Smashing the 1,000 attendee target

The challenge

Ghassan Sultan, CMO of TECHNIA a global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) consultancy set out to deliver a virtual experience worth attending; his primary goal was to attract over 1,000 attendees to a virtual conference to raise brand awareness and drive sales pipeline. After a successful physical event in 2019, with significant investment in content, logistics and event space; the TECHNIA team decided to rethink the ‘roadshow’ approach to develop an experience which delivered on content and engagement whilst aligning to the brand mission for sustainability.

TECHNIA originated from a series of acquisitions – Ghassan also saw this as an opportunity to bring together the local marketing teams to drive attendance for this first truly global event. Ghassan’s vision brought together digital marketing pioneers, embedded agile marketing practices and exceeded KPIs by delivering a standout virtual experience at scale.

TECHNIA’s key objectives:

>1,000 registrations for the virtual event
Prove that the event could be commercialised by attracting sponsorship partners
Create a unique virtual experience that rivalled physical events and would be sustainable with minimum carbon footprint
Use agile marketing to bring together a cross functional global team to promote the event and unify the dispersed TECHNIA marketing teams

With the event inception in late 2019, they were ahead of the game and fully launched before global lockdown due to Covid-19.

The concept itself is simple. We wanted industry leaders across a variety of sectors to collaborate together on reimagining the future of PLM. With the focus on sustainability, promotion of the event encouraged prospects to join the conversation. Well-designed booths played host to innovative debate as some of the brightest minds in PLM shared their experiences and invaluable insight with others. It is this interactivity and engagement factor that was championed by TECHNIA and the team and highlighted the true potential of going virtual.

Method

Planning began in November 2019, curating content and working with a third party to develop a platform which could deliver on the promise of an engaging event. Having previously worked on a successful campaign, TECHNIA teamed up with Bright a leading strategic marketing consultancy specialising in agile marketing practice to create the go to market plan.

Introducing an agile marketing hub

With an ambitious target of 1,000 attendees in less than three months, Bright worked with the corporate marketing team to implement an agile marketing hub. The hub is a blended team of Bright and TECHNIA resource that was able to flex and scale based on campaign requirements and supported day to day delivery whilst embedding agile ways of working across the marketing function through on the ground change management. Bright worked with the local teams providing execution oversight and continual improvement of campaign execution using a variety of different channels to drive registrations, testing, learning and improving on results to optimise campaign performance.

The campaign focused on blending an integrated approach to target both existing and new accounts. As a digital event there was a heavy focus on digital channels, including:

Localised email campaigns across all regions, including personalised nurture and information comms to registrants
LinkedIn and Facebook advertising. Using sponsored posts to retarget key accounts and audience personas
LinkedIn Social Prospecting, targeting a global audience with direct peer to peer messaging via LinkedIn
Organic social promotion across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
Partner marketing. Engaging with event sponsors through regular comms and providing a marketing pack of resources to help them promote the event
Sales engagement. Engaging with the regional teams through regular comms to ensure personal and consistent promotion to target accounts, especially those already in an active sales process
Conversion rate optimisation on forms, continual testing to remove any points of friction preventing sign-up and ensure opt-in for future marketing beyond the event
Coverage in the Engineering press. PLMIF – A traditional Physical Event Becomes Digital

Cultural change

Driven by TECHNIA’s core mission to ‘Make Product Creation Sustainable’ this event had the full support of the CEO, Jonas Gejer. Creating a step change in the culture towards agile marketing methods, and the reduction of traditional events, required a collaborative culture. For a company which has grown through acquisition, they have never seen so much cross functional collaboration. Communication and working towards a joint goal have been invaluable in moving the culture forward.

Adapting to market disruption

Keeping a keen eye on market during Covid-19 TECHNIA have been able to reap the benefits of using agile ways of working to quickly flex the target industries moving away from a focus on aviation towards a focus on Life Sciences and rapid manufacturing. Adding new, relevant content and speakers to the programme on topics that would be valuable during Covid-19 and beyond and by shifting targeting, it meant TECHNIA would engage the most valuable audience for sales follow up post event.

With agile marketing, we were able to bring my vision to life, creating an interactive virtual experience bringing together the global PLM community by working as an agile hub at pace in a global organisation.
Ghassan Sultan, CMO

Virtual event success!

The live days of the event were a storming success, delivering on leads, brand awareness and user experience, including:

Created a ground-breaking, sustainable virtual event
Positioned and promoted a virtual experience to generate >1,200 high value registrations
Created an interactive and multifaceted experience blending live and on demand content, large and intimate sessions and allowing networking across the event
Increased brand awareness and solidified the brand positioning with an innovative and sustainable event
Aligned brand values with marketing activities to deliver business outcomes and support growth objectives
Created longevity through its strategy to deliver a month-long engagement within a virtual experience
Commercialised its virtual event with sponsorship and well attended booths
Brought together a team of corporate and local marketers to execute across 12 territories