Success story about a major event in the summer
This article is a case study about the organization of the Summer Marathon event, a course of training webinars for start-up online stores. This was the first experience of holding such an event in Ukraine, and the result exceeded our expectations. I am sure it will be interesting to many habrovans to repeat this kind of event for the success of their company.
I work for Insales Ukraine . The idea of ​​the "Summer Marathon" appeared in early June. At that time I knew two things:
And so, lying on the bed, by chance, the idea of ​​holding the “ Summer Marathon ” was born. Free webinar for the whole of Ukraine on creating an online store from the very beginning, to work with customers.
')
Marathon had to solve the following tasks:
But what about the growth of traffic and sales? Increasing the number of customers and traffic to the main site InSales was not the main goal. Trust marketing and multi-step sales are a more efficient approach. First, you need to gain trust by providing useful information, advice, communication, and then make an offer, and each individual person will decide whether our product is of interest or simply to receive further information. A marathon in this strategy was the first step.
After the goals of the Marathon had been outlined, I quickly made a presentation for the Moscow office. The start of the Marathon was appointed 16.07. Frankly, real preparation for the Marathon began in the 20s, when we started courting speakers and partners.
In the first version of the Marathon, 26 themes were planned, spread over 3 months. After discussion, we agreed on 17 topics, 11 webinars and one month time. Looking back it was the right decision, because even a month of webinars was not an easy test. At the end, the most interested and persistent listeners remained.
The success of the Marathon identified two important organizational principles. I believe that it is through their application that we obtained such results.
Do not delay the organization process . The result should be as fast as possible. Or, as I call it, “we are doing a C-grade, then we reach Pyaterochka”. No need for a long time to think through all the details of the project. Deep thinking, analysis, licking can stretch or completely kill the start of the project.
Make a skeleton project to run . New ideas and additional solutions are best implemented along the way using feedback from product consumers. They took the skeleton - the program, speakers, regulations and the Marathon website and made it into five. New ideas appeared and were realized on the basis of feedback / results in the process of the Marathon. All that has been implemented - improved results.
One of the most important things of any event. How, what, when and by whom will be done. The rules of the Marathon were:
The timing of one report turned out to be very small - 30 minutes is really small. Experienced speakers did not have time to convey an important point and interpret it well.
The time had to be transferred to the standard time from 17 to 18. Mostly because the invitation to the webinar was received late, the students did not have time to attend the webinar.
Most of the speakers met the thesis framework, but the presentations were prepared on the last day. As I have noticed, this is a frequent practice.
Third-party experts did not speak. Just because the search for experts on each topic is a very hard task. Yes, and for 11 webinars. We decided that we will invite for single webinars.
At first the invitations went away in 5 days, 3 days and on the day of the webinar. There were a few intermediate options, but the most effective time to catch up on the broadcast of people - 2 hours before the webinar. The others watched the recordings.
Moderator is extremely necessary! Speakers are addicted to their own report, begin to be distracted by questions from the chat, it is also necessary in the chat to make explanations and so on. Always plan a moderator.
Record webinars. This is the coolest idea that was implemented at 200% at the Marathon. Below I will tell.
From the experience of participating in various conferences, organizing events, we knew that the audience was most interested in the reports of real practitioners.
Selection of speakers is not an easy task. I wanted to pick up little-known speakers in order to diversify the program with new names and find people who in the future can be invited to speak. The speaker must not only have a successful project or a well-implemented cool solution, but also receive a high from speaking. Getting a buzz is a prerequisite for the speaker to be interesting to listeners.
Despite the selection, among the speakers were those to whom the format of speeches, and even more so webinars, was new or not at all to their liking. There were companies that sent a zero speaker to evaluate their employee in a new role (as a result, it became clear).
To all (in spite of everything), the speakers express our great appreciation and gratitude. Many reports turned out to be interactive, informative, which resulted in letters of appreciation and an increase in the number of views on YouTube. Speakers can be viewed in the Marathon program.
It was possible to collect 874 students (including 70 unsubscribers) without spending a penny. We engaged in attracting listeners at the last moment, so the first webinars were only 20-30 people.
In our Napoleonic plans there was the attraction of various media to cover the event, information support for related services, active advertising on the InSales website, contextual advertising, social networks, retargeting (remarketing). But the plan is good only on paper.
Already before the start, we managed to reach an agreement with various partners (many thanks to them) about the announcement of the event. Three out of 15 partners led the lion's share of the audience. Two other major partners did not meet expectations: one unexpectedly turned out to be an inactive audience (which caused a great surprise), the other started their own event. The rest led quite a small number of listeners.
Unfortunately, not all advertising platforms managed to cover. Media, contextual advertising, retargeting, advertising on the site, social networks were not involved. It can be said that a large number of participants were lost.
The media itself did not know about our Marathon. There was no time to engage in active pushing through the announcement, and I did not want to pay for the placement.
Advertising on the site failed - there was simply no sensible place for a banner. The rest of the placement methods did not attract traffic.
With contextual advertising and retargeting just failed. It “hurts me,” but reality is far from ideals and beautiful plans of its own.
Social networks. There were a lot of ideas related to social. networks. They would give a good increase in listeners, the involvement and distribution of information, of resource costs were overwhelming. Therefore, we had to simply refuse, in order not to spend money where we could not achieve a good result.
Important. The concentration of resources in several priority areas, where we could achieve maximum results, was the absence of errors and good final results. The approach was justified, despite the fact that I had to discard a lot of ideas, cool ideas.
Initially, the site of the "Summer Marathon" was decided to do in a specialized service. It was necessary to have a good combination of several components:
Implement on your own site was not possible. Therefore did on lpgenerator. The site was ready in 3 days. Despite the hemorrhoids with different functions, everything turned out perfectly.
A week later the idea was born to conduct multi-stage testing of landing pages. I decided to bring the process to a separate post: there will be a lot of pictures and the article will become unbearable for reading (unless of course the habrovans like this case and they support the post about testing)
The only communication channel with listeners was email newsletters. Mailing was conducted by me, 4 times a week. Two invitations to webinars and two webinar reports. The reports wrote tips and comments, revealing the topics of the webinars.
Everything that began to represent mailing, especially reports, was formed somewhere around the fourth webinar. After that, active feedback from listeners went.
Due to the correct format of communication and presentation of the material, a huge number of letters came from more than a hundred listeners, each of them received an answer. These were reviews of the Marathon, requests for advice, stories about their projects, and so on. There was no division: InSales customer or store at Prestashop. Thanks to this correspondence, we learned a lot of useful information about the Marathon audience.
The most feedback was typed in the letter “I am alive”. In the beginning, the participants of the Marathon sent letters in which they doubted that a living person was writing. Somehow it hurt me, and I wrote a letter "I am alive" or about building relationships . " Got a barrage of letters. Subject Sokolov, our marketing director, made such a demotivator a joke. And in one of the letters they sent me "A Th, sympathetic."
To my shame, the letters were not tested at all. That is, different headers were used, CTA, the time of sending letters, but there are no comparative figures. Therefore, just a few facts from the available statistics:
Statistics from July 16 to August 20. Peaks in most cases - sending reports about webinars.
By the first webinar there were 170 people, at the time of “1” there were 521 people. By 23.07 the number of participants reached 690 people. Point “2” marked 731 people.
But the complete statistics on all the letters in the framework of the Marathon.
The first 4 webinars are uploaded to Dropbox. Why I didn’t immediately get an idea to make a YouTube channel - I don’t know) Fifth and previous recordings already went to YuoTube. Putting posts on Youtube is very useful:
The result: 1831 views, 51 subscribers. Every day one or two new subscribers are added.
First there was the idea to record a video in order to later change access to it for likes and shares. Change did not work - did not find the necessary automatic exchange tool (maybe someone knows?).
Surprisingly, more than half of the participants watched the Marathon on the record. Yes Yes! Fools are those who still do not record webinars, seminars, and so on. They lose a huge audience.
Another idea to translate video into text and lay out in the building. blog. The text has a huge number of keywords - search engines sweets. And nothing that the text is an interview report. Thus, from the video recordings and the Marathon itself, the maximum content was extracted for the future.
As you can see from statistics, organic traffic to the site outgrowth is insignificant. On the other hand, there were no measures for the growth of traffic, at the same time as the Marathon. There was no stupid traffic surge from the newsletter or from the Marathon website. The lack of direct offers and advertising has affected quality: conversion rates in registration, lead activity and conversion from registrations to customers are much higher than normal.
Total 874 subscribers. Of these, more than 75% showed any activity: they opened letters, clicked on links. About 50% are mega-active: they participated in most of the webinars, watched the recordings, wrote letters.
As I wrote above, thanks to the records, we got a bunch of content. Video recordings for the YouTube channel and translation articles for the blog.
It didn’t work out (I didn’t have enough time and energy. I think we could get a large audience 2 times.
Marathon gave birth to many ideas that we will definitely apply in the future. This: work with social. networks, content generation, exchange of event records for likes and shores, examples of dialogue with event participants, and so on.
Thanks to the Summer Marathon, we got to know the cool and necessary partners, the speakers, and some of them had excellent relations for future cooperation.
The leader of the delivery of Ukraine, New Mail (NP), was so impressed with the feedback during the webinar with them that it decided to hold its own webinars for its customers. Yesterday they held their first webinar for which 912 people gathered. Will conduct more. It's nice when thanks to your event such companies as NP make such initiatives.
In the hope that I liked
Neznamov Anton
InSales representative in Ukraine
Prehistory
I work for Insales Ukraine . The idea of ​​the "Summer Marathon" appeared in early June. At that time I knew two things:
- I need to do something big, so that when InSales comes to Ukraine, it learns as much as possible to the target audience;
- In Ukraine, there are few interesting educational projects with the expectation of regions, and not the capital.
And so, lying on the bed, by chance, the idea of ​​holding the “ Summer Marathon ” was born. Free webinar for the whole of Ukraine on creating an online store from the very beginning, to work with customers.
')
Marathon had to solve the following tasks:
- Gather an audience with which you can then build relationships using email marketing;
- Promotion in the market with a large-scale event;
- Find new partners to organize further events;
- Share your opinion leaders;
- Get publicized in targeted media.
But what about the growth of traffic and sales? Increasing the number of customers and traffic to the main site InSales was not the main goal. Trust marketing and multi-step sales are a more efficient approach. First, you need to gain trust by providing useful information, advice, communication, and then make an offer, and each individual person will decide whether our product is of interest or simply to receive further information. A marathon in this strategy was the first step.
After the goals of the Marathon had been outlined, I quickly made a presentation for the Moscow office. The start of the Marathon was appointed 16.07. Frankly, real preparation for the Marathon began in the 20s, when we started courting speakers and partners.
In the first version of the Marathon, 26 themes were planned, spread over 3 months. After discussion, we agreed on 17 topics, 11 webinars and one month time. Looking back it was the right decision, because even a month of webinars was not an easy test. At the end, the most interested and persistent listeners remained.
Fundamental
The success of the Marathon identified two important organizational principles. I believe that it is through their application that we obtained such results.
Do not delay the organization process . The result should be as fast as possible. Or, as I call it, “we are doing a C-grade, then we reach Pyaterochka”. No need for a long time to think through all the details of the project. Deep thinking, analysis, licking can stretch or completely kill the start of the project.
Make a skeleton project to run . New ideas and additional solutions are best implemented along the way using feedback from product consumers. They took the skeleton - the program, speakers, regulations and the Marathon website and made it into five. New ideas appeared and were realized on the basis of feedback / results in the process of the Marathon. All that has been implemented - improved results.
Marathon Organization
Marathon Regulations
One of the most important things of any event. How, what, when and by whom will be done. The rules of the Marathon were:
- Webinars every Tuesday and Thursday. Mon and Fri are not suitable, because Many people do not care about these days before training, and they needed one day of rest between webinars.
- The report duration is 30 minutes, if two topics = one webinar, and 60 minutes, if one topic = one webinar.
- Time from 11 to 12.
- They put forward a requirement for the rapporteurs that the theses of their reports coincide with the theses of the topics created. Presentations should have been sent the day before the webinar.
- To invite for each topic third-party experts who would give their own vision and open topic and tell their experience.
- Invite five, one and a day webinar listeners.
- The presence of a moderator.
- Webinar recording
The timing of one report turned out to be very small - 30 minutes is really small. Experienced speakers did not have time to convey an important point and interpret it well.
The time had to be transferred to the standard time from 17 to 18. Mostly because the invitation to the webinar was received late, the students did not have time to attend the webinar.
Most of the speakers met the thesis framework, but the presentations were prepared on the last day. As I have noticed, this is a frequent practice.
Third-party experts did not speak. Just because the search for experts on each topic is a very hard task. Yes, and for 11 webinars. We decided that we will invite for single webinars.
At first the invitations went away in 5 days, 3 days and on the day of the webinar. There were a few intermediate options, but the most effective time to catch up on the broadcast of people - 2 hours before the webinar. The others watched the recordings.
Moderator is extremely necessary! Speakers are addicted to their own report, begin to be distracted by questions from the chat, it is also necessary in the chat to make explanations and so on. Always plan a moderator.
Record webinars. This is the coolest idea that was implemented at 200% at the Marathon. Below I will tell.
Speakers
From the experience of participating in various conferences, organizing events, we knew that the audience was most interested in the reports of real practitioners.
Selection of speakers is not an easy task. I wanted to pick up little-known speakers in order to diversify the program with new names and find people who in the future can be invited to speak. The speaker must not only have a successful project or a well-implemented cool solution, but also receive a high from speaking. Getting a buzz is a prerequisite for the speaker to be interesting to listeners.
Despite the selection, among the speakers were those to whom the format of speeches, and even more so webinars, was new or not at all to their liking. There were companies that sent a zero speaker to evaluate their employee in a new role (as a result, it became clear).
To all (in spite of everything), the speakers express our great appreciation and gratitude. Many reports turned out to be interactive, informative, which resulted in letters of appreciation and an increase in the number of views on YouTube. Speakers can be viewed in the Marathon program.
Marathon
Recruitment
It was possible to collect 874 students (including 70 unsubscribers) without spending a penny. We engaged in attracting listeners at the last moment, so the first webinars were only 20-30 people.
In our Napoleonic plans there was the attraction of various media to cover the event, information support for related services, active advertising on the InSales website, contextual advertising, social networks, retargeting (remarketing). But the plan is good only on paper.
Already before the start, we managed to reach an agreement with various partners (many thanks to them) about the announcement of the event. Three out of 15 partners led the lion's share of the audience. Two other major partners did not meet expectations: one unexpectedly turned out to be an inactive audience (which caused a great surprise), the other started their own event. The rest led quite a small number of listeners.
Unfortunately, not all advertising platforms managed to cover. Media, contextual advertising, retargeting, advertising on the site, social networks were not involved. It can be said that a large number of participants were lost.
The media itself did not know about our Marathon. There was no time to engage in active pushing through the announcement, and I did not want to pay for the placement.
Advertising on the site failed - there was simply no sensible place for a banner. The rest of the placement methods did not attract traffic.
With contextual advertising and retargeting just failed. It “hurts me,” but reality is far from ideals and beautiful plans of its own.
Social networks. There were a lot of ideas related to social. networks. They would give a good increase in listeners, the involvement and distribution of information, of resource costs were overwhelming. Therefore, we had to simply refuse, in order not to spend money where we could not achieve a good result.
Important. The concentration of resources in several priority areas, where we could achieve maximum results, was the absence of errors and good final results. The approach was justified, despite the fact that I had to discard a lot of ideas, cool ideas.
Summer Marathon Website
Initially, the site of the "Summer Marathon" was decided to do in a specialized service. It was necessary to have a good combination of several components:
- Rate of change
- Easy to change any part of the site
- Simple testing pages
- Traffic tracking
Implement on your own site was not possible. Therefore did on lpgenerator. The site was ready in 3 days. Despite the hemorrhoids with different functions, everything turned out perfectly.
A week later the idea was born to conduct multi-stage testing of landing pages. I decided to bring the process to a separate post: there will be a lot of pictures and the article will become unbearable for reading (unless of course the habrovans like this case and they support the post about testing)
Feedback
The only communication channel with listeners was email newsletters. Mailing was conducted by me, 4 times a week. Two invitations to webinars and two webinar reports. The reports wrote tips and comments, revealing the topics of the webinars.
Everything that began to represent mailing, especially reports, was formed somewhere around the fourth webinar. After that, active feedback from listeners went.
- He began to write his thoughts about the success of online stores, one way or another connected with the previous webinar.
- Each newsletter with the report changed its signature. "Alive all alive", "Waiting for an answer"
- Actively asked the opinion of students on various issues (not only about the Marathon)
Due to the correct format of communication and presentation of the material, a huge number of letters came from more than a hundred listeners, each of them received an answer. These were reviews of the Marathon, requests for advice, stories about their projects, and so on. There was no division: InSales customer or store at Prestashop. Thanks to this correspondence, we learned a lot of useful information about the Marathon audience.
The most feedback was typed in the letter “I am alive”. In the beginning, the participants of the Marathon sent letters in which they doubted that a living person was writing. Somehow it hurt me, and I wrote a letter "I am alive" or about building relationships . " Got a barrage of letters. Subject Sokolov, our marketing director, made such a demotivator a joke. And in one of the letters they sent me "A Th, sympathetic."
To my shame, the letters were not tested at all. That is, different headers were used, CTA, the time of sending letters, but there are no comparative figures. Therefore, just a few facts from the available statistics:
- Sending an invitation 2 hours before the webinar brought the most listeners;
- The biggest openness of the letter with the title “take away the recording of the third webinar” and “what are they“ ideal online stores? ”;
- The average open rate is 29%. I don’t cite the clickability, there have not always been letters with CTA;
- Reports were sent to Fri and Mon. In PT, statistics are always 2 times better;
- With the growing number of subscribers, statistics began to decline;
Statistics from July 16 to August 20. Peaks in most cases - sending reports about webinars.
By the first webinar there were 170 people, at the time of “1” there were 521 people. By 23.07 the number of participants reached 690 people. Point “2” marked 731 people.
But the complete statistics on all the letters in the framework of the Marathon.
YouTube channel
The first 4 webinars are uploaded to Dropbox. Why I didn’t immediately get an idea to make a YouTube channel - I don’t know) Fifth and previous recordings already went to YuoTube. Putting posts on Youtube is very useful:
- There are statistics of views, likes, and comments.
- Video attracts third-party audience
- Videos are divided into social. networks
- Convenient to view
The result: 1831 views, 51 subscribers. Every day one or two new subscribers are added.
Video recording
First there was the idea to record a video in order to later change access to it for likes and shares. Change did not work - did not find the necessary automatic exchange tool (maybe someone knows?).
Surprisingly, more than half of the participants watched the Marathon on the record. Yes Yes! Fools are those who still do not record webinars, seminars, and so on. They lose a huge audience.
Another idea to translate video into text and lay out in the building. blog. The text has a huge number of keywords - search engines sweets. And nothing that the text is an interview report. Thus, from the video recordings and the Marathon itself, the maximum content was extracted for the future.
The results of the "Summer Marathon"
Traffic
As you can see from statistics, organic traffic to the site outgrowth is insignificant. On the other hand, there were no measures for the growth of traffic, at the same time as the Marathon. There was no stupid traffic surge from the newsletter or from the Marathon website. The lack of direct offers and advertising has affected quality: conversion rates in registration, lead activity and conversion from registrations to customers are much higher than normal.
Lecture hall
Total 874 subscribers. Of these, more than 75% showed any activity: they opened letters, clicked on links. About 50% are mega-active: they participated in most of the webinars, watched the recordings, wrote letters.
Content
As I wrote above, thanks to the records, we got a bunch of content. Video recordings for the YouTube channel and translation articles for the blog.
Advertising and PR
It didn’t work out (I didn’t have enough time and energy. I think we could get a large audience 2 times.
Ideas for the future
Marathon gave birth to many ideas that we will definitely apply in the future. This: work with social. networks, content generation, exchange of event records for likes and shores, examples of dialogue with event participants, and so on.
Partners
Thanks to the Summer Marathon, we got to know the cool and necessary partners, the speakers, and some of them had excellent relations for future cooperation.
Side effects
The leader of the delivery of Ukraine, New Mail (NP), was so impressed with the feedback during the webinar with them that it decided to hold its own webinars for its customers. Yesterday they held their first webinar for which 912 people gathered. Will conduct more. It's nice when thanks to your event such companies as NP make such initiatives.
In the hope that I liked
Neznamov Anton
InSales representative in Ukraine
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/192772/
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