Demand Generation Summit - the Movie!

My last post referred to the Demand Generation Summit at the beginning of this month. As I was saying in my presentation on the day, it's essential to plan for how you will build upon an activity to maximise the return.

In my opinion, the Demand Generation Summit itself provides a super case study example of post-event activities that many of us could leverage in our own campaigns. We all know that marketing events are expensive - venues, lunches, visiting speakers etc. There are 2 questions that frequently come up in event planning:

1. How can we ensure that the event is the beginning of a conversation and not the end of it?
2. How do we engage with people who weren't able to make the event, or that we don't engage with until after the event has happened?

Against Question 1, the organising team have created a Linked-In group. Great move - people who attended can join, people who are referred by colleagues can join, people who stumble across it on Linked-In can join. YOU could join - as the time of writing this there are 73 members. Next step is to really get a dialog going within that group - that is more difficult of course because it requires people to participate rather than just observe.

To answer the second question, BrightTALK was one of the sponsors and the presentations were professionally captured and edited on video and are now available from a separate Demand Generation Summit webinar site, along with the slides. Congratulations to all those involved - I think they've done a great production job. Check it out!

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Demand Generation Summit - London November 4th

Yesterday I had the honour of speaking at the first Demand Generation Summit held at Altitude in the Millbank Tower in the heart of London. The event was organised and sponsored by Banner, Google, Eloqua, BrightTALK and MarketOne. Details of the event can be found here.

A few observations from the day...

I think the team did an outstanding job in the preparation and execution of the event - list cleansing, audience generation, pre-event materials, venue selection, catering , agenda were all very thought through and flawlessly executed - hats off to everyone involved.

Amongst the attendees there was a clear desire to exchange ideas and opinions. At one level I think that many of the attendees found it a positive cathartic experience to recognise that the challenges around aligning marketing with sales, creating appropriate content, nurturing conversations, and measuring ROI are shared amongst all of us in the B2B marketing community. We may all have distinct challenges within our own individual organisations but the fundamental issues are very similar.

There is a significant opportunity to continue the dialogue amongst the attendees, and indeed build a community to encourage further discussion and exchange. On the back of the summit a Linked-In group has been setup called the Demand Generation Network. I'd encourage you to join and participate - could be fun and develop into a truly valuable resource.

Several people asked for copies of my slides, and so I've posted them on slideshare. As I said yesterday, I'd hope that you can use some of the content to assess what your current state of health is around conversations with pre-customers (still not comfortable with that word!) and to help you identify those areas that are under your control and those areas where you need so influence other parts of the organisation.

I'd very much appreciate any feedback - either here or in the Linked-In Group.

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