Using Social Media and Online Events to Build Thought Leadership

BrightTALK Marketing’s largest virtual event in 2020 brought together 3,800+ registrants and 50+ expert speakers for 18 ground-breaking sessions - increasing registrations by more than 211% over prior years.

Impressively, our team planned the entire event in just 10-weeks, and we’re excited to show you how. Join us as we break-down our planning and execution best practices with a focus on optimizing the audience experience. We’ll detail tips and tricks to streamline both speaker recruitment and training to ensure everyone comes away fully prepared. Plus, we’ll give you a framework to make planning your own relevant and engaging events as easy as possible - even on a condensed timeline.

Join this fun-filled and informative event as we wrap up 2020 and look ahead at 2021. We'll dig into hot topics and trends from this year and highlight key predictions for what the upcoming year will bring. The panel will cover:

- Marketing takeaways from 2020
- Webinar and virtual event strategies
- Sales and marketing alignment
- Predictions and tips for 2021

We hope you'll join us as we raise a glass to 2020 and prepare for the year to come.

The current climate has brought about rapid and likely longstanding changes worldwide. In only a matter of months, we’ve seen local businesses, multinational corporations, and even entire industries, quickly pivot business operations and strategies just to stay afloat.

As marketers, we find ourselves asking, “where do we go from here?”

Join us as our BrightTALK production experts unpack not only what they've seen working this year, but also what is on the horizon for virtual events. David Edwards, Business Manager & Associate Managing Director, Greg Johnson, Managing Producer, Jeff Kunken, Director, Creative Accounts, and Michael Lacy, Manager, Webinar Services, will use a rapid roundtable format to discuss:
- How virtual events have shifted this year
- What’s next for both marketers and the events industry
- How to set your team up for success and get ahead of the competition

So much content, so little time. In the super-saturated B2B landscape, how can you ensure your webinars get noticed? Let us show you how to build a webinar that puts your content to work for you. From refining your copy to executing engaging, multimedia presentations, we’ll cover everything you need to know to showcase your brand while driving increased pipeline and revenue.

We’ll walk you through how to:
- Refine your webinar abstract to drive registrations
- Build and execute promotions that stand out from the crowd
- Optimize the day-of experience for speakers and attendees alike

In a world where content is increasingly more complex and data-centric, B2B marketers are turning to animation to create engaging videos and gifs that stand out without breaking the bank.

“Animation is only expensive if it’s a one-off. If you build it into your content motion, it can be cost-effective and powerful.” - Steve Madeja, Producer (BrightTALK)

As marketers, we need to wring every last drop out of the content we work so hard to produce. In this episode, we’ll explore how leveraging animations can breathe life into existing content without having to start from scratch. We’ll strategize the types of B2B content that best lend themselves to animation and demonstrate how you can captivate new audiences through multiple formats.

Join Jeff Kunken, Steve Madeja, and MB Welch as they take you behind the scenes with The Studio, the BrightTALK content series pulling back the curtain on B2B video production in the marketing world.

Plan. Develop. Promote. Amplify. Repeat. The sheer amount of time and energy needed to create tactical, engaging content that converts can drag down a team when not done strategically.

Join our VP of Corporate Development, Val-Pierre Genton, and Manager of Marketing Programs, Olivia Dassler, as they pull-back the curtain on BrightTALK’s own content production engine. You’ll come away with actionable best practices that set you up for success and prepare your team to capitalize on opportunities as they arise.

They’ll focus on:
- Generating scalable awareness and demand through always-on webinar and video programs
- Creating a content plan that features all potential forms of content
- Tips and tricks to speed up the content development process without sacrificing quality
- Best practices that put your content to work for you
- How to push measurement and performance monitoring to the next level

As a special bonus, get access to the real-life templates the BrightTALK marketing team uses to plan, develop, promote, and maximize our own game-changing content.

Developing your understanding of your target audience is important, but turning those insights into an actionable strategy that proves ROI can be difficult for the most seasoned marketer. It’s easy to get lost and hard to know where to begin without the right tools or strategies to help develop your ideas into a repeatable content plan.

In the second episode of the Content Intelligence Series, Nick Markwith will explore how to start developing a data-driven content strategy that produces results from an analytical perspective. Join this episode to learn:
- What elements are needed for your content strategy
- How to understand your strengths and opportunities through analysis
- How to leverage topics and formats drive results

You’ve set your virtual event KPIs. Now, where should you focus your resources to get the most bang for your budget? Let us walk you through the essentials.

Join Nick Fagan, Senior Director, US Sales (BrightTALK) as he sits down with Ed Farraye, Growth/Revenue Marketing (HashiCorp), to highlight how to maximize the ROI of virtual events in 2021. We'll discuss how to establish a budget that maps directly back to your overarching goals and objectives, and how three different types of virtual events fit into your GTM strategy - demand gen, brand-building, and internal. While we won't share top-secret budget specifics, we'll break-down the minimum requirements necessary to launch a practicable B2B event or conference and outline the extras that, when executed cost-effectively, can elevate a standard virtual event into an engaging digital experience.

With the growing potential for a global recession, businesses that are not yet digitally-focused will be forced to adapt. But, when pressure looms and budgets begin to feel tight, why will the best marketers lean-in to post-digital marketing?

Join Dr. Dave Chaffey, co-founder and content director (Smart Insights), and Andy Wiggans, VP and regional managing director, EMEA (BrightTALK) as they break-down the intricacies of an omnichannel communications growth plan that prompts conversion to online or offline sales while limiting digital silos.

Together, they’ll cover how to support the continued growth of both B2C and B2B organizations by reviewing:
- Important success factors for digital transformation
- Omnichannel communications planning and content marketing strategy
- Quick wins from low and no cost comms

Effective art direction can be the difference between integrated brand experiences and one-off, budget-busting disasters. But, when framing a vision and setting expectations, marketers and creatives can occasionally feel like they speak different languages.

“Sometimes it seems like clients are coming at a video project from their left brain and we’re coming at it from our right brain and we can’t even understand each other.” - Nyekha Bennett, Art Director (BrightTALK)

We asked our marketing and Studios teams how they manage art direction when both have different priorities and timelines. “Trust the process” and “non-verbal communication is key” are only a couple of the tips we’ll cover as we discuss how to ensure effective collaboration from the very beginning of any project. Plus, we’ll include a template kit of quick workshops the BrightTALK team uses to help align project groups from the start.

Join Nyekha Bennett and Greg Johnson, along with Mike Marsdale and Kate Jacobsen, as they take you behind the scenes with The Studio, the BrightTALK content series pulling back the curtain on B2B video production in the marketing world.

Winning new customers is hard work. Keeping them long-term is equally challenging. A lot of time, energy and resources go into maintaining happy customers, but the journey doesn’t have to stop when your core buyer changes their company or role.

Identifying job changes open new growth opportunities. These former buyers are advocates and it’s likely you can fuel growth by quickly reacting to these movements.

Join David Pitta, CMO at BrightTALK, and Christian Kletzl, CEO & co-founder of UserGems, as they share results of how they found 8x ROI in 90 days by quickly identifying and reacting to buyer job changes.

In this session, they will discuss:
- Monitoring job changes at customer and target accounts
- Reacting to change with automated but personalized messaging to former buyers and new buyers at target accounts
- Anticipating role churn and forecasting future impact of growth and retention

In a time when many organizations are reducing quarterly goals and struggling to keep revenue flat, it’s rare for a business to uncover new opportunities and grow pipeline. Worse still, overburdened sales teams often lack the time and resources to work every lead, meaning large swaths of potential profit ends up deprioritized and underworked.

The solution? AI.

Join David Pitta, CMO (BrightTALK), as he sits down with Aaron Bollinger, CRO, and Frank Burns, Director of Account Management (Kronologic), to discuss how teams, both big and small, can seamlessly cultivate high-value lead sources with always-on communication. Plus, we'll share how BrightTALK’s recent use of AI has increased response to opportunity creation by 22%, resulting in 12,000% ROI in only 90 days!

Adaptability has been the theme of 2020. Carefully crafted business plans went out the window with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March. As businesses embraced remote working, marketers quickly pivoted in-person programs and turned to new engagement tactics to drive demand in an especially noisy digital marketplace.

This summer, BrightTALK surveyed 1,000 marketing professionals across the globe to better understand how strategies have shifted. In this live session, BrightTALK’s Nick Markwith will dig into the data with a special emphasis on webinars and virtual events. Topics include:

- How GTM strategies have evolved recently
- Budget shifts and investments
- The importance and effectiveness of webinar and virtual events
- Core demand generation tactics and predictions for 2021

From webcams and USB mics to multi-camera 4K setups and drones, it’s easy to get lost in the tech of our trade. But, if there’s one question our team has heard time after time, it’s: “Do I really need this?”

“There’s a saying in the photography world,” says Tom Harris, BrightTALK producer. “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

In this episode, we’re debating the gear (and gearheads) B2B marketers need in their arsenal. We’ll provide recommendations for the essential equipment our team uses regularly - and even a few fun extras they take out when the time is right (i.e. drones). Plus, we'll give you handy tips and tricks you can use to make the most with what you’ve got on hand.

Join Greg Johnson and Frank Hanley, along with Tom Harris and Craig Bonheur, as they take you behind the scenes with The Studio, the BrightTALK content series that pulls back the curtain on B2B video production in the marketing world.

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BrightTALK Studios is the strategic, creative, and production division of BrightTALK. Along with our partners around the world, our teams in London, New York, and Sydney help businesses define and create the content they need to engage their target audience.

It's easy to create content; anyone can spin up a 500-word blog post or put together slides for a presentation, but are you contributing to the digital noise or cutting through it?

Creating high-performing content requires marketers to really understand their audience - not only as a persona with pain points but as a human with needs, different learning styles and buying preferences. By reaching your audience how and when they want and focusing on providing value first, marketers can build authentic connections through their content marketing and become a trusted partner in their buyer's journey.

Join this talk with Nick Markwith, Sr. Director of Content at BrightTALK, as he discusses the content planning and strategy process from a data and psychological perspective and how you can make the most with your content.

In this talk, you will learn how to:
- Understand your audience past the basics
- Leverage content formats and editorial directions to influence buying decisions
- Build trust and connect with your audience through your content strategy

About the presenter
Nick Markwith loves data and content. As the Sr. Director of Content at BrightTALK, he has spent the past nine years using our insights from 10M users to develop BrightTALK's editorial strategy and advise clients on how to reach their target audience through content and virtual events.

Go beyond world-class strategies to break-down the challenges we all face. Marketing Visionaries shines a light on the purpose-driven leaders behind some of the greatest achievements in B2B marketing and connects you with those who are helping their networks grow with humanity, sustainability, and compassion.

You're invited to join us for Marketing Visionaries: Riadh Dridi at 8 am PDT on September 15. Become a part of the conversation as Riadh Dridi, CMO (Automation Anywhere), and host Val-Pierre Genton, VP-Corporate Development (BrightTALK) discuss crisis-proof marketing, authentic diversity, and AI-powered innovation.

Now is the time for visionaries. Come along as we explore the role of the modern marketer and ingenuity of humankind.