Driving +10k people to a virtual conference within 7 weeks - Road to Celosphere Live 2020: A best practice guide for event promotion

The Corona-Virus has changed the way B2B companies are able to engage with their prospects and customers. Physical events are no longer a possibility and therefore long-lasting shifts in the events industry, as well as in the way we as Marketers think about events, are to be expected. When will we see the next big in person conferences again? Will work-related traveling still be a common occurrence, even after we’ve proven that it’s not an absolute necessity?

We can’t answer those questions just yet but we surely should assume that companies will benefit from building in-house marketing capabilities that are able to deliver world-class virtual event experiences. This requires quite a significant shift when it comes to skill sets and the tools needed, but it also offers massive opportunities for scaling, for reaching a bigger audience (without the barrier of physical limitation), and finally, cost savings.

One year ago, Celonis unexpectedly had to take the decision to turn its biggest physical flagship event of the year, Celosphere, into a virtual event. Within 7 weeks, the whole company turned a physical 3 days conference into a virtual one.

In this article, I would like to share some of the learnings I and my team were able to collect, from being part of the event organization, as well as managing the digital marketing promotion efforts for Celosphere Live last year. The article will only focus on the promotional stream of the conference, not going into the details on the actual organization and hosting of the event. Needless to say that success can only be achieved if you have a world-class agenda and content to promote. 

Do not underestimate the workload of creating a world-class virtual conference

Let's face some important facts before going into the details on the digital marketing and DemGen initiates used to promote the event.

Holding a several-day virtual conference requires a huge amount of organizational work and the involvement from several teams and departments to make it happen. 

It needs a marketing/ events team of a certain size, several months of preparation, and also a sufficient budget to be able to attract a large audience. At Celonis, more than 15 different teams were involved in the organization of last year′s virtual conferences, Celosphere Live and Celonis World Tour.

To ensure success, it is critical that the executive management buys into this understanding and that the conference is treated by everyone as a cornerstone of the year’s marketing activities - and that it is used to reveal important announcements, bring the community together, and build a space to exchange know-how.

This is a list of project streams & departments involved: 

Added Fact: Another precondition for a successful online conference that creates a lot of hype and reaches a lot of people is, of course, that you have a great product in the center of it, that solves problems and is able to excite an audience. 

All of the findings and tips stated in this article are based on the Celonis example and its great and innovative software, and therefore there are several factors that might not make these findings directly transferable to other companies. I′m describing some of the success factors of a Conference built around the great technology of Celonis.

Event content - present your agenda early on

Your ideal audience will only register for a conference if they think they will get something valuable out of the event - being it to get inspiration, to connect to peers, or to learn. Stating the obvious: the biggest driver of the event is the content of the event itself. Beyond the fact of being just a typical marketing phrase, our analytics supported this claim: 

The agenda drives registrations. 

Having an agenda outline versus no agenda makes a huge difference in the conversion rates of your registration page. Driving (paid) traffic to an event page with no agenda can result in a big waste of advertising budget. Therefore, it is beneficial for the event promotion to reveal speakers and attending companies as early as possible. Do not wait for your agenda to be completed or 100% perfect, but rather present an unfinished skeleton of the agenda and fill it as you get more confirmations. It can make sense to time the release of some of the highlights & speaker announcements to create new momentum during the promotion cycle. 

Nevertheless, our finding was: The more complete the agenda, the higher the conversion rate on the registration page. 

Engage the whole company - steer with analytics

As mentioned above, the execution and planning of an online conference require the involvement of a lot of teams and stakeholders in the company. And so does the promotion of the event. 

Another critical factor for driving a large number of people to the conference is that you create excitement about the event within the company itself. Yes, Marketing is likely to be (one of) the main drivers of registrations but if you do it right, it can also be only a small portion of the sources of event registrations.

Ideally, you want everyone inside your company to feel excited about the conference and to feel that he or she can contribute to the success of the event. And the best way to do so is to actually enable the different teams to drive people to the event, as well as to show them how much they are contributing. The conference should be something that bonds employees of your company together and something about which they should feel proud of afterward.

So, how do you get people excited about the event promotion? Firstly, you need to distribute email templates, create social media posts to be shared, email banners to be placed in the signatures, etc. But most importantly, excitement is created when you are able to show who and how many people signed up to the event due to someone's specific effort. 

Make your employees feel like contributors - with data.

At Celonis, it almost became a race and a competition between the different teams to be the ones driving the most amount of people to the event. So, how can you create this visibility into the contribution of each team? Which data points do you need? 

Prepare the right data setup - Your UTM strategy

The key to building a dashboard that can steer the company to a successful and exciting event promotion is a good UTM strategy and the generalized adoption of UTM parameters during the event promotion stage. 

In order for the UTMs to give you valuable insights you should connect your UTM data to your CRM data so you can show which channels drove which contacts to the event. Find a good article on how to grab the UTMs via form submission and connect them to your Salesforce campaign object here. 

Once you have this connection in place, it will enable you to understand which sources and channels drove how many registrations and more importantly, it will also give you insight into the quality of registrants per channel or source. Furthermore, it will let you understand how the attendance rate per channel looks like once you have updated the status of the campaign member after the event. All of these insights will help you make better investment decisions in your future events. 

So, how do you set up UTM parameters in the right way? In short: The most important thing is that you need a common identifier such as using the same event name in all UTM campaign parameters that will let your group and compare all the different channels you use against each other. The rest depends on how your company’s UTM strategy is set up. Find a good article about what UTMs are and how to use them in the best way here. 

This could be an approach on how to set up your UTM parameters (simplified):

Set an attendee goal & incentivize critical functions

As stated earlier, your virtual conference should be the year’s cornerstone event. As such, it should be used to make big announcements, create excitement around your product, and bring your community together. Therefore, you want to attract as many (relevant) people as possible to the conference. 

Now that you have built the foundation to measure the contribution of channels and teams, you should set an overall attendee goal for the conference. It should be ambitious and motivating but not unrealistic. If your company is on a growth trajectory, the goal should be rather a stretch instead of too easy to reach. Our former CMO Anthony Deighton used to say that that “every goal setting exercise should have a sense of discomfort, about it” and that the best goals are the ones that “when you say them out loud, you say that’s bananas. Like there’s no way, well, what if, what if we did that, what would we need to do?” (listen to the following podcast to hear more, it's quite inspiring).

That's what we did at Celonis and we almost always reached or even surpassed those goals even if they seemed unreachable at the beginning. This is one of the things that struck me most about working at Celonis is that it enabled me to see just how much can be achieved when you set a high goal. For instance, we increased the number of attendees by more than 6x in a year after switching Celosphere from being a physical event to being a virtual one. We aimed for 10k registrations, in the end we attracted almost 20k.

How to do it?

Break down the attendee goal by channel and region (if applicable) and translate them into registration goals. Create responsibility for the goals at a channel and regional marketing level. Incentivize the teams that own each of the channels and orchestrate the achievements of the goals regionally (a regional field marketer should have an eye on the registration target of his or her region across channels). 

Here are some aspects/ indicators that we took into consideration when coming up with our goals:

• Indicators that show the engagement in a certain region, e.g. # of mailable contacts, # of accounts with oppies
• If you have existing data from previous digital event or conferences: Registration to attendee ratio; Registrations by channel (email, BDR, Sales, Ads etc.) to split the registration targets into channel goals

This could be a matrix that illustrates your attendee goals by channel & region:

Adjust your goals on the way if you see that they are completely unrealistic. Otherwise, the motivation, positive experience, and the hard work that is put into the preparation of the event may fade. 

Build a company-wide dashboard

In order to show the progress of your promotions and the target achievement of the registration goals, you should build an event dashboard that is accessible, as well as the source of truth to all relevant stakeholders. Build a version of the dashboard that can be shared with the whole company. It could include: 

• Registrations by day, days left until the event 
• Typical registration curve in the course of an event promotion; the average number of registrations per day required to achieve the goal
• Registrations by channel / source (aggregated)

Build further versions of that dashboard with restricted access to the relevant functional leaders which drills down further into details, e.g.

• Which accounts have already signed up, and how many contacts per account
• Accounts with opportunities that have not yet signed up
• Top 10 registration drivers by team, e.g. Top 10 Account Executives, Top 10 SDRs, Top 10 partner managers, etc.

My experience has shown that it's highly motivating and engaging to show the progress of the registration numbers to the company (if done in a good way). Employees are very interested and will come up with creative ideas to contribute.

Establish a regular communication cycle to the company

Once you come up with goals you need to keep the company engaged and informed about the progress of the event preparation as well as the number of registrations. Establish a regular communication cycle in the company, such as a weekly email newsletter that includes updates on the newest speakers, the number of registrations broken up by channel and region, information about companies who signed up, internal success stories & even champions as well as a link to the page where all content related to the event lives. 

Create a go-to place where everyone can find content to be used for promoting the event, such as email templates, email banners, slides to present in the next prospect or customer call, social media posts to share, etc. Make the weekly email an exciting event that your employees cannot wait to receive.

Marketing channel insights

Now that we have talked about some important constructs that govern and surround the event promotion, let's dive a bit deeper into the best way to manage your promotion channels and the teams behind them.

Agile performance marketing - A/B test everything

A key to a successful event promotion is agility, especially in the area of performance marketing. The digital channel owners and the content team need to work super closely together in a steady feedback and ideation mode. I highly recommend setting up a daily stand-up with your core digital team and content producers to look at the ad campaign data and to make adjustments accordingly. 

What is working well? Where do we need to adjust the copy? Where should we reduce the budget? Where should we increase it? What do we need to stop and which A/B tests do we set up next?

Create an ad campaign structure that allows for rapid A/B testing. Think about criteria you want to test and set A/B tests up for as many hypotheses as you can! You will be surprised at which factors drive your CTR up or down - it can go from a word in your headline to the color of your background.

Begin your performance marketing efforts by trying several different paid channels and keeping a close eye on the quality of registrations throughout the first days. Not all conversions are made the same. 

For example, what we found at Celonis (and probably cannot be generalized), is that leads with the first touch from Google Display are cheap but have very low quality. Therefore our strategy was to use channels with better targeting options such as LinkedIn to drive initial traffic to Celonis and then re-target via cheaper Google Display ads. Test to find out what works for you but keep the mindset of quick changing and turn around based on the results you observe.

Landing Page Optimizations are critical for your investment

As important as the A/B testing of the ads is the optimization and steady A/B testing of your landing/registration page. You might think it's all about the content of your event (page) but the presentation and order in which the content is presented has a massive impact on whether or not people end up signing up. During last year′s Celosphere Live we were able to increase the landing page conversion rate by more than 200% (to a conversion rate above 15%) across all channels. Here is what we tested:

• Having a form on the event landing page vs. having a separate registration page
• Including # of registrations on event landing page
• A/B testing the order of certain landing page components, especially speaker components
• A/B testing the headline and CTA of the sign-up page

If you drive thousands of users to your landing page, every tiny little percentage increase in your conversion rate results in a massive number of new registrations. Plus, it will improve your ROI.

Email & database marketing is key

Our most effective channel for driving attendees to our virtual events is marketing and sales emails. I believe this is common marketing sense but naturally, the contacts in your CRM/database have already engaged with your company before and therefore are the ones who are most likely to join your virtual conference. 

Another finding is that the attendance rate for those contacts is much higher than the one of the contacts you generated new via e.g. paid ads. That being said, you want to develop an exciting email marketing cadence to inform your database audience about your upcoming event and what they can expect from attending it. 

But there should be a clear difference between marketing and sales emails. Where the marketing emails should be rather high level and following the event messaging and design theme, sales emails should be individualized and personalized based on the relationship of your company with the account. In the best case, sales emails build up on your marketing cadence. Here are some tips & tricks from my perspective, as the leader of the email marketing campaigns for our global events at Celonis.

Marketing emails:

Develop a cadence for getting people to sign up and another one for keeping your audience engaged after they signed up. Build your cadences around a content plan. Think about the segmentation of your database when creating said content plan as well as the email cadence. An example could be to have persona-specific dynamic contents in your emails where you display the agenda items that are most relevant to that persona. Coordinate important content launches and announcements with your content marketing teams and use the email send dates as important deadlines.

This is an example of how the email cadences could look like: 

We had a good experience with the creation of a global email cadence in English as well as with suggesting segmentation criteria for the email lists. It is up to the local field marketing teams to then decide on the changes to be made to the list and/or the localization of the emails if needed.

Sales emails: 

Provide your Sales teams (BDRs, SDRs) with marketing engagement insights so they can follow up based on a contact′s engagement with your (email) marketing campaign. Who opened and engaged with your marketing email? Who visited the event page but has not signed up yet? These are the best leads to follow up on and to convince to join the event.

This is relevant for sales since your virtual conference is THE place where your prospects can engage with peers, they can see how other customers use your product as well as get to know the latest and greatest updates and best practices. You want as many of your contacts to join the virtual event as possible.

Incentivize your partners

Partners can also be a great channel to promote your virtual conference - as long as you incentivize them in the right way. Think from the partner's perspective: Why would they want to promote the event? What is their incentive? Ways to incentivize partners could be through sponsorship packages where the partner has a virtual booth at the conference or even an own session during the event. Naturally, this will incentivize the partners to drive their audiences to your event. If you have a compelling offer, the partner channel can be a huge driver and success factor (our partner marketing and partner management team can tell you more about their secrets here for sure).

Create excitement via organic Social Media

I have not been too involved on the social organic side of marketing so I would refer to our expert Philip Behnke for this point. Naturally, your social organic channels are very important for your event promotion as well. Regular news and announcements will help you to further create excitement about the event in your community.

One thing that worked very well for us: Provide your internal and external speakers with templates that they can share on their platforms.

Increase energy level at the finish line: Focus on enablement & attendance, don't stop promoting!

The closer it gets to the event the more important it is to enable: 

1) the registrants on how to join the event, 

2) your company on how the event is going to take place and 

3) your sales team on how to engage with their contacts during the event. 

I will focus on user enablement here as it illustrates the end of your promotional journey. All of the work you have put into driving people to sign up will only be worth it if people are actually attending and consuming your content. 

My main tip for the user enablement stage is that: the way you set up the operational email cadence to prepare registrants for the event is the key to a good attendance rate. 

Think about when you will send your reminders to join the event and which information these emails should incorporate. How will people be able to join the event? Which link do they need to use and whom can they contact when technical problems occur? Keep it short and do not confuse your audience. Prepare a user guide to show how the event is going to take place, how to log in and where to find what. One thing is to communicate these procedures to the registrants, another equally important thing is to communicate them to your company.

Having the right event tool will help you massively to set up and deliver these reminder email cadences. We just switched to the platform Hopin 6 months ago and the difference in terms of event experience, user engagement insights that we have access to, as well as the attendance rate itself is huge compared to our previous live streaming solution, Vimeo. At another recent virtual event, we achieved an attendance rate of over 60% in some of our biggest regions.

Another important learning, right at the end: Do not stop promoting on the finish line! We have actually seen that the registration numbers are the highest in the week before the event and even during the event (it’s the beauty of a digital event I guess). Instead of fading out your efforts, rather double down at the finish line and share the event experience as it happens, on your social channels.

And with this, I close the article. Following these steps, we at Celonis were able to attract more than 18k people to register for our first-ever virtual conference - within the span of only 7 weeks. It was certainly one of my most exciting projects and one of my proudest professional achievements to have managed the digital promotion of Celosphere 2020. There is a lot more to share when it comes to the follow-up and post-event promotion but I will leave that for another article if you are interested.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Connect with me to discuss and share similar experiences.