generally the same.

"Our contact database is the lifeblood of our event business, without it, we are nothing"

Agree? If you do, are you really getting the most out of your prospect and customer database?

You are not alone. When I ask this question to CEOs and leaders of the event industry, 9 out of 10 people give me a categorical "No" or a "I don't think we do, certainly we don't know enough from our contacts; we could be doing more with it".

If your sentiment (or that of your boss) is aligned with the statements above, read on if you want to fix that for good.

This blog was updated on the 15 October 2020

So this blog is inspired by years of working in events and conferences and experiencing for myself all the positive progress in the industry. But of course whenever there is change, there are always those that resist it and just like to keep things the way they are - the dreaded "comfort zone."

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.

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.

A common question we are continually asked by media and event professional entrepreneurs is:

If we want to hire a marketer, how much are we expected to pay?

Hopefully you've caught onto the fact that, this is the golden age of marketing. Marketing is playing an ever important part in the success of media and event businesses and at a time where technology, social media and innovation is key. Therefore marketing salaries need to be at par or sometimes even higher than the average salary. At last the work of hardworking marketers is being accurately compensated. It's taken some time but we're getting there! 

There are unlimited amount of website developers that can build websites, the big problem is which one to choose? Almost every person I meet that has had their website developed asks someone they know or trust “Who built your website? Do you know a good web development agency?”

Note: This was originally published on June 12, 2014 but reviewed and updated on June 27, 2017.

I love our industry and it's great to see there are more and more events and conferences popping up for our own folk.

Interestingly enough June and November seem to be particularly busy for the events world. Fortunately there's a good variety of them, some of which are more marketing related, that we all should put in our diaries and make a point of attending.

Ex-Euromoney MD Luke Gibson lifts the lid on inbound marketing for traditional events businesses and explains why they're so glacially slow at adopting the new inbound marketing methods. Luke talks tough at times and certainly doesn't sugar coat his messages to marketing directors and others seeking investment in inbound marketing for their events.

Catch a few highlights below or watch the full interview here:

Most B2B marketers have an idea that writing about events they are hosting is a little different from their day to day workhorse emails, landing pages etc. But how can you be sure you've covered all the essentials in your B2B brand event communications plan?

We've created a checklist of items that should feature in communications about every B2B event, no matter what the event type. Some are channel specific, some apply across all your communications. Ready to see what's on our hit list?

Want the inside scoop on the hashtags every B2B marketer should use to make sure their event is super successful? Look no further. We've done all the hard work for you, compiling a list of the essential hashtags in each category, plus tools to help you find the ones that could make or break your event. 

You might be a bona fide B2B email strategy guru, but do you know what it takes to tweak those strategies to make them suitable for event marketing? Find out...