The Shifting Sands Of Selling Tech

Tech marketers need to keep trying new tactics for demand generation, as traditional physical events remain temporarily sidelined. Two key programs that we plan to incorporate into our 2021 demand generation strategy include revamped webinars and virtual events.

Revamped Webinars

In the early days of the pandemic, many marketing budgets were slashed in the wake of dire uncertainty and widespread lockdowns. Like others, our company canceled plans to participate in near-term trade shows only to learn that all 2020 events were canceled as well. Since the beginning of the year, we’d been conducting 45-minute webinars with our product team and partners to discuss our platform and customer pain points in IT operations.

While this approach helped build out our video content library, we needed to adjust in order to keep our audience engaged. In April, we changed the agenda to focus on remote tech operations. Then, during the summer, we launched a new series of 20-to-30-minute events that focused on broader industry topics.

These “RampChats” were designed to attract participants based on issues that IT front liners were experiencing in the moment rather than conducting product demos. We enlisted partners and industry thought leaders to be our guests and switched from audio and slides to live video chats as video collaboration became an overnight sensation of work-from-home culture.

Costs & ROI

Since we already had an ongoing BrightTalk subscription to host the webinars, we leveraged the platform by producing webinars weekly at no additional monetary cost. The only cost was a few hours of our staff time to prepare and conduct the webinars and then a few more hours to create and track follow-up campaigns after the event. By the end of 2020, we attained more than 1,000 leads from 25 webinars, which surpassed the goal we set in January.

Lessons Learned

Just as our company was ramping up live webinars, so was every other tech company. We found that the quality of leads had room for improvement: Few of them converted into a viable MQL for our salesforce. On the positive side, expanding these events has resulted in a rich content library of product and industry videos and recordings that we can reuse in campaigns, on our blog and in our social outreach.

2021 Action Plan

This year, our marketing team is implementing new processes to improve lead quality from virtual events. We created three new nurture streams, segmenting prospects by job title and areas of interest as determined by our BDR team and through progressive profiling. We’ll also be putting forth more effort toward finding industry thought leaders who can be our star guests.

During tough and flush times alike, people look for leaders to guide them in decisions and toward milestones. While the topic is always important (our event on “patch management” was an unexpected winner last spring), a vibrant speaker with viral influence can boost registrations and post-event downloads.

Virtual Events

In 2019, conferences and tradeshows represented a significant percentage of our lead generation outcomes. We didn’t immediately jump on the bandwagon when events moved online last spring, but as the months progressed, we saw that virtual events were filling buyers’ need for connections and advice.

In the second half of 2020, our company purchased sponsorship packages at two major virtual events: The IDG AI and Automation conference event in September and Gartner’s annual IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference in December. We had participated in these events in past years with strong results, which made the decision process simple. Even so, virtual events were unchartered territory.

We had to figure out how to make valuable connections with prospects and deliver quality leads to our salesforce in a world where handshakes, stopping by someone’s booth and cocktail hours were replaced by “virtual booths” with scant human appeal.

While sponsorship fees were lower than usual in both cases, we were still spending a healthy sum during a year where our marketing budget was curtailed. On the other hand, we saved on travel expenses for the handful of employees needed to staff the event, along with all of the physical booth set up costs. Both events we participated in nearly doubled the number of leads we expected to receive, much to our CEO’s delight.

Take advantage of the unique programs that large events offer to help boost networking. For instance, some virtual events developed a gamification element where visitors could collect badges at each booth and exchange them for prizes at the end of the show. We upped the ante by adding our own giveaway of Amazon gift cards, which visitors automatically qualified for just by interacting with us at our booth. This generated an uptick in prospects who downloaded our content and became leads for our BDR team.

Along the same lines, we paid extra for a thought leadership program at one event. This allowed us to deliver a 45-minute session during the show on a high-level, non-promotional industry topic, which set us apart from other companies and provided valuable content for attendees, who continued to download the recording days after the event was over.

2021 Action Plan

This year, we plan to continue spending marketing budget on industry events whether they are virtual or physical. We’ve added an online swag store hosted through Shopify to our mix of strategies. It’s an easy way to incorporate the swag element into the event scene now that everything has gone virtual. You can set a limit on how many people can use the Shopify code, and share the code with your salespeople to give to prospects. They simply enter the code at the online store and the swag is shipped directly to them — just make sure you pick something fun (and usable) for your swag gift.

Don’t wait for people to visit your virtual booth, either. If you have access to contact information of attendees, sign-up your most experienced, digitally savvy salespeople to man your booth. They can proactively reach out during the show with the right message to generate interest and, ideally, meetings.

Creative, digital marketing strategies will remain important throughout the rest of 2021. We predict that people will be hesitant to travel like they did in 2019, at least until vaccinations have reached a certain penetration of the global population. Secondly, many may conclude that the costly and time-consuming prospect of traveling for events and meetings isn’t always necessary if goals can be achieved in a more convenient and cost-effective online forum.

To that end, we are looking into holding a few smaller regional events — such as wine tastings or “master classes” on popular topics like entrepreneurialism or self-growth — footnoted by short presentations on our company. As always, content is king. Investing in high-quality product and industry assets that help prospects gain knowledge, make decisions and learn more about your category is never a wasted dollar.

Demand gen tactics and tools keep changing. As marketers, we need to take risks and experiment with new tactics while striving for continual improvement of everything that we do. Ask for feedback from employees, survey prospects and customers and take the time to debrief after every major campaign to learn what worked, what didn’t and thank those who contributed to your results. 

Mandy is a Senior Marketing Manager at OpsRamp, where she is responsible for a wide range of activities, including events and demand generation. She is based in San Jose, Calif., and can be found online at LinkedIn.