Key Success Factors in Building a Community

Carla Johnson, keynote speaker, marketing expert and Chief Experience Officer for Type A Communications gives us a deep dive into storytelling, something that should be a critical piece in any marketers’ toolbox. Carla, one of the foremost experts on the topic, explains what storytelling is in terms of marketing, why it’s effective and how to make it part of your marketing process.

In this interview Carla describes:
A simple framework marketers can use to become better storytellers
What an effective customer story looks like
How to operationalize storytelling in your organization

Webinars are a critical B2B content marketing strategy and as marketers become responsible for the customer journey, webinars are a valuable tactic for engaging prospects and customers at every stage of the funnel. Webinars drive high value leads at the top, and deliver compelling customer stories at the bottom of the funnel.

For our 2018 Benchmarks webinar, we’re doing something new. We’ll review data points from an analysis of 12,000+ webinars in the last year and we'll also share interviews from marketers who are the very best in the webinar business. You’ll learn what makes their initiatives successful, from strategy and process to promotion and follow up tactics.

Join us to learn the latest on webinars in 2018, including:

- The best days and times to hold and promote webinars
- Best practices on webinar content and event duration
- How the best marketers build scalable, successful webinar practices that drive engagement and revenue

We’ve all seen the explosion of marketing technology companies over the past several years, clearly illustrated in Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape that grew from 150 companies in 2011 to over 5,000 last year.

Today, we’re seeing many marketers who have been part of the martech tool buying spree in recent years take a step back and assess both how their stack works together and if they’re getting ROI from each piece. On the other hand, exciting developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have added capabilities and enhanced others.

So how do we make sense of the martech landscape today? How do you build a stack that answers business needs and takes advantage of cutting edge technology?

We’re excited to feature David Lewis, CEO of DemandGen, a leader at the forefront of making sense of today’s marketing tools for his clients, along with several innovative marketers who will discuss:

- Martech’s evolution in recent years
- Building a stack that makes business sense and delivers ROI
- Where martech is going, notably the impact of AI

When asked if they have good Sales and Marketing alignment, many leaders would quickly nod their heads. "Of course we do!" But when it comes down to it, is that alignment real? Are there clear SLAs in place for the treatment of leads and opportunities on both the Sales and Marketing sides? Is the impact of that alignment measurable? Do lead flow, reporting and other critical operations plumbing work as they should? How does this need to evolve as marketing is being asked to support growth across the customer experience?

We're excited to feature noted Marketing and Sales expert Matt Heinz, who will moderate a roundtable with visionaries from both functions where we'll discuss how to make tangible, measurable Sales and Marketing alignment a reality.

In this roundtable we'll cover topics like:

- How the best teams have operationalized Marketing and Sales' responsibilities
- How to measure the Marketing's influence at all stages of the buying cycle
- Which operational pitfalls to avoid

The CMO role is in a time of great change. On the B2C side, we're seeing several noted CPG brands like Coca Cola eschewing the CMO role and instead hiring Chief Growth Officers. In B2B, there is some traction in the rise of CGOs but the broader trend shows the CMO role becoming much more metrics and revenue-driven. It's an exciting time for marketers but it's critical to understand what's driving this dramatic shift.

Liz Miller, SVP, Marketing at CMO Council will host a lively roundtable with several notable CMOs. In this session we'll explore why this shift is happening, how businesses should think about these leadership roles, and what this means for Marketing as a whole.

You'll learn:
- How the emergence of key technologies has powered the shift to CGOs and revenue-focused CMOs
- How the need for growth influences breaking down old siloes across organizations and placing big bets on innovation
- What a CGO does and whether your company needs one today

Many B2B marketing teams have introduced webinars into their marketing mix. These web-based events attract qualified, invested audiences that you can convert into leads weeks before the content goes live, and months after it’s recorded. Are you making the most of this powerful lead generation asset?

Join this live webinar with BrightTALK and Uberflip to hear B2B webinar best practices and learn:

- How to optimize your webinar sign up process to get more registrants and how to get people to actually show up!
- How to leverage your recorded webinars to drive leads
- How to use paid amplification to drive even more MQLs from your webinar library

According to research from Google, buyers engage with an average of 10.4 pieces of information before making a purchase decision. Are you creating the right content to address your prospective buyers’ needs at each stage of the funnel?

Join BrightTALK as we share how to ensure you’re building a well-balanced asset library, including tips on blending rich and static media and building content that supports customer retention and growth.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

- How to leverage different content types for each stage of the funnel
- How to build an editorial calendar that address all stages of the sales funnel
- How to establish a content library that suits use cases, personas, and the complete buyer’s journey

In today’s sharing economy, people like to offer their insights and expertise. Let them.

By embracing your most loyal followers, you can gain authenticity and reach. Prospects and other customers are more likely to trust information when it comes from a third party, especially one with experience with your products or services.

Power users can deliver valuable insight through reviews and feedback, but they can also help with FAQs and basic customer support issues. This is especially true in the B2B marketplace, where knowledge and experience can pay huge dividends for employees and companies that use them.

This session will focus on creating loyalty programs that identify key supporters and power users, and then suggest ways to engage them to help sell and support the brand, ultimately boosting business.

Today, we expect everyone and everything to be connected. Always. In this connected economy, information is so easily accessible, that the relationship between buyers and sellers has been changed forever. The buyers are in control and they decide who they connect with, when, where and how.

Join us for a live webinar as we discuss:

- The shift in buying behavior
- How buyers are self-navigating the sales process
- The importance of personalized and interactive content to deliver business value
- The need for marketing organizations to adapt
- Why tracking and measurement is paramount to success in this new era

Want to know what innovative B2B marketing leaders are focused on in 2018? We interviewed 8 marketing experts to understand how their strategies are evolving and what predictions will shape the future of the function.

Hear from:
Doug Sechrist, VP, Demand Marketing at Zenefits
Kelvin Gee, Sr. Director, Modern Marketing Business Transformation at Oracle
Tommy Jenkins, VP, Demand Generation at AvidXchange
Sangram Vajre, CMO at Terminus
Scott Vaughan, CMO at Integrate
Julia Stead, VP, Marketing at Invoca
Jason Seeba, VP, Integrated Marketing at Dynamic Signal
Steven Wastie, CMO at Origami Logic

Join David Pitta as he shares learnings from our experts, including:
- Evolving go-to-market strategies with content and demand marketing
- Focusing on how marketing influences the customer experience
- Leveraging artificial intelligence today and in the future
- Evaluating the changing landscape of marketing teams and resources

Engaging with users on social media is critical, but so is listening. Just like in real life relationships, you will learn a lot more about your target audience if you pay close attention to what they are “saying”—to you, or to (and about) someone else (yes, even your competition).

This session will highlight the key trends in enterprise social, and explain how to leverage these new media to better understand and connect with your audience—and use the resulting data to strengthen your products and services.

While there’s often disparity among marketers around their favorite content marketing tactics, there’s one tactic that virtually all marketing teams use: social media. In fact, 92% of marketers say that social media is important to their business, according to the Social Media Examiner.

Whether it’s paid or organic, B2B or B2C, having a strategic social plan is key to seeing results from your social media efforts. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

- Build a complete social media plan for promoting your content (including downloadable templates)
- Craft trackable messages to generate leads through social media
- Enable and inspire your sales team to share your content

The General Data Protection Regulation affects everything that any business does with personal data and applies on an entity-by-entity basis. Its May 2018 deadline and wide-sweeping changes are challenging Marketers and their General Counsel to understand how it affects business growth strategies.

We’ve invited leading expert in data and privacy regulations, Tim Hickman from White & Case, to review:
* An intro to GDPR: what is it and why is it needed
* Key issues GDPR raises and the impact on businesses
* What you can do next to prepare

We’ll also have BrightTALK’s CMO, David Pitta, to review:
* How BrightTALK is GDPR compliant
* Addressing consent barriers if they exist
* Working with BrightTALK to be compliant

Is your content targeting the right audience? General information is great for broad-based marketing, but creating sticky communities requires that you go deep.

That might mean offering insights that are outside your core competency, but which will add significant value for your users. And it definitely means providing insights that target specific buyers based on the industry they're in, their geographic location (or that of the company they work for), their job role, the size of their business, and more.

The goal is to deliver information that is so relevant, your members see you as a thought leader not just in your area of expertise, but in theirs.

This webinar will discuss the need to go beyond your content comfort zone and offer recommendations on how to create the content you need to appeal to buyers on a personal level.

The Content Wrangler is a San Francisco-based global digital media company that exists to help organizations adopt the tools, technologies, and techniques they need to connect content to customers.

A small shop with two employees, The Content Wrangler uses webinars to build awareness, develop interest, and spot right-fit prospects. To compete with much larger firms, the company leverages its content strategy know-how to produce nearly 100 webinars a year on BrightTALK.

Producing that many programs may seem unrealistic for even a much larger team, but it’s possible because the company applies principles from lean manufacturing to their webinar production processes -- a format that any company can replicate.

Join BrightTALK for a special presentation from Scott Abel, Chief Wrangler at The Content Wrangler. You’ll learn how The Content Wrangler built one of the fastest growing—and most engaged—channels on brighttalk.com.

You’ll discover how adapting lessons learned from single-source publishing can be applied to your webinar production process, enabling you to produce more webinars with less effort.

Email marketing plays a significant role for successful webinars. It starts with a cadence of promotions that reliably drives registration to your content. Next comes a series of transactional emails designed to deliver an engaged audience at the pace and scale of your webinar programs. Post event allows you to create pathways for your audience to explore additional content and your products, while also coordinating with qualification teams on direct outreach strategies.

We’ll share learnings from 10+ million data points on what's working with email at scale. This webinar is planned for 30 minutes of sharing and then will open to a question & answer session.

We’ll review the following three email pathways to use with your webinars:

- Promotional strategies
- Transactional sends
- Post-event follow-up tactics

Here's an overview of what we'll cover in the webinar:

Agenda and background (3 mins)

Promotional strategies (7 mins)
- Segmenting database for relevancy
- Learnings on copy and design
- Cadence for consistent performance

Transactional sends (10 mins)
- Good use of confirmation emails
- Delivering live and engaged audiences (Reminders / calendars)
- Converting on-demand viewings

Post-event follow-up tactics (7 mins)
- Cuing up the next steps
- Routing to content vs product nurture paths
- Leveraging qualification teams

The core job of today’s marketers is to build communities around the topics that people are passionate about. To know what matters to them, to engage them, and to help them feel part of these communities with powerful stories. And for many marketers, the gift of storytelling is a natural one.

But not everyone is a born writer or brand minstrel, and knowing what will work for your audience takes more than data and clever messaging alone. Thankfully, everyone has the ability to tell stories that matter. It’s a skill that you can learn, polish, and adapt for your specific role and company.

On Wednesday, June 28th, join BrightTALK and Prezi’s European Regional Director, Spencer Waldron, to learn what it takes to keep your marketing efforts fresh, timely, and engaging. You'll also find out:

- How to turn user feedback, prospect needs, and industry trends into stories that stand out
- How to leverage the techniques and practices of renowned writers, speakers, and entertainers to develop more effective brand messaging
- Tricks and tips used by expert marketers to craft meaningful stories that will help you grow your user base

You’ll also get to see a handful of great story examples broken down into their key elements and decoded.

As marketers are being asked to increase their contribution to bookings and revenue, account-based marketing is being used as a strategy to improve conversions and reduce the sales cycle.

That said, ABM is only as good as the quality of the underlying data in your database and performance varies substantially depending your approach to execution.

Tune in to this session and learn how you can:
- Increase the number of target accounts
- Increase the number of contacts inside of target accounts
- Increase appointments with target accounts
- Improve sales and marketing alignment
- Grow revenue inside target accounts

Over the past 17 years, Val has built and sold an Internet business and helped business, sales and marketing executives at Fortune 500, mid market and start-up companies to create value, move markets and accelerate growth. He combines this knowledge with deep insights from millions of data points that are generated as nearly 6M professionals connect with experts and companies on BrightTALK to learn and grow.

Webinars have become an incredibly versatile and effective content marketing tactic that has been proven to drive higher value leads. As a result, marketers are being challenged to change and optimize the way they run webinars to attract and nurture their target audience.

For this year’s BrightTALK Webinar Benchmarks Report, we analyzed more than 10,000 webinars to understand the key metrics behind top programs and how marketers are effectively using webinars to drive demand for their business.

Join us for highlights and analysis from this year’s report, including:

- Best practices for using webinars to drive stronger pipeline and nurture strategies
- Suggested timelines for driving audience to your webinars
- Tips for optimizing titles and abstracts to attract more relevant audiences