MMCS Events Top 3 Digital Marketing Strategies for your events from Innovation Enterprise

Article Information

  • Posted By : Marina Vatav
  • Posted On : Aug 27, 2015
  • Views : 2666
  • Category : Marketing
  • Description : Launched in 2009, Innovation Enterprise had a truly remarkable growth. The company grew from organizing a few events a year to 120 events across the entire world, doubling their team over the last six months. 80% of their events are in the United States, others are in Asia Pacific, Australia, and Europe.

Overview

  • Deanna NoticeDeanna Notice, VP Marketing, Innovation Enterprise

    Launched in 2009, Innovation Enterprise had a truly remarkable growth. The company grew from organizing a few events a year to 120 events across the entire world, doubling their team over the last six months. 80% of their events are in the United States, others are in Asia Pacific, Australia, and Europe.

    Designed for executive-level professionals, Innovation Enterprise events are very industry focused, and so is their marketing.

    Deanna Notice, Vice President of Marketing at Innovation Enterprise, shared their Digital Marketing strategies that keep their community engaged and growing.

    1. Targeted Marketing over Mass Marketing

    "At the moment one of the challenges we have in the event marketing business is just the sheer amount of competition. We found that we've moved away from a kind of mass marketing strategy to more of a content and engagement strategy. It's all about nurturing our leads, and we recognize that people may not be ready to buy something from the first interaction with us. So we have our channel sites, which are content focused, and we have articles, webinars, white papers, etc. We engage our leads with that content, and collect interested leads for particular products. And that really does allow us to drill in and target people.

    If we have someone in our database who's continually downloading white papers and watching webinars on digital marketing, for example, then we can use our marketing automation software to target those people at the right time and tell them about our events," said Deanna.

    2. Growing Organic Communities

    "Another strategy that really works for us is growing organic communities. We have a large number of different groups across LinkedIn, across Meetup, and we work with different media partners. Our biggest LinkedIn group probably has about 130,000 professionals across the world, most of them are from the U.S. We grow that community, engaging with them with discussions about topics that they want to hear about, their biggest challenges, or companies that they think are performing well in today's environment. We use all of that information to shape our agendas. We use those groups and those communities to spread the word about our events as well. We moved away from mass marketing, but we still do mass email; however, it's far more focused and targeted.

    We have different marketing people working in the channels. They manage each of the communities and  make sure the community is engaged, that they are approving discussions, that the group stays focused. We don't have people talking about topics that are not relevant," noted Deanna.

    3. Create and Share Great Content

    - Have great Speakers at your events

    "Across all of our events we are acclaimed for the content, for the fact that people who are speaking are representing the industry. They are the industry leaders at any one point in time. I think that's what brings people back to our events," pointed out Deanna.

    - Continuously create and share great online content

    "The beauty of our business is that we have so much content. We do have an in-house editorial team and they do write new fresh content every single week for our channel sites. And that's based on topics that we get from our advisory boards. Each channel has an advisory board, 5-6 industry leaders that really help us to shape the content that we are working on.

    So, they might just send a topic and our editorial team would then do the research and come up with fresh content. In addition to that we do countless amounts of interviews during our events. We have all of the recordings from the presentations. Also we do work with a lot of vendors to provide webinars and white papers. We have a lot of content from industry innovators and software providers that we work with.

    Apart from our Innovation Enterprise corporate site, we have a site called channels.theinnovationenterprise.com. That site is effectively a content hub. We have fresh interviews, articles, white papers, and webinars on that site. And that site gets updated daily by our editorial team," shared Deanna.

    - Invite external contributors to submit content

    "We have opened that site up to external contributors so we get a lot of content from people who write for Forbes, ZDNet, and TechCrunch. They are also sharing that content on our site, which is great.

    It's really easy to become an author. You just make a profile and you can start publishing articles. Quite a lot of our authors we don't know personally. They come onto the site, and publish their own material. I guess for them it's a great way to get traffic through to the site, and obviously have links back to the original article source. For us and our community, it's just a different insight—more content. We can never have enough content," pointed out Deanna.

    - Content on Demand

    "We also have content on demand (www.ieondemand.com) where we have probably about 5000 hours of content from our events from the last 5 years. We have some people who attend our events regularly, people who attend one event, and others that just subscribe to our online platform and just watch presentations. The good thing about it as well is that you can get in contact with speakers and submit questions also. It's that interactive," noted Deanna.

     

    Innovation Enterprise provides access to content across 7 distinct channels, including Big Data, Analytics, Strategy, Innovation, Digital, Finance & Supply Chain.