Source: Vidyard Breaking through all the marketing noise is hard enough on its own, but when your audience is other marketers, you have your work cu
Breaking through all the marketing noise is hard enough on its own, but when your audience is other marketers, you have your work cut out for you. How do you engage people who spend every hour of their workday thinking through the same problem? We can create blog posts, ads, and case studies to grab the attention of our prospects, but when they know all the tricks of the trade, creativity is key.
At Influitive, we’ve worked for the past five years to build a whole new category of marketing—advocate marketing—to help B2B companies ignite growth through the voices of their customers. Our platform gives marketers the ability to discover, nurture and mobilize their customer base to reach a wider audience, accelerate the sales pipeline, and improve customer engagement. It’s my job to educate our prospects on what advocate marketing is, why it’s important, and why they need it.
In 2015, Influitive created a new industry event focused on advocacy, customer engagement, and experience. We called it Advocamp. The first year was a huge success and we wanted the 2016 event to be even bigger; our goal was to more than triple attendance. But it wasn’t going to be easy to get the attention of so many more B2B marketers and convince them to attend our virtually unknown event. Oh, and did I mention that we only had three months to get everyone registered? No sweat.
We had our normal promotion vehicles—the website, email, content, and social ad campaigns—but we knew to stand out in a sea of events that look more or less the same on paper, we were going to have to get creative.
Enter Camp Counselor Buck.
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To convince people to attend a brand new marketing event instead of or in addition to the dozens of other events out there, we couldn’t just tell them Advocamp was the best conference ever. We had to show them. We had to make them feel something.
When you have to grab people’s attention quickly, and don’t have the luxury of a 1,500-word post to explain the awesomeness of your event, the best tool to accomplish this is video. It can help build that emotional foundation, and it’s much easier to be funny, sad or joyful through video than almost any other form of content. But sometimes it’s also a lot harder to produce.
87% of online marketers use video. What’s your excuse? @Vidyard #videomarketing (Tweet This)
This is where our video partners come in. We had worked with a video production company called Sparksight on many video campaigns in the past, including some basic Advocamp commercials in 2015. Among these Advocamp promo videos was a camp counsellor character named Buck—think B2B marketing meets summer camp with a large helping of physical comedy. We called these videos Buckshots.
While the early Buckshot videos from 2015 were super funny and people seemed to enjoy them, we could only use them for brand awareness, which is marketing speak for “we have no way of measuring the impact of this.” We made them, put them online, and hoped they would take off. I’m sure you can guess that they didn’t. They got a few hundred views each. But we weren’t done with video. We realized we had to put significant distribution efforts behind them just like any other piece of content we produced.
Although we couldn’t tie registrations and hard ROI directly to these original Buckshots, we did get a lot of positive feedback from our colleagues, partners, customers, and other Advocamp attendees. Marketers attend so many events every year, and often they feel like just one big advertisement. We heard, however, that we had hit the mark when it came to instilling a different kind of emotional impact associated with our event. It made a promise about the event experience that stood out from the competition. More importantly,…
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