Integrating Digital Events Into Your Content Marketing Program

[This is a reprint of a guest post I made to the INXPO Virtual Event Blog]

Virtual and Hybrid events can be much more than a digital extension of your in-person event program. The field of content marketing has been evolving quickly for both large and small businesses. Companies have always used content of various types in their marketing efforts but new digital, social and mobile channels have made organizing and communicating the content much easier. Instead of treating content marketing efforts as siloed experiences, marketers need to integrate their efforts to tell a story that resonates with their customers.

There are several advantages of using digital events (virtual/hybrid events, webcasts, live chats, etc.) as a centralized point for content marketing:

1. Digital events are a natural integration point for traditional and new marketing channels. When developing a virtual and hybrid events we already leverage many types of rich content and marketing channels:
   1. Traditional marketing – e-mail, newsletters, whitepapers, case studies, etc.
   2. Social media – blogs, micro-blogs, online communities, etc.
   3. Digital – streaming & on-demand video, websites, banner ads, etc.
   4. Mobile – streaming video, apps, location-based services, etc.
   5. Partner integration – leverage your existing vendor/partner ecosystem
2. A regular cadence of digital events is a good source of fresh content for building and nurturing a community. One of the challenges of keeping your community active and engaged is providing valuable content on a frequent enough basis to keep them coming back to your site or social account. Developing a spectrum of low-cost to high-quality digital events can help you increase your frequency and provide value to your audience.
3. Fish where the fish are. Digital event content can be distributed in places where your audience naturally congregates – that could be your company’s website, social media site, or 3^rd party sites. Live streamed events and on-demand content can be syndicated through a number of channels with calls-to-action back to your assets.
4. Nurturing your existing customer community. Content marketing is not just finding and converting new prospects. Rich, customer-focused content is a great way to build advocates, thought leadership and build lasting relationships. Digital events can add real-time engagement with your company’s subject matter experts and provide a proactive way to build customer satisfaction.
5. Build a 365 environment. Digital events are a great starting point to build a year-round ecosystem for customers to find out about your products, get support, find knowledge base information, engage with your community, etc. Look for ways to mash-up many of your other content marketing efforts to intersect with your dynamic digital event efforts to create a vibrant customer engagement environment.

Content marketing can be an important touch point for marketers to engage with their audience by providing information customers value in a number dynamic ways. Look at ways to leverage your digital event program to bring your content to life and drive traffic to your sites. But what if you could take that engagement to the next level and use your digital events to power your content marketing strategy? What would you create?

Good resource for learning about content marketing: Content Marketing Institute

Make Your Customers Your North Star

Does it ever feel like the earth is moving right from under your feet? Is everything you’ve learned about Marketing is being questioned? New devices, tools and channels keep popping up which break the rules on how we were supposed to communicate with our customers. Videos were things created in TV studios. Social was something you were at parties. Thought leadership was done by industry magazines. Mobile was something you were when you bought your first car. Tweets were something birds did. Tablets were how you took your vitamins. Viral was something you avoided.

With so many changes, how do you do you stay on the edge with your marketing efforts? I found that through thick and thin, success and failure, the best way to come up with a new marketing strategy or manage engagement challenges is to keep your customer as your North Star. Make doing what’s right for your customer your guiding principle. They should be the focus of what you do. Know your audience – what are their likes, their behaviors, their pains & itches, their dreams & hot buttons, their technographic & psychographic profiles.

• If you’re having difficulty defining ROI for a new channel – make sure that channel is optimal for how your customers use it. Your social media channels might work better for engaging your audience to drive satisfaction and community, while traditional channels might work better for your awareness campaign.
• If you’ve created a digital campaign that’s not getting the response you’re expecting – go back to your customer insights to see if your audience is receptive to the kind of behaviors you’re asking for. Are you asking them to create new content while most of your audience prefers consuming it instead?
• If you’re driving a lot of traffic to your website but only a few people are converting to your offer – do you understand what motivates your audience?
• Before you build your mobile app – do you know what percentage of your audience has smartphones and if the app you’re creating will be valued by your audience?

Social/Mobile/Local/Digital are changing customer expectations and behaviors. Do you know how these channels are impacting YOUR customers and prospective customers? It’s so easy to get caught up in the technology and the excitement of the latest bright, shiny objects. By taking a customer-centric approach to marketing it will help you to build your engagement strategies and troubleshoot challenges. Make your customer your North Star.

See Through Your Customer’s Eyes

With digital, social and mobile changing customer expectations and marketing – don’t forget to walk through your marketing campaign or experience with the fresh eyes of a new user. Sometimes, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of a project and it’s a relief to hit the launch button and get it out the door. But before you do that, make sure you step back and walk through the experience from the beginning as if you were seeing this for the first time. I experienced a number of digital campaigns over the past few months that included steps which didn’t work at all or were confusing.

One of my favorite reminders is – “I am not my customer.” I can’t assume that my audience thinks the same way that I do or have the same expectations. Look through their eyes and run through the program. Better yet, get someone who is your audience test it for you before you launch.

Some things to consider:

• Walk through the user experience – make sure that each of the details of the customer journey are working properly. Do the components of the website and campaign work properly?
• Does the experience resonate with your brand objectives? Does it portray the right message you want to the customer? I frequently see campaigns or videos that are trying to get their content to go viral through social channels but in the process of pushing the edge, make sure it fits the image you want to portray to your audience.
• As our customers become more empowered and connected does your campaign fit their changing expectations?
• Are there ways to simplify the user experience? Can you reduce the number of steps the customer needs to take as they walk through your site? I’ve seen campaign owners fall in love with their grand experience and not realize that simplifying the process for the user would be better.

Make sure your vendor or agency tests everything and it’s working as expected. Then double check and go through it yourself – maybe a few times. Do you have any best practices for seeing through your customer’s eyes?

Using Microsoft Kinect to Engage Trade Show Attendees

One of my favorite events for Microsoft employees is the company’s internal technology fair called TechFest. We get to see some of the coolest technologies that the researchers have been working on. As an event marketer, the technology that I see which has the greatest potential for trade show exhibitors is the Microsoft Kinect sensor. The Xbox Kinect is one of the fastest selling game devices which uses  motion, facial and voice recognition to create the game interaction. Last month , the company released the Kinect for Windows SDK which allows the Kinect sensor to work with PCs.

One of the coolest TechFest demos I’ve seen is outlined in this video from Microsoft Research called the Holoflector. It uses the Kinect sensor, augmented reality, a mirror and an LCD monitor to create incredible digital effects.

At trade shows, exhibitors look for ways to attract attention, engage attendees and create dynamic branded experiences. Using the Kinect sensor in creative ways has the potential to create Wow experiences on the exhibit floor. Some ideas:

• Develop digital experiences which allow attendees to interact with your brand in unique ways that they could not do in reality.
• What could you do with multi-user experiences and gamification on the exhibit floor?
• How can you make these experiences larger than life?
• Search for Kinect videos on the web to get ideas on some of the incredible applications developers have created with Kinect and connect the dots to fit the trade show environment.
• Integrate several different types of media – don’t think of it as just a 2-D TV experience.

I’m excited for the potential that the Kinect camera can bring to the trade show experience. We’re only limited by our imagination. Have you created or seen an exciting  application using the Kinect for Windows at an event? Let me know in the comments.

[Scott Lum is an employee for Microsoft. The ideas are my own and not necessarily endorsed by my company]

Integrated Marketing Through Virtual Events

Last year I wrote a blog on Bringing Virtual Events into the Mainstream. I’d like to add one more component: the value of virtual events lies in the ability to engage customers in rich ways while integrating social, mobile, digital and traditional marketing efforts. Instead of looking at each channel as a silo, how can we use in-person and digital events as an integration point for these efforts?

Marketing integration through the filter of F2F and Digital Events:

• F2F & Digital Events as a marketing hub: One of the things I like most about in-person and digital events is that they bring a variety of marketing channels together in one place, at one time. Event marketers can integrate social, digital, localization and traditional marketing efforts. This gives us a great opportunity to get the various channels working together in synergy. It’s also important to tie those channels with larger corporate efforts and not limit them to the event itself.
• F2F & Digital Events as a component of a year-round Content Management strategy –Use a regular cadence of rich interactive content to build customer trust and thought leadership. Create a spectrum of low cost to high quality digital and f2f events to engage, entertain and educate your audience. Intertwine these events with your other content distribution channels.
• F2F & Digital Events as part of a community & relationship building effort. For a community manager content is still king. Having fresh content and engaging with your audience face to face and through social channels during an event can be valuable. Look for ways to amplify the voice of your community through content curation or have them participate authentically through your events. Look at ways to stream low cost webcasts to your community web site or integrate live streaming into your Facebook or YouTube channel.

By integrating various components of in-person and digital events with your other digital, social, mobile and traditional marketing you can create a nearly unlimited combination of ways to engage your audience throughout the customer journey. As we find ways to bring the costs down and simplify the process, digital events will be an invaluable component to the marketers toolkit.

What do you think it will take to bring virtual events into the mainstream?

Interactive LCD is Big at Events

I had an opportunity to visit Oracle OpenWorld (compliments of Oracle and CEMA). As I walked around the partner pavilions I noticed one of the hottest technologies for exhibitors was the interactive touchscreen LCD panel. The interactive LCD panels ran a wide variety of sizes from 3-ft. tall to a 8′x15′ wall.

Interactive touchscreens give marketers another way to engage with their audiences and attract attention at their booth. Here are some highlights and lowlights on how some of the companies used their touchscreen monitors.

1. Connected Marketing – Some of the better touchscreen experiences integrated their other marketing efforts from the show. Intel handed out some cards with different messages on it and you placed the cards on a scanner which allowed you to interact with the LCD display. Emerson created a large interactive LCD which mirrored an experience on their iPad app.
   
2. Lead Generation – Make it easy for attendees to profile themselves by scanning attendee badges or using a card scanner.
   
3. Tell a story – Some of the displays told an interactive story. The story branched out depending on the user’s interest. The graphics were dynamic and simple to keep the attendees attention.
   
4. Have fun – Many of the better interactive displays were fun to use. One booth used it as a slot machine but you don’t need a touch-enabled LCD for that. Intel had a game which involved understanding their solutions – you got to learn something and have fun at the same time.
   

There were a few examples where I didn’t think the touchscreens were put to the best use:

1. Electronic Brochures – One company scanned in their brochures and posted it on their interactive display. Seriously? Do you want me to read through pages of 12-point font while I stand at your booth? To their credit, there was an option for me to include my e-mail address and have the brochures e-mailed to me. But this should be an interactive experience – engage me, amuse me, educate me. I hope their website has more interactivity.
   

1. Another company used the LCD touchscreens to solicit customer feedback. The problem is, these touchscreens are poor data input devices. A laptop with a keyboard is much better for entering text. Entering text into a big electronic keyboard is awkward and difficult when it’s positioned vertically. The attendee’s comment as I took this photo, “Oh, I hate typing like this.” If you want feedback – why not add a webcam and let them record their feedback more naturally? I had a feeling the team was looking for something cool to do with their new technology but didn’t consider if the old school alternatives would be better for engaging their audience.
   

As an event marketer, I’m very excited about what interactive touchscreen LCDs can bring to the booth. But we have to think through our objectives for using the technology and make sure it enhances the attendee experience. Few considerations:

1. Does the new technology enhance the attendee experience over your other event options? Does it do a better job of attracting attention, communicating your message, entertaining the attendee, etc.?
   
2. Can you use it to connect with your other marketing efforts at the show? Is there a way to connect the touchscreen environment with your web experiences, mobile or tablet apps so that users have a connected experience?
3. Make it seamless to capture leads – many touchscreen environments required users to manually enter their e-mail using the electronic keyboard. A better option was to have a booth attendee scan the attendee’s card with their wand but the best option is to have a card reader so the attendees can do it themselves without having an employee hover over them while they explore.

Up next, I’ll look at some of my favorite uses of interactive touchscreen LCDs at OpenWorld. Have you seen other great examples of interactive LCD screens at events? What worked and didn’t work for you?

 

Note: Scott Lum is an employee of Microsoft Corp. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer.

The Worst Survey Question Ever

I was watching a keynote from a digital event and during the presentation this survey pops up. There were 3 or 4 questions all with the same options. What’s wrong with this picture?

1. There’s 5 ways to say Good and 1 way to say Bad – how does that help you?
2. If I have no comment – I have to select Bad.

Seriously?

If you want honest feedback from your event attendees spend a little time architecting your survey questions so that they yield the results you’re looking for.

Here are some tips:

1. Pick a handful of questions that you most want to get feedback on. Wordsmith the content so that it’s clear to the respondent.
2. Make sure you answers match your question. In this example, “Excellent” and “Very Good” are not answers to the question. I would have used “Agree”/”Disagree.”
3. Select a spectrum of options give you the proper feedback you want (I didn’t realize that “Fair” was incrementally better than “OK”).
4. Have a few people review and try out the survey. Those extra eyes would have caught that “Bad” and “No Comment” are not the same thing.
5. If you’re running the survey online, try it out a few times before it goes live. Make sure the flow of the survey works well and the data is flowing properly. It may also help catch formats that look good on paper but are cumbersome online.
6. During this live streamed event, the survey popped while the speaker was still talking. You want the survey to pop up as close to the end of the session as possible to increase the number of people taking the survey but don’t overlay it while the person is still talking. It’s rude and I want to listen to the speaker.

Surveys are an important part of getting feedback from your digital event attendees. Spend some time to create a survey that will be valuable to you. Do you have any other best practices for survey creation?