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The Narrative Science Recipe for Ultra-Successful B2B Virtual Events
49 Plays4 years ago
Sadly, most virtual events are terrible.
For whatever reason, virtual events have been unable to replicate in-person conferences, which likely won't happen for another six to 12 months, conservatively speaking.
But Narrative Science has cracked the nut. Its most recent virtual event attracted 3,000 (yes, 3,000 registrations).
In this Marketing Spark episode, Cassidy Shield, Narrative Science's VP, Marketing, talks about how the company has approached virtual events and made them a core part of its marketing activities.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches.
AI and Data Storytelling with Cassidy Shield
00:00:09
Speaker
Today, I have Cassidy Shield, VP Marketing with Narrative Science, which offers AI powered software that creates content that turns enterprise data into easy to understand reports, transforms statistics into stories, and converts numbers into knowledge. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Cassidy. Hey, thanks, Mark, for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
00:00:29
Speaker
As people who listen to this podcast know, I am huge into brand storytelling. So I'm really looking forward to talking to you about how storytelling has evolved and how it's resonating with target audiences in the current marketing and sales landscape.
The Power of Storytelling in Data
00:00:43
Speaker
I want to start with getting your thoughts about the value of storytelling and of course, data driven storytelling.
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Obviously, as a company who considers themselves a data storytelling company, storytelling's at the heart of everything we do. The reason for that is quite simple, and that is we as humans, we're telling ourselves stories all the time. When you think about, in this instance, as you mentioned, Mark, data,
00:01:09
Speaker
if you're looking at a report, whether it's in your work setting or your personal setting, or you're getting information from somebody verbally, you are as a human forming stories in your mind because stories are how we understand. And once you understand stories are what drive action. So we're a big believer
Challenges in Data-Driven Storytelling
00:01:26
Speaker
in that. We don't think the industry as a whole is well-served in helping all of us in our day-to-day work understand data in a way that we can tell stories from it and drive action.
00:01:37
Speaker
That's why we exist as a company and we aim to change that. So we're a big believer in storytelling and a big believer in data storytelling.
00:01:46
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about data because I'm not a data person. I am more on the brand experience and content and strategy side. I appreciate the value of data and a lot of it has been focused on growth hacking and optimization and conversions and
How AI Simplifies Data Analysis
00:02:04
Speaker
all that. But maybe you can connect the dots between data and storytelling because
00:02:10
Speaker
That doesn't happen very often i understand that there's lots of good stories within data why are companies taking advantage of their data to drive brand storytelling is it a lack of knowledge. Do they not understand that there's the stories to be extracted from data.
00:02:26
Speaker
I think, Mark, you hit on this at the beginning when you said you're not somebody who considers themselves a data person. I think that's really the issue we have today is people are forced to pick and choose which direction they're going. Are they somebody who's
00:02:42
Speaker
come out on the creative brand side, or are they somebody who's more data-driven and data-centric? And we shouldn't have to make that choice. But the reason we have to make that choice is because it takes a hell of a lot of effort to get data, the data out of your systems in your company, takes a lot of time to make sense of that, and then to figure out what to do with it. So really, the issue is kind of the barrier to the ability to get that information.
00:03:08
Speaker
If we can make that really easy, especially for people like you, Mark, who you just want to know the insight. You just want to know if, for example, the content or the campaign you're running is working or not. You don't really care about how you get the data and how do you analyze it. You just want to know the outcome, the insight.
00:03:26
Speaker
That's what's really difficult today. If we can make that much more simple, then we can get to a point where we're not picking and choosing between am I a creative person or am I a data person? You're just a person, obviously, who can do both. The real reason that companies don't do more of this is because it's really hard. It's hard because the tools and processes and systems out there don't make it easy.
00:03:49
Speaker
Okay, so that obviously lends itself to asking you what what narrative science does and how it helps marketers and other kinds of people leverage data for better brand storytelling, because obviously, as a brand storyteller, I want all the I want to use all the tools at my disposal.
Evolving Marketing Strategies: Brand Storytelling
00:04:09
Speaker
And if I can start to use data in a very user friendly, easy way, I'm all over that. So maybe you can get into how does
00:04:15
Speaker
narrative science work, walk me through how I as a marketer could start to leverage the power of data. Think about the status quo. How do we do that today? Assuming you have somebody on your team, you can get the information for you. You're either looking at a chart or you're looking at a report. And you have two choices at that point. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out what that information tells you or that data tells you so you can glean some insight and some understanding from it. Or you can ask somebody to do it for you.
00:04:43
Speaker
And typically, in either of those scenarios, what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out in human terms, what is this telling me? And what is the key insight? And what is it that I need to understand in order for myself to take better action? And that process just takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time for you as an individual to figure it out or for you to go find somebody that you may have on your team
00:05:07
Speaker
to help explain it to you. And so what we do with technology and AI, as you pointed out at the beginning, is we try to make that a lot easier. So instead of looking at a chart or a report,
00:05:17
Speaker
we have the system tell you what you need to know in plain English. So the system does the analysis for you, it understands what the drivers are behind the analysis that you're looking at, and then it explains to you in human terms what you need to know. And so the idea is, if we can explain it to somebody in human terms who's not human terms,
00:05:37
Speaker
language, stories, when they're not a data person, it just helps them understand the data and take action. What I'm confident about in any function, and let's take marketing for example, is that if I can create an understanding within my team, my team knows what to do. That's really the problem we're trying to solve is not to tell the team what to do.
00:05:58
Speaker
is to help them understand the data in a way that they can take action and be creative and be innovative. And so that's what we try to do with our software. We lower that barrier. We shift the status
Connecting through Virtual Events
00:06:09
Speaker
quo. So instead of you needing to figure it out or you needing to ask an analyst, we let the system tell you what you need to know for you in a way that you can understand.
00:06:17
Speaker
So in simple terms, what the technology does is extracts insights that marketers can understand quickly and then leverage into creating different types of content because the data is actually providing them with signals about what to do and what to say. Is that, is that an accurate depiction? We analyze the data for you and we tell you what you need to know.
00:06:41
Speaker
When you look at the marketing landscape these days, you know, I'm a big advocate of brand storytelling. And I think in the last little while it's got lost behind the power of data. Everyone's all over data. What have you seen differently this year in terms of how companies are approaching storytelling and how the tools that they're using or the approaches that they're taking are different than even eight or nine months ago.
00:07:07
Speaker
So a few ways I would love this topic. What's happened, let's say, since COVID in the last eight or nine months? And I'll use it in the lens of us as a company as well. And that is the options you had as a marketing team have been dramatically limited. Obviously, we all know this by now. What that's really put a bigger emphasis on is telling the story of your company and your brand and the value of what you provide. So you really have fewer channels, you have fewer tactics.
00:07:35
Speaker
and in those channels and tactics, you need to stand out because everybody's rushing to the same thing. I don't know if it's ever the art of being a brand storyteller. I don't know if it's ever disappeared, but the increase in emphasis over the last eight or nine months as you pointed out is because you need to stand out. There's a few ways you can reach your audience and everybody's rushing to the same channels and it's upon you as a marketer
00:08:01
Speaker
to be able to differentiate yourself and stand out from the rest of the noise. I think that's why we're seeing a heightened emphasis in brand and brand storytelling is because we don't have an option as a marketing organization or as a marketing community because of the limited options to get out there in front of your customers and your prospects.
00:08:22
Speaker
So maybe you can talk about narrative science and perhaps how your own story has evolved and how you've been able to or had to reposition the company to connect with prospects at a time when, for example, you can't go to conferences and you can't visit prospects and you can't do that. That one on one personal engagement has the company reloaded on its own story.
00:08:49
Speaker
There's a few things here. One of the reasons it works well for us in general, and I'll talk about what specifically has changed, is we build technology that would consider early adopter technology. We need to find people who are looking to drive a different type of change inside their company, who are not satisfied with the status quo, etc. To do that, these people tend to seek you out. It's important for us to be able to tell a brand story
00:09:14
Speaker
because we're trying to entice people who want to think different and do different to kind of come seek us out. So it's always been kind of an important thing for us. The heightened emphasis is just then in the last eight or nine months is like, how do we go about doing that? As a company and as a marketing team, we've decided we're going to be really good at two things.
00:09:32
Speaker
That's it. One is what we call, what we took from Sweetfish Media is this notion of content marketing. We started our own virtual events. These events weren't about us. These are events about the community and bringing in people to be able to share their experiences. The idea being that if we can bring people together to share their experiences and their learnings for others,
00:09:54
Speaker
then we're providing good to the community and to the people that we want to engage with. We've continued doing this in a variety of different ways, whether that's small events, whether that's content we create that we give away for free, whether it's a podcast, whether it's larger virtual events. One of the things we've done around that is just created a brand and a story around us giving back to what, in this case, is the analytics community because that's who we're trying to target. Then the second thing we did is we've just become really good at doing paid
Diverse Content Formats for Engagement
00:10:22
Speaker
and organic
00:10:22
Speaker
Social and so that's the channel of choice for us. This is an interesting kind of compare and contrast between data and brand. When I say we've gotten really good at it, we've gotten really good in two ways. One is we know how to test these channels in a variety of different ways. But very good at looking at the data and tacking our strategy.
00:10:41
Speaker
on social, super confident in our ability to look at data and take action on and understand it and take action on it intact our strategy. But ultimately, the reason we're successful is because of message. It's because of design. And so we go back to think about, like, what really works on digital channels? Yes, you can look at data all day, you can test and test and test. And that's important.
00:11:04
Speaker
But the thing that works at the end of the day is your brand and your story. That's what we found out through all our testing that stands out the most. And that is old school stuff being really good at copywriting, being really good at design, being really good at positioning your company versus the alternative. We've gotten really good at that. And a lot of that's because we have had no choice. As I said, there's been fewer options. And the way we need to stand out is really through brand and storytelling and positioning and messaging.
00:11:30
Speaker
Let me circle back on both of those. I think I owe narrative science an apology because I wrote a post on LinkedIn recently suggesting that no one had nailed the idea of a virtual event. A lot of them weren't terribly interesting. In hindsight, the reason that I connected with you was because of the virtual event that you guys put on probably a month or so ago.
00:11:50
Speaker
And it stuck out because amid a sea of all these bad virtual events, there was something different than you guys did. So maybe you can talk a little bit about why you did what you did and how you've made them successful because by and large, virtual events aren't successful. Yeah, we actually just had one yesterday too, which I consider a success. We had over 3000 people register.
00:12:08
Speaker
And we're able to put this event on at the third of the costs that we've been able to put on other events. And that cost is all absorbed by us. We don't charge people to come to the event. We don't pay speakers to come to the event. This is an event for the community. Yeah, how do we make this interesting? First and foremost, we make it not about us.
00:12:24
Speaker
You really got to put your mind into the position of like, what can I do for the community? And what we do is we try to bring in really interesting speakers to talk about really interesting topics that are going to help people day to day. We don't keep it at the high level where it's really kind of fluff and kind of visionary statements and speakers. We want to get people who are practitioners, who are leaders and people who are driving change within their organization.
00:12:50
Speaker
so the audience can learn something from that and take action on it so it's almost like it's about education vs inspiration we've mixed up formats we make it fun with our promotion around this we give all the content away for free so we have the event yesterday all the contents on our website for free there's no gate you can go look at it anytime and we do a good job promoting the speakers that's what it's about it's about the audience about the speakers and giving.
00:13:15
Speaker
people in our industry a platform to share their knowledge. And when you take yourself out, I think more events go wrong as you're trying to put yourself in the event as the company running the event. We've done a good job of keeping it fresh and kind of taking ourselves out of this, that it's really about the audience and the community and providing value to them. It's not about promoting narrative science.
00:13:35
Speaker
The team's been really creative around that. We haven't stuck to one format. We've mixed it up. When things don't work, we tack and we try something else. It's a strategy that's worked for us. And I obviously see a lot of posts out there and there are a lot of bad virtual events. Fortunately, I think I have a good team and we've been able to do that.
00:13:51
Speaker
really well. And we're not kind of resting on doing the same thing over and over. We're mixing formats. We continually try new things out. Some of those things work, some of them don't, but a lot of experimentation on just kind of this format of getting the community together in different ways in order to be able to share and provide value to each other.
00:14:07
Speaker
So I'm curious about how you have emulated or tried to emulate the whole connection, serendipity, accidental conversations that go on at a conference. Cause my take is that for the most part, conferences are conferences. The, you know, the, the content is the content, but the value is going to a conference and meeting somebody by.
00:14:27
Speaker
just by sitting beside them and having an interesting conversation and all you've also you got a new connection or even a new friendship how do you make that happen in a virtual event how do you give people the opportunity to interact with your speakers and vice versa so that there's an energy there there's a sense of people being connected and really feeling like they're they're an integrated part of the experience.
00:14:47
Speaker
First, we got to realize that out of all the people who register, not everybody attends the event live. With the people who tend to event live, obviously they're very committed to the speaker and the topic and so forth. We do a few things that we've learned over time. We try to make the sessions very human. So if you go and you listen to this, we're joking around, we're having fun, we're sharing personal anecdotes about like day-to-day life as well as the topic we're talking about.
00:15:12
Speaker
We do this on Zoom where the audience is encouraged to interact. We're always taking questions. Sometimes we'll leave it to the end, but a lot of time we're like encouraging the audience to just ask questions and get engaged, make comments during the session. And we've gotten to the point where now our speakers are actually asking, we had one I was doing yesterday.
00:15:31
Speaker
And our panelists were asking the audience questions and the audience was responding. We tried to make this very approachable and very human. And now it's not perfect because we're all sitting on our computers at home. We do our best to try to make it so the audience feels like they are a part of the conference. And then two is like what you do after the follow up, what you do after the conference. And that is the encouragement to get everybody connected, whether that's on LinkedIn or through email.
00:15:56
Speaker
We do a lot of sharing and follow up with the audience. We give them all our email addresses, so if we can't address something within the conference, we'll address it afterwards and we'll actually do address it. We don't make the conference just one thing that comes and goes. We want to make this as the start of a relationship with both our speakers and our audience from that point forward. It's not perfect. It's very difficult to do. We try to put ourselves in the shoes of what would we want
00:16:19
Speaker
at an event like this and then try to make sure that we can deliver it as best we can to those who choose to attend and spend time with us.
00:16:27
Speaker
What I really like about what you're doing and the fact that you've completely embraced virtual events is that as you say, there are fewer channels available these days. There are fewer options for marketers and that the ability and the willingness to focus on one particular thing and do it in different or creative or even radical ways to engage your audience makes a lot of sense these days because if you, you gotta be known for something, you gotta stick out, you gotta differentiate it.
00:16:54
Speaker
And of course, having a great brand story is great. But if you can do something that sparks conversations, I think that's a formula for success. We had a board meeting yesterday, and we're updating the board. And it's always nice to be able to tell your board when things are going
Provocative B2B Positioning
00:17:07
Speaker
well. We do a lot of things in our marketing team, and we've gotten what I consider pretty sophisticated. But they all really come back to two different approaches, and that's it. So at the heart of it, we keep it pretty simple, like you said. One of those things is running events and doing
00:17:22
Speaker
content-based networking and getting people to engage with us in a community. And that's it. And we may do a bunch of different tactics and ways within that tactic to experiment and try things out and figure out what works. But at the heart of it, it's just one thing we're doing and that is creating a virtual space where people can get together. To your point, we're trying to do many different things. We're trying to do a couple things and do them really well.
00:17:45
Speaker
One final question, and it's a question that I've asked a lot of marketers recently because I had a client who said to me, how are B2B companies sparking conversations with prospects? And by that, he meant real conversations, not people downloading an ebook or
00:18:01
Speaker
Engaging with you on social media but actually having conversations because at this time when again conferences aren't happening and there's a lot of noise and a lot of content being produced it's Hard to get somebody to agree to actually talk to you. So what are your thoughts on? Sparking conversations. How do you make that happen?
00:18:20
Speaker
I think companies out there need to up their provocativeness and the way they position themselves in the industry and be very clear about that 10X in this world because you can't, for all the reasons you said, as easily spark a conversation. What I mean by that is one of the big shifts, and this ties back to brand and positioning that we made, is we became very declarative about our position mid-year. It's had a huge impact on increasing the engagement we've had
00:18:49
Speaker
true engagement with prospects and real conversations. We just picked a position and we weren't everything. We're not everything to everybody. We're one thing. If this is something you believe in, then let's talk. If it's something you don't believe in, that's okay as well. Good luck.
00:19:05
Speaker
We talk about this a lot, but go look at B2B brands out there and everybody's trying to play the middle road. Nobody's picking a side. I think right now you got to pick a side with your brand and be known for something and be very specific about it. When you're known for something, that means you're also known for things that you're not. You got to be comfortable
Advocating for Data Storytelling over Dashboards
00:19:23
Speaker
with that. That's how you get people really interested in having dialogue. It won't be for everybody, but the dialogue you do have will be substantial.
00:19:31
Speaker
Just specifically what did narrative science do like what did you go from and what did you go to this is inside baseball for our industry but like we know we've been about data storytelling and turning data into stories and so forth and we've always known the status quo didn't work there's a better way we just started coming out and saying things like no more dashboards you know for our industry that's basically saying the way you've been doing it for 20 years stop.
00:19:53
Speaker
there's a better way. And then we played off that and we went into other messaging and tactics, but it's all back to there's an old way and there's a new way. The old way is dashboards, the new way is data storytelling. And we just pounded this over and over. And it may not mean much to Mark to you, but in the analytics community, they knew exactly what we were talking about. When you say something like that, because the status quo is dashboards and visualizations,
00:20:19
Speaker
When you say there's a better way, people raise their head and they're at least intrigued to find out what you're talking about. We've talked about this all the time within the company or privately with customers. We're never that declarative in the market. As soon as we started becoming declarative in the market and picking a side, we saw a huge influx in demand and interest that conversations with us.
00:20:41
Speaker
That is terrific
Conclusion and Call to Subscribe
00:20:42
Speaker
insight. And I think you're right. I think a lot of brands need to be provocative. Think out of the box, do things that feel uncomfortable because at this day and age, when it's really hard to capture someone's attention, you've got to do something different. Really great insight, Cassidy. I really appreciate the time that you spent with me on the podcast and really telling the story of, of narrative science. Where can people find you online to learn about more about you and about narrative science?
00:21:06
Speaker
Certainly. So you can find out about Narrative Science at narrativescience.com. You can follow us on Twitter, you can follow us on LinkedIn. For myself, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time on social media. You can also email me at cshield at narrativescience.com. I'm happy to engage on email as well.
00:21:23
Speaker
Appreciate the time, Mark. Always enjoyed talking about this stuff and honored that you had me on here. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe by iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it.
00:21:39
Speaker
For show notes of today's conversation and information about Cassidy, visit marketingspark.co slash blog. If you have questions, feedback, we'd like to suggest a guest or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.