They say necessity is the mother of invention and as marketers, we have always felt that crises beget creativity. Here are some of our favorite examples of how event organizers, exhibitors, and demand generators have been turning lemons into lemonade this past week.
- Splash released Managing Events in Crisis Mode, a coordinated webinar, blog and social hashtag that brilliantly combines expert tips and community engagement to support Splash’s community while showcasing the company’s own marketing chops.
- Eventbrite put together resource pages for event organizers and event attendees, stocked with short, informative articles full of concrete tips for everything from how to set up your online event to how to make the decision to go online in the first place. These clean and simple resource centers also feature Eventbrite’s own FAQs. We love how they thought about all the things their customers and community might need, and pulled them together in one easy-to-navigate space.
- Inverta brought marketers together to share ideas about pivoting to a virtual environment in a virtual networking lunch. Rather than requiring registrations, the company made the event more casual by allowing anyone to join or leave at any time. They cleverly combined this flexibility with an incentive to preregister—a $20 UberEats gift card that went well with their virtual lunch theme, and enabled them to still generate leads from the event. (They had 120 registrants, 60 of whom attended!)
- Rather than shifting their entire conference online, Demandbase is opting for more personalized experiences, such as invite-only, deep-dive product spotlight sessions for customers and prospects, digital drops of social-distancing-friendly gift cards, virtual happy hours, online exercise classes and more. We haven’t seen any of this content ourselves, but we love how Demandbase is thinking about how to bring the relationship-building aspect of their conference to their digital experiences.
- Across industries and sectors, individual people are finding ways to connect and share. For communities, this looks like spontaneous neighborhood networks and, in Italy, socially distant singing. In education, it looks like everyone from individuals to universities releasing free online content. And for marketers it is Slack groups, LinkedIn discussions and more. We’re heartened by this outpouring of humanity and creativity in this challenging and uncertain time.