Article Highlights:
Use social media to build customer loyalty and, with it, turn an annual corporate event into a year-round conversation. In this article you’ll discover:
- How a tagging system can reveal the content and messages that perform best
- How to increase site traffic and social engagement year after year
- Ideas to keep the conversation going
We love events as much as the next marketer — but, from where we sit, building out an ongoing experience anchored in creative conversations year round is even better.
That experience — Adobe Summit — is exactly what we’ve supported over the last three years. Working side-by-side with Adobe’s events team, we developed, optimized, and promoted an extensive social campaign that, in 2020, delivered 222% more unique visitors to the registration page and 135% more registrants from social media year-over-year.
In fact, over three years, we’ve seen a 20x lift in unique visitors to their site from social media — our primary KPI.
In any year, that would have been a major win, but in 2020 Adobe Summit was scheduled for late March — right at the onset of the global COVID-19 shutdowns. Summit 2020 moved to an online-only format just weeks before its scheduled date. Immediately, we pivoted our campaign to aggressively promote registration for the new digital format and, ultimately, keep the momentum going with on-demand sessions long after closing remarks.
Applying our four areas of core expertise — strategy, creative development, paid media, and performance analytics — we successfully worked together with the Summit team to exceed the goal of our unique visitor KPI as well as build ongoing engagement and loyalty with event attendees.
Here’s how we did it — and how we plan to keep innovating and accelerating in 2021 and beyond.
1. Strategy and Messaging
To lay the groundwork for a successful social campaign — one that would remain valuable before, during, and after Adobe Summit — we dug into the data, spending time getting to know the Summit target audience, their motivations, and what’s keeping them up at night. Those insights were then used to build out messaging for each individual campaign, helping us speak directly to key segments with messages that would attract them to the event site.
2. Creative Development
With a strategic foundation in place, we rolled into creative content development with an eye on executions that would best communicate key messages and engage audiences. We zeroed in on formats like GIFs and videos that had motion, authentic messaging from peers, and high-value content — actionable tips people could apply to their business right now. Ultimately, this strategy manifested in a variety of ways, engaging prospective attendees, diversifying the Summit message, and delivering year-round value for our audience.
3. Paid Placement
With targeted content in place, we used paid placements and retargeting to increase engagement with high-value prospects and past attendees. We also created custom and look-alike audiences based on quantitative and qualitative insights from attendee data. This ensured we were reaching last year’s audiences and more people like them while helping us optimize our ad spend with a full-year calendar synced to times of high-intent for Summit registration.
4. Performance Analytics
With the campaign wheels in motion, we built a custom dashboard for real-time tracking of social metrics across platforms. By tagging all organic and paid social posts, we were able to track performance at a granular level. Using Adobe Analytics and data from the social platforms, we layered in additional metadata to understand the performance of our creative with target audiences by platform. Weekly reviews allowed us to adjust content and placement strategies based on data.
Looking ahead, we’re confident we can keep the momentum going into year four and beyond. Through our four areas of expertise, we’ve been able to collaborate and create a successful social strategy that builds customer loyalty and creates an ongoing conversation about the value of Adobe Summit.
Contact Stoke to learn how we can use our expertise to help you achieve your business goals and exceed your KPIs.