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Maximizing Impact: Strategies for Social Engagement and Thought Leadership at Industry Events

sian@karbocom.com on September 24, 2024

As we know, social media is not only an outlet for sharing information – both personal, professional and everything in between – but it’s also a strategic tool to drive engagement between vendors and users. A few months ago we shared 4 ways to use social media to garner media attention in 2024. Today, our counsel is geared toward driving impactful engagement at conferences using hashtags and executives’ thought leadership. 

Hashtags are strategic conference assets

Hashtags are a versatile tool that can enhance brand awareness, discoverability, engagement, organization, and more. Leveraging conference hashtags, or creating your own, can help drive:  

  1. Increased visibility: With hashtags your conference-related post automatically becomes discoverable to users following that hashtag, expanding your audience beyond your networked followers. This is especially keen for industry events, as conference-goers look to hashtags to help find relevant talks, booths, and more. For example, longtime Karbo client Penguin Solutions leveraged a unique hashtag (#HPCeveryone) on branded Penguin plushies at a large industry conference and received close to 100 entries from social media alone.  
  2. Enhanced Engagement: Posts that include relevant hashtags usually have the most engagement. They attract interested audiences (and potential customers), which leads to more likes, comments, and most importantly, shares—expanding influence and reach.
  3. Targeted marketing for brand awareness: Hashtags enable executives and businesses to foster a sense of community by reaching specific audiences that are interested in more niche content and topics. Leveraging unique hashtags can drive user-generated content and broaden awareness for your personal and professional brand. 

Being a thought leader rather than a thought follower 

Industry events are the perfect place to display unique thoughts that inspire new opportunities, drive audience engagement, capture lead generation, and display your company’s breadth of knowledge at crowded industry events.  Ensuring your executive or business’ social media aligns with what you’re messaging and offering at the event helps accrue an engaging audience. Here are a few ideas to consider:

  1. Talk titles: Consider amplifying unique thoughts with catchy talk titles that spark immediate interest and go against the grain. Attendees are usually given an agenda with all presentations, having a title that stands out will likely leave an impression on the busy conference-goer. 
  2. Live social broadcasting from the show floor: This tactic has helped Karbo clients dramatically increase followers and engagement. Report from booths, ask questions of attendees and publish their answers, be that man or woman on ‘the street’ that’s providing interesting timely news from the show floor. Consider using an engaging platform (i.e., X, Reddit, etc.) to invite post-conference thoughts. 
  3. Amplify via Social Media: Up the volume on your booth happenings, your executive’s views and speaking with hashtags and unique offerings, such as a raffle or giveaways (using a hashtag) or one-of-a-kind photo opportunities that are sure to resonate with your brand. 

Being a thought leader rather than a thought follower captivates an audience that drives engagement and awareness on social media. From harnessing the power and value of industry events to optimizing tools, impactful ROI is exemplified by the countless clients we’ve supported in gathering record-breaking attendance, social media engagement via optimal hashtags, and results that are proven to drive sales. 

We’ve seen firsthand from the countless clients we’ve supported how effective strategies, such as  creative social programs, using the right hashtags, and other tactics can lead to impressive results, from increased attendance at events to heightened engagement online to sales leads.

 

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7 Tips For Creating An Award-Winning Case Study Video

admin on July 16, 2020

Here’s a compelling statistic: 69% of B2B marketers use case studies to help generate leads. Pair that with the 88% of video marketers reporting that video gives them a positive ROI, and the business opportunity for a case study video really comes into focus.

Here, we outline seven tips that have helped Karbo Com create videos that won over the minds of target audiences, (and the hearts of judges and award committees!).

Most recently our client, Penguin Computing, came to us to help promote the company’s involvement in Director Ang Lee’s blockbuster film Gemini Man in advance of the film’s world premiere. Karbo Com harnessed the power of a video case study to highlight the company’s solution and convey how it was essential to making the film a reality. 

Managing the entire video production process from conception to completion, the Karbo team developed a project plan and led the initiative smoothly, ahead of schedule and within the scope of the budget. The final videos were strategically released on social media, online, and at Penguin Computing’s biggest trade show event of the year. In recognition of the Gemini Man case study videos, Karbo Communications was awarded a Gold 2020 Hermes Creative Awards and won the 2020 Silver Telly Award.

 

1. Define Your Target Audience

The foundation for any case study starts with clearly defining who that target audience is and what drives their decision making. Honing your message to cater to a clearly defined audience will propel your case study video to have the greatest impact possible. 

Don’t know where to start? Ask your comms team to assist in developing personas to outline actionable insights about your target audience. Communications teams are experts at understanding where your message should land and how to get it to stick. 

 

2. Precisely Outline What You Want to Accomplish

The next step in the development process is crystalizing your communication goals and objectives. Begin by understanding what compels your target audience to take action by answering the following questions:

  • How do we outperform competitors in our market?
  • What are the key messages that will most clearly convey our benefits?
  • What do we want the audience to know, feel, and do after having watched the video?
  • What key elements of our messaging lend themselves well to video?

Once you have a firm grasp of what your goal is and what your objectives are, gather assets such as white papers, customer testimonials, and statistics to help illustrate your points. Having a specific goal and clearly articulated objectives allows you to evaluate materials you can use to support your “case,” and eliminate what’s extraneous. With those materials in hand, your communications team can begin crafting questions that guide your subjects to tell a compelling story.

 

3. Ask Leading Questions To Craft Your Story

When spearheading the development of a case study video, you’ll need to coax the right answers from sources. Guide your subjects to help tell your story by developing questions that cut to the chase. 

Ask questions that provoke your subjects elaborate on the following aspects of the project:

  • The situation
  • The problem
  • The solution
  • The outcome

Keep in mind that questions should always remain open-ended to stimulate interview subjects to expound on their thoughts. Follow that protocol and you may find yourself with some additional soundbites you didn’t even know you wanted!

 

4. Storyboard & Script the Narrative

A storyboard is a visual representation of a film sequence and breaks down the video’s elements into individual panels. Storyboarding your case study video will allow you to clearly establish the flow of the narrative and visualize how shots will flow and work together. It’s important to keep your visual brand identity in mind throughout the process to keep the video’s look and feel consistent with your brand. Ensure you have complete internal alignment on language, tone, and visuals before starting on the storyboard. The last thing you want is to discover the need to pivot halfway through production, wasting both time and money.

In the script, clearly articulate the opportunity, the solution, and the positive outcome. Support those key components with exciting and engaging visuals that illustrate, give color, and provide visual context to the story told by your interview subjects. Substantiate your successes by including data points in the script that highlight the impact your solution provided.

Lastly, include a “call to action” in your case study that drives your target audience to engage with your brand or your product. Remember, the greater goal of your case study video is to support marketing efforts, ultimately contributing to your bottom line.

 

5. Project Management is Critical

Assign a project manager to lead the planning process and handle day-to-day coordination to streamline production. Their role will be crucial in developing a production schedule and anticipating any roadblocks that could hinder progress. There are many moving parts from scheduling interviews and securing b-roll, to managing budget, location and props. It only takes one broken link in the chain to disrupt the entire production. Avoid that unnecessary headache by setting a realistic production schedule, emphasize production design and experienced direction, and secure buy-in from key stakeholders.

For the case study we orchestrated for Penguin Computing, the Karbo Com team assumed the role of project manager, setting the project budget, developing the storyboard and scripts, hiring a production team, and creating a launch plan that was ultimately executed and measured. Organizing all those components under one management umbrella allowed for a seamless production.

 

6. Keep It Brief

Video length matters! In fact, there’s a significant drop in viewer retention for videos longer than 2 minutes. Of course, length will vary depending on the content and the platform you are publishing to, but keep in mind that less is often more. 

The best practice is to create cuts of varied length to best suit your website and social platforms. We’ve aggregated the optimal lengths per platform:

  • Instagram — 30 seconds or less
  • LinkedIn — 30 seconds to 5 minutes
  • Facebook — 2 minutes or less
  • Twitter — 20 to 45 seconds
  • YouTube — 2 minutes or less
  • Website — 5 to 10 minutes

For Penguin Computing, we developed a number of videos at varying lengths — allowing us to optimize each video for the specific platform it was published on and maximize engagement.

 

7. Launch Strategy

You’ve just finished your video. How do you decide when, where and how you’ll use it in your marketing efforts? There are a couple of ways you can boost visibility right off the bat:

  • Use company social accounts to promote the launch (you can even create a specific hashtag)
  • Optimize the video content for SEO by ensuring an SEO-friendly headline and appropriate meta descriptions and tags
  • Encourage internal teams and relevant contacts to share and engage with the case study from their own social accounts

To drive further visibility, work with your PR team to gauge where, when, and how content like a video case study should be promoted. Leverage your PR team’s expansive network of relationships with reporters, analysts, and influencers to get your message in front of the right people at the right time.

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How To Create Unbeatable Brand Positioning That Moves Markets | 5 Tips from Karbo Com’s CEO Julie Karbo

admin on June 30, 2020

Last week, our CEO Julie Karbo led a Coaching Circle at the 2020 Women in Technology International Virtual Summit. A marketing expert who has helped thousands of craft successful brand narratives, Julie shared pages from her playbook on how to successfully move markets.

 

Branding & Positioning: Why It’s Important

Why is branding important? If you’ve got a better product it will sell itself, right? If only it was that easy. The streets of Silicon Valley are littered with failed companies that had great products, but didn’t tell their story in a way that moved hearts, minds and wallets. We’ve all seen examples of messaging that fails to accurately communicate a company’s value, differentiation and vision.

Branding exercises lay the foundation of a company’s communications with customers, partners, investors or any other entity that has a stake in what they do. The branding exercise itself is complex, time consuming and rigorous. It requires a commitment from the CEO to participate wholly and she or he must mandate the same from other members of the C-Suite. It’s critical that there be a commitment to unflinching honesty and self evaluation, with an exercise leader that asks the right questions, keeps the process productive, moving forward and free of arrogance and power plays. Those are just table stakes. Then comes the hard part.

 

Nailing Your Message

Branding is never a one-meeting-and-you’re done proposition. It takes a great deal of internal and external research, the ability to audit key audiences, collaboration across the highest levels of the organization, and a willingness to test its efficacy. Without this commitment companies can fail to craft the right narrative. It’s not as rare as you think. According to Forbes, only 1 in 4 corporate brands is perceived as different from their competitors.

Effective positioning: 

  • Speaks to the needs and motivations of key stakeholders
  • Demonstrates strong, specific differentiation
  • Includes compelling language that is tied to current trends
  • Accurately describes the company’s mission, vision and products/services
  • Drives results

 

Know What You Need to Know

Where does it all begin? With the customer. Do you have robust persona(s) of your target customer(s)? What are their demographics? What do they read? How do they make product purchase decisions? What do they do in their spare time? What keeps them up at night? What’s causing and alleviating their pain and what’s not?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. A quality persona profile reflects the prism by which your customer judges you. Many executives believe it’s based solely on their product features. This is partially true, but remember your solution isn’t simply your technology platform and product, it includes the quality of your management team, what reporters, influencers, partners, your support teams and the competition say about you and more. At Karbo Com we call it the Whole Product Prism.

 

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#6cdbf9″ class=”” size=””]”Executing the branding exercise flawlessly is one of the most important things you will do as a company. Devoting resources is important. But just as critical is making a commitment to truth, introspection and collaboration.”[/perfectpullquote]

 

Getting Branding & Positioning Right

Once we have our foundational research done, we begin to craft the narrative. At Karbo Com, we manage the overarching process, and will craft the first draft of straw man messaging according to three categories: market, technology/product and company.  These straw man messages are discussed with the whole team and once these narratives are finalized they are tested with customers, partners and other influencers.

 

How Do We Know It’s Working?

Measuring branding efficacy requires accountability, and accountability starts with the identification of qualitative and quantifiable KPIs. Karbo Com then uses analytic platforms to help determine success metrics. One size doesn’t fit all. Measurement is a function of the unique needs of each company. Key components can include sales leads, sentiment, competitive response, influencer concept tests, share of voice and a host of other metrics. 

Executing the branding exercise flawlessly is one of the most important things you will do as a company. Devoting resources is important. But just as critical is making a commitment to truth, introspection and collaboration. Finally, you have to pledge loyalty to your narrative — to tell your unique story in a way that moves markets.