Whether you’re a growing startup or an enterprise business, its oftentimes difficult to keep the content calendar filled with relevant insights. However, many businesses are looking to take scrappier approaches to content creation, ensuring that investments in other tactics — such as webinars and events — fuel engagement later in the calendar year.
This was a recurring theme during a panel discussion hosted by ON24 and Bizzabo at their Experience This! event that took place this past August. My colleague, Klaudia Tirico, moderated the conversation between Axel Kirstetter, VP of Content Marketing at the Merrill Corporation, and Anne McCrory, Group VP of Customer Experience And Operations for Events at IDG. While the topics of discussion varied, scrappy marketing as a business practice seemed to be in constant consideration.
Here are a few things discussed during the session that any marketing team can start doing today to get scrappy with their B2B engagement strategies:
1) Leverage Prospect Engagement To Fuel Content Production
While webinars have been around for some time, it still seems as though many B2B businesses continue to produce them on an as-needed basis. However, Kirstetter noted during the panel discussion that webinars can be a foundational asset that helps drive discussion, while also fueling ideas for other pieces of content later down the line.
“We use webinars to generate content,” Kirstetter said. “We visualize our ideas prior to the webinar, but the flow is subject to panelist and attendee engagement.”
Kirstetter also noted how specific polls during webinars enable his team to create extremely segmented infographics. For example, specific responses from a heavily dominated healthcare audience in a webinar can create new insights into that segment’s behavior. “It really generates a lot of interesting discussion,” he concluded.
2) Experiment Unique Ways To Connect Relevant Physical & Digital Events
There are a variety of (pseudo-free) channels at a marketing team’s disposal when looking for unique ways to engage an active audience. When it comes to connecting physical events with digital experiences, McCrory of IDG noted how they started to investigate mediums such as Twitter chats to get speakers and attendees engaged early to drive further engagement once the event came around.
“Sometimes as a follow up, after we started this group conversation after the event and everybody wanted to keep going, I wanted to bring this sort of the community — which also lives within an app — to have more of a live interactive experience,” McCrory noted.
3) Building A Community To Promote Further Engagement
Ultimately, B2B companies are learning that building a community around your brand provides a plethora of benefits — including opportunities to learn more about your customers and fuel content calendars. McCrory noted how IDG is practicing this along with their Twitter chats, such as with Advisory Boards and reward programs.
“We usually have an advisory board to come in the past to share ideas and give us feedback on topics we were presenting,” McCrory noted. “We also typically have an awards program associated with that. It’s a very rewarding mechanism for our stakeholders, and we can create a ton of content from that.”
