5 ways to get the most out of your B2B conferences and events.

B2B conferences are a fantastic way to connect with colleagues and customers, old and new. But they don’t come cheap. A lot of time, money and stress (!) goes into them, so it’s only natural that you’ll want to maximise your return on investment from the conferences you organise and/or attend. Fortunately, with a little thought and preparation, you can turn your conference into a content marketing machine. Here are some of our favourite ways to generate great conference-inspired content.

1. Video vox pops
Vox pops (vox populi, voice of the people) are informal interviews and a great source of soundbites that you can use on your website. Talk to your customers in coffee breaks or at networking receptions and get their take on the day. They’re really easy to do, too – all you need is a cameraman and an interviewer mingling with the crowd. Don’t forget to ask for permission from the interviewee, though.

2. Promo video
If you’re capturing the talks, atmosphere and highlights from the event, you’ve also got other video options. You could create a short teaser video, inspiring people to attend next year, or a longer summary video so those who couldn’t make it don’t miss out.

3. Blog posts
Every one of your speakers will be talking about a topic relevant to your business – and each session should be viewed as a potential blog post. Sometimes, we’re asked to provide a writer to attend sessions and write them up afterwards. Equally, you could invite each speaker to pen their own post at a later date. It’s a great way to quickly generate a bevy of relevant, topical blog posts that simultaneously position your event as a valuable gathering place for your target market.

4. Live tweeting
Though social posts from a conference have a limited shelf life, they can pay dividends on the day. Create an event hashtag for attendees to use when tweeting about the event before, during and after. Those who can’t make it can also use it to get involved.

5. Surveys
We don’t just mean a satisfaction survey. Asking just a few questions of attendees can give you valuable data about the issues facing your customers, their opinions on current trends or whatever you want to ask them. You can use the data as the basis of an infographic or blog. If you ask enough questions, you could even write a short paper.

Have a plan for your conference-inspired content
However you choose to generate content from your next B2B conference, the most important thing you can do is to plan it well. How will you use each piece? What part will it play in your sales cycle? If you can fit conference-content into your wider content strategy, then you stand to generate some truly impressive ROI from your next event.

Have you held a conference recently? Or are you thinking about holding one? We’d love to hear about your content plans for it. Drop your account manager a line or get in touch via LinkedIn.

Three ways to get C-level buy-in for your social selling campaign

In our recent blog post, we identified three roadblocks to successful social selling — lack of confidence, lack of expertise, and lack of senior management buy-in. As promised, we’re revisiting that third point to help you find ways to persuade your busy C-level managers to lead the way with social selling.

If buy-in is an issue for you, here are three messages you need to deliver to the board.

1. Social selling isn’t sales

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s important to get across to your C-levels that you’re not asking them to take part in a routine activity that might be best left to the sales team. Of course the sale is the ultimate goal, but social selling is as much about nurturing relationships as hitting sales targets, and this is where senior management can add — and already do — add value.

2. You will make it easy for them

Show the board how easy it is for them to share the content you’ve prepared for them by committing to provide them not just with awesome content, but also pre-prepared soundbites and hash tags that they can copy, paste and send with minimal or zero edits. If they’re still not convinced, offer to run a four-week trial and dare them to demonstrate what a burden it is!

3. They can help calm nerves

We talked about lack of confidence in the previous blog . Of course we’re not suggesting the salespeople themselves are shy and retiring, but they may not yet have confidence in social media as a means to nurture the sales funnel. When they see senior management putting out great imagery, provocative thought leadership and pithy commentary though, they’ll feel much more inclined to follow suit. Particularly when they see how easy it is (point 2).

C-levels hold massive sway — people will accept their connection requests and listen to what they have to say. Convince them their prime objective is not to sell, but to get the content out there and seen, and they should be more than willing to help. If you’re ready to plan and execute a social selling strategy the most reticent CEO can give the thumbs up to, please give us a call on 01628 622187.

And be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to keep updated with our latest content marketing thoughts, ideas and insights to help you fuel conversations, with your audience.

Three roadblocks to successful social selling — and how to clear them

Good salespeople build relationships and sell through their networks. It’s not so off the wall then to assume that in this digital age we live in, social media might have a role to play.  So why are you struggling to get your social selling initiative off the ground?

In conversations with our customers, three themes come up time and time again

1. Lack of confidence

We’re not talking about the salespeople themselves — generally, they have plenty of self-confidence, and reaching out to people comes pretty naturally.

What we’re talking about is confidence in social media as a means to engage with people and nurture leads. It’s a slow-burn activity, which means it can be hard to predict results, and it can feel easier to revert to tried-and-tested sales techniques.

Solution: One way to encourage participation is to make it as easy as possible for your colleagues to get involved; show them that they don’t need to spend hours each day to take part. A good way to do this is to circulate a regular email briefing which provides:

• A synopsis of the recently published assets, so that they can quickly get a feel for the main points.
• Links to the company’s posts that you want them to amplify, so that they can easily find, like and share.
• Prewritten soundbites which can either be customised or used as is, so that they don’t have to formulate an original contribution when sharing with their network.

2. Lack of expertise

For those of us who are comfortable with social media, it can come as a surprise to learn that others don’t always live and breathe it. But a lack of experience with social media, or particular platforms, can hold people back — especially if they think they need to spend a lot of time updating and maintaining their profiles.

Solution: A half-day workshop could be all it takes to get your sales teams up-to-date on social media and give them a basic grounding in how it all works. Again, preparing soundbite copy that they can customise to fit their own profiles can make this far easier for them.

3. Lack of senior management buy in

If your salespeople are reluctant, wait till you get talking to the board! Just like the sales team, C-level managers might feel like it’s too much work, especially as they’re not directly involved in sales. It’s really worth getting them involved though — they hold massive sway, as will their connections.

Solution: It’s important that your board understand they’re not being asked to make sales themselves — that’s still the job of the sales team. Explain to your C-level managers that their task is to get the content seen as widely as possible, and set an example to the rest of the business.

In fact, this last point is so important that we’re writing a separate blog post, all about getting C-level buy-in. If you’re looking for ways to get a little more traction with your social selling initiative, sign up to receive a notification when this blog is published.

Hitting the nail on the head: the key to more effective sales collateral.

When Theodore Levitt said, “people don’t buy quarter-inch drills, they buy quarter-inch holes,” he may have hit the nail on the head (excuse the pun!). What he meant, of course, is that people look for solutions, not products.

However, unless Levitt had a group of quarter-inch-hole-drilling enthusiasts in mind, he didn’t take the principle far enough. And if your goal is to create effective sales collateral, you need to avoid the same mistake. The thing is, people don’t really want quarter-inch holes either.

Identify with your customers’ pain points or aspirations

If we were to revise Levitt’s statement to sum up what people really want when they go shopping for drills, it might look something like this:

“People don’t buy quarter-inch drills, they buy the ability to quickly and easily complete the DIY jobs that they’ve been putting off for weeks because, frankly, there’re a bunch of other things they’d rather do with their well-deserved weekends”.

Granted, it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like Levitt’s version, but it does reinforce the fundamental point that’s missing from the original: to articulate how your solution will enhance the lives of your audience, you need a comprehensive understanding of who they are and what they’re trying to achieve.

To sell your solution, you must understand the problem.

Levitt was right to point out that your audience don’t buy products and services; they buy what those products and services enable them to do.

That’s why you need to be able to step into their shoes and see the world through their eyes.

Then, and only then, will you be able to accurately articulate the benefits that your solution will bring to their lives – and that’s how you close the deal.

How well do you know your audience?

To get to know them better, fast, download our Customer Insight eBook.