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.

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:

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.

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.

A common trend among B2B companies developing online communities around their event topics, is that the marketing team does not have any influence on the content that is generated to drive engagement. A big mistake!

Last week we looked at how running an event could kill your B2B inbound marketing efforts. This week, we're going to come at the topic from a different angle and explore how you go about leveraging your existing audience to run great B2B events. Done right, this works just like the flower and the butterfly. Both get something out of it, no damage is done, everyone's happy.

Whether you know it or not, like it or not, having a successful event or a series of successful events in the same or similar topic, is the basis of a community - it's all about the gathering of people that share a common interest. So what better way to engage with your community than through great content.

The events sector has a big advantage compared to most industries, in that you have experts at your fingertips - whether that's your production team, stakeholders, speakers or advisors. That allows access to knowledge, thought leadership and future shaping ideas with "relative" ease. 

We are very pleased to announce that BrightBull has officially formed a joint venture with leading European inbound marketing agency Increnta. Increnta is a platinum HubSpot partner and Oracle Gold Partner with clients in 14 countries, specifically in the areas of Publishing, Training and Education, Financial Services, SaaS, Services, Healthcare and Tourism with a portfolio of 300+ clients.

With declining delegate revenues and events still feeling the pinch of a new business ethic, shaped by recent economic austerity, landing the big kahuna event sponsorship deals is more important than ever before. But with companies wanting more for less and keeping a tight hold on the purse strings, how can you increase the value of event sponsorship?  

You’d have to have been hiding under a rock the last few years not to be aware of the growing number of online event communities springing up. But there’s a huge difference between being aware and actually putting that nagging sense of “should do” into action and sprinting ahead of all the others (without getting disqualified of course!) If you’ve so far lacked the motivation to fully commit to building your online event community, here’s your incentive.

I took part in a panel discussion at Event Tech Live with Anthony Dunn of i2i Events Group, Neil Robertson-Ravo of Top Right Group, Ade Allenby of Reed Exhibitions; and Tamar Beck from Gleanin. It was a great session (probably the best one I've participated so far) that sparked lots of interesting views. It was mostly focused on how you engage an event audience online and offline, and what kind of tools you need to do it. 

If the qualitative and quantitative evidence that we’ve provided in other blogs isn’t enough to get the support of your team, or your CEO’s buy-in, the cherry on the cake in your argument will be demonstrating the effects of an online community at every level of the value chain.

There are several groups who will thank you for your efforts in your B2B online community – in terms of both monetary rewards and delegate fandom.

Many companies, particularly smaller ones, find it difficult to create their own content, and instead resort to curating, reusing or even copying content from other sources. Big no no. Doing this can be time consuming (for little or no reward), risky in terms of copyright issues, and your website may not really be advanced enough to host this kind of content.

We always recommend that companies create their own unique content, and if possible host their own regularly updated blog. But if this is not a feasible undertaking – for reasons relating to time, budget, or technical capabilities – it’s better to take action and join the content publishers than take a backseat and simply watch others succeed in this arena.

There are a number of different tools you can use to create your own bespoke news portal in less than one hour. Yes you read that right - under an hour. It’s the perfect way to provide your audience (both internal and external) with relevant and industry related content that you think will add value.

This is the single question, budget holders ask most frequently to both marketers and service providers like us.

Everyone understands what are the benefits of adopting an inbound based, community driving approach. Everyone gets it, however to get the support of the big guys you will need to be able to back up the bold statements you’ll be making with some hard facts.

We’ve drawn upon HubSpot’s research with their 30,000+ customers and the findings to demonstrate how a community based marketing strategy can impact your metrics – from website visitors to actual tangible customers.

The ROI is represented in three main areas, visits, leads and sales:

Building a community is a big commitment for all parties involved, and one of these commitments is financial. Yes, depending on the company size, the financial commitment might be perceived as big or not and you need to commit for at least 6-12 months before you start realising results and a return on investment.

To give you an idea, it costs between £36k and £250k. That doesn't help does it? The reality is that the costs vary greatly depending on many factors and how you choose to go about it.

Let's hit the nail on the head, in order for a 12-month inbound/community marketing program to be successful, there will be many daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that need to be completed to stay on course for achieving your business goals and getting a return on your investment.

So you have two options:

We advocate that before you do anything else to kick off your community, you must, must, must have a blog, but once that’s done and you’re in the routine of publishing regular content, it’s time to bolster your efforts with the other platforms available to you.

These are the steps you must take to develop your online community:

Great, you’re convinced. You realise that at some point you’re going to have to come around to the idea of an online community for your event(s) and what better time to start than right now? So how exactly do you do that?

Start Blogging! Start your own, blog on LinkedIn, blog wherever you want, but do it consistently.

Well we’ve shown you the shape an online event community can take, so think about which areas you’d like to focus on. We have some advice of our own on that topic but ultimately it’s down to you to fit the forum to your ideal customer, or the place you know your prospects and customers can be found.

However, we can’t stress this point enough – if you don’t have a blog you’re missing a major opportunity to generate leads and build a captive audience. This is the most effective first step you can take in creating YOUR community, though you might not think it’s the easiest.

Here are our 5 steps to blog success, take them one step at a time.

Most event companies we’ve engaged with have at least an understanding that something in the industry needs to change, even if they’re not sure quite what shape this change will take. They’re all scratching their heads as to how they can achieve greater levels of awareness for their events, drive delegate attendance, and increase ticket sales – and do so in a sustainable way.

The beauty of the online community is that it checks all the boxes. It is the only clear solution. Any conference organisation that isn't thinking about developing a community, generating good engaging content, pulling rather than pushing and recognising that there needs to be a different approach, is missing a huge opportunity.