As a BtoB marketing professional, one of the biggest components of your strategy is based on events. Events represent a major expense item, concentrating a lot of your resources for results that are difficult to measure over the long term.
Indeed, once your event is over, the dynamic created quickly fades and the discussions trail off until the next edition.
To encourage engagement of the audiences present at your events all year long, and no longer on a one-off basis, you need to rethink your overall marketing strategy, focusing on the permanent engagement of your contacts.
This continuous engagement is facilitated by setting up a marketing community website, where your audiences can meet virtually to discuss dedicated themes and topics, according to their interests. This way, you provide opportunities to meet and discuss, on demand and always available.
But how does this marketing community complement your event strategy? The answers are in this article.
Your events provide you with content: reuse it!
Your event is over and whatever the format it took, physical, digital or hybrid, you have a wealth of content at your disposal to ensure its follow-up. This content can include recordings or replays of sessions, interviews, videos, analyses, discussion threads, and more.
However, as with your event, where you decided which type of participant can access which session, you need to decide who can access this content:
- Does all this content have to be accessible to everyone?
- Do you have to provide the same content to all your registrants and participants?
- What content has the best added value?
- Do you need to control the accesses you provide to members based on their engagement?
You can choose to make this content available to all your registrants and attendees, or restrict access to only certain categories of contacts, such as members of your community. Your event attendees will then be able to join your community to access more premium content, available any time and without restrictions.
To better understand this concept, an analogy can be made with the media sector. The beginning of an article is freely available, and to be able to read the rest, you need to subscribe to the media.
The exact same process can be followed when implementing your community website. Leave some of the content related to your events freely available, and publish more exclusive content, which will then be accessible only to members of your communities.
Your events provide discussion and meeting opportunities: make these opportunities permanent.
The goal of an event is to encourage meetings and discussions between its participants in order to create a collective dynamic and emotions around a specific theme.
Many solutions are set up during your event to maximize these interactions: speed meetings, business meetings, round tables, networking, cocktails, lunches.
But what remains of these interactions after your event? Do the discussions continue over time? Most of the time this is not so. Frequently, the discussions occur during the event and continue for a few weeks afterwards, but not longer.
If you opt for a community strategy, which complements your event strategy, you can then redirect your event participants to your community space, where they can connect with each other on an ongoing basis.
By providing a dedicated space for these contacts, where they can find a group of users with similar interests and aspirations, and interact with them, you can unite a community.
By offering this community bespoke content and interactions, and especially in a permanent and on-demand way, you foster the engagement of its members, and therefore their loyalty to your brand.
Your events generate qualified contacts: capitalize on this audience.
Your event registrants and attendees represent a highly targeted audience. They are already mature on the topics you are promoting as they have already shown interest in your business. They represent your target audience. It is therefore necessary to capitalize on their participation to make them join your marketing community.
By joining your community, they will have access to exclusive content and unlimited interaction opportunities, in exchange for some information they will provide to you. Of course, you will get all the data needed for their membership and the creation of their member space, such as their name, first name or email address.
But you will also get complete tracking of the content they consult on your community platform. You will therefore know more and more about their specific interests and concerns and will be able to send them more targeted and relevant messages.
You can then fine-tune your targeting and capitalize on this to give greater impact to your future marketing actions.
Which platform should you choose to set up your marketing community? Discover inwink Community.
