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Advice for Planning a Successful Virtual Conference
69 Plays2 years ago
Have you considered hosting a virtual conference but are unsure where to start? Well, this episode is for you!
We sat down with Ollie Whitfield, Demand Gen Team Lead (formerly Growth Marketing Manager) at VanillaSoft, to talk about how the VanillaSoft-Autoklose team pulled off its Growth Month event in June 2022.
Under Ollie's leadership, the team surpassed registration goals and pulled off a month-long event consisting of over 40 sessions led by sales and marketing experts.
Listen in to learn more about:
We sat down with Ollie Whitfield, Demand Gen Team Lead (formerly Growth Marketing Manager) at VanillaSoft, to talk about how the VanillaSoft-Autoklose team pulled off its Growth Month event in June 2022.
Under Ollie's leadership, the team surpassed registration goals and pulled off a month-long event consisting of over 40 sessions led by sales and marketing experts.
Listen in to learn more about:
- Why Ollie opted for a month-long vs. "a couple of days" long event
- The operational and administrative details that go into pulling off a virtual conference
- Selecting speakers and setting expectations for speakers to help promote (based on lessons learned)
- And more
Want to connect with Ollie?
Connect with him on LinkedIn and be sure to check out his TikTok account, @olliewhitfield96.Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. In each episode, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your sales and marketing strategy. We'll share what we know, along with advice from industry experts who will join us on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello, Elena.
The Rise of Virtual Conferences
00:00:20
Speaker
How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Stacy. What are we talking about? Well, Elena and you listeners, we aren't going to talk about virtual conferences. They've been the big thing since pandemic started. What do you think about them, Elena? I like them, but only when they're done correctly. You like them as an attendee or a presenter? Both. Oh, good. I think both, again, when done correctly,
00:00:49
Speaker
That's what our topic is today, but not a big general discussion of virtual conferences. We're going to talk to somebody who did it right. And even though he says he didn't meet his stretch goal, the goal that we knew of from the client
00:01:05
Speaker
he surpassed that. I think he doubled it. So it was a great event. We got to be part of as speakers as well as work behind the scenes to help execute from marketing operation side with HubSpot and has Summit set up to social media and email marketing. So a lot of fun. Alina, you want to introduce our guests?
00:01:27
Speaker
I would love to. Our guest
Meet Ollie Whitfield
00:01:29
Speaker
is Ollie Whitfield from Vanilla Soft. He is the growth marketing manager for Vanilla Soft. And he also works with AutoClothes as well. And he loves to write cold emails and call scripts. So this whole event that he threw, which was called Growth Month,
00:01:45
Speaker
was right up his alley because growth month is all about some of those things. So he really, we, we had the opportunity to work with him on this and it was just such an amazing event. We got to be part of the event. We got to set up the event, like Stacy said, and Ollie really pulled it together, found the great speakers and we are excited to talk to him about how he did it and why
00:02:11
Speaker
It was such an event that was really impactful and successful. Hi, Ollie. Thank you so much for joining us on our show this week. How have you been doing? Life's good. I'm pleased to finally make my debut on this. I've had my eye on coming on this show for a while, so now we've finally got a good reason for me to come on. I'm excited to be here and thanks for having me. How are you guys doing?
00:02:35
Speaker
Well, we're excited to have you and we've had our eye on you for a while too, to be on the show. So we're excited to have you to talk about some cool stuff that you've been doing at vanilla soft. So maybe, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you do at vanilla soft first, and then we'll dig into the topic.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah.
The Role of a Growth Marketing Manager
00:02:56
Speaker
Well, it's funny. All my career I've had jobs that are kind of the title is like irrelevant in a weird way. And that's not really a bad thing. It means you get to do a few different things. So if you read my title, growth marketing, I don't even know what that is, to be perfectly honest. I don't really know. So you don't have to do anything. Yeah. Like you're kind of like you and Stacy, really. Exactly. There you go. I had to put that one in there. I apologize. You're strategists, right?
00:03:22
Speaker
But yeah, in a sense, it's a bit more like demand gen, but it's the way that I can see it for the most part. So sort of my hands in sort of everything that we do for the most part, not that far in some cases, but for all of our webinars and those things, all of our podcasting.
00:03:38
Speaker
pretty much all of that will come through or involve me in some way. Some of the stuff like our website, I'm miles away from that. I wouldn't even try. Anything where we're trying to generate a lead is what I would call it. That's why I say demand gen. I would have said lead gen, but people seem to not like that anymore. That's not cool. Yeah, we got to change up the names every once in a while. SDRs and BDRs and now lead gen, demand gen.
00:04:05
Speaker
Well, Ollie, you surely have proven yourself as a lead gen person with this last growth month initiative that you did for Autoclose, which is the vanilla soft brand. I think you, did you double the goal amount of leads that you had to generate or was it even better than that? I don't remember. I just know it was big.
00:04:25
Speaker
We beat it. My stretch goal, we didn't get anywhere near it, so I'll take a beat humble pie on that one, but definitely beat the goal by about 90%. Well, you beat the goal, so there's a win right there.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, we're happy with that. It's our second ever event like this.
Learning from Growth Month
00:04:42
Speaker
It's not like we've done 50 in a row and we can maximise it. For example, I picked this stretch goal that I had based on Vidyard, which was one that we were lucky enough to sponsor and speak at previous. They got close to 2000 and I thought, you know what, I'd love to beat that.
00:04:59
Speaker
I didn't. But they've been doing it quarter after quarter for a while. Pretty sure. They spin it up and like a thousand people come anyway. Like maybe, I'm assuming that's how it works. We didn't really have that at all. We're pretty much like zero plus whatever our email list can bring. So that was a long way.
00:05:20
Speaker
This is just the second virtual conference growth month was that you've done with vanilla soft. Maybe you could give us, which makes your stretch goal that you didn't meet a big deal. You did a great job after only two, but could you give us a little bit of background on what growth month was and why you decided to do such a lengthy virtual conference?
00:05:41
Speaker
It was born out of the first one we did, which I'll go on record. It's my fault. It was a disaster. Well, very, very, very close. The first one we did was give a con, and that was vertical specific to higher ed fundraising.
00:05:55
Speaker
Yeah, which in fairness, I mean, the three of us, maybe you're a lot more well versed in this area than me, but I don't know anyone there. So trying to arrange a whole conference where you've got speakers there. It's pretty difficult if you don't know anyone. So maybe a little bit of naivety and inexperience. I didn't know anyone at all.
00:06:14
Speaker
So I had to lean a lot on our sales team and I'm very, very grateful. They did an amazing job. They really came through on this. It would have been nothing if they didn't do half the stuff they did. All the speakers, all the content, all the topics, everything. And just moderating all of it so they deserve a huge plug and shout out for it. Yeah, they did. Then it was just a one-day thing too.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, and it's eight sessions, and this event ended up being 45. But I'm sure that you both feel the same, the sort of sharp learning curve of, oh my God, this is so much, and how quickly we got it together because we had no time to build it and how little time we had to promote.
00:06:53
Speaker
for how quickly that one day went by. I didn't watch one session. It was all out of that. So on that one day, just all of those things combined, I went probably a little bit too far the other way. I just thought, next time we do this, this is not happening. I've got to start right now. I've got to get as many speakers and now I've got to get sponsors now. And by the end of that day, I had I think 25 of them out of the 45, which made a world
Engagement Strategies for Virtual Conferences
00:07:16
Speaker
of difference.
00:07:17
Speaker
I know it's still a massive road up to the event from there, but I needed so much time. I wanted the main problem as well. Think of it. One day, you build up to it. Day happens. Day over. That's it. When you've got a month, you've got a month during probably a month previous and maybe even a couple of weeks afterward. I was thinking, you know what? This is quite hard. We struggled to get in enough leads. We struggled to get the speakers to promote.
00:07:42
Speaker
we've got like six times the amount of time, great. But the whole idea of growth month was it was going to be a month instead of one day, which is kind of the Achilles heel of the event I felt anyways. So if you heard this kind of feedback, but as a person who has attended like a jam packed day or two session, I appreciate
00:08:04
Speaker
something spread out over multiple days because it's such a luxury for anybody to get to sit at their desk and I'm at a conference, but they're not really, but some people can still bother them. I think the idea of spacing out was great.
00:08:17
Speaker
The first one, being honest, if you actually did go to the entire thing, you were really hungry by the end of the day, you had a banging headache because you hadn't drank all day, you hadn't even been to the bathroom, nothing. Like if the mailman came to deliver your Amazon, you missed that. No one's actually going to go through all of that. So yeah, I think we sort of learned quite quickly about the agenda being way too much and then just trying to cram it together.
00:08:41
Speaker
What made you choose going for a month versus some virtual conference will do a week? I've seen some where they did it the whole summer. So what made you think that the month might be the sweet spot?
00:08:55
Speaker
Can I give you some really data driven, like specific number? I don't like data. Go for it. Just like the sound of it, really. And when you think of it, like if per week, let's say we do a webinar a month, or let's say we do two. Normally, you're going to divide out each week and say on Monday, we'll do one email on next Thursday, we'll do one. You're breaking up your week by that. So I'm really thinking of it as how many swings of promotion do I need?
00:09:25
Speaker
probably a couple at least, but we're also going to have other stuff to do as well. So maybe a month is a good round number. And looking around the market, I haven't really seen anyone do a month specifically. So just give it a go, see what happens. And sort of the concept was, as I said, let's have a long time doing to promote, keep going. And I think it worked for that. Maybe it could have been a bit slightly different, but what I was trying to achieve, I think it did with the format.
00:09:52
Speaker
I think it worked really well having the whole month and then just having two sessions a day. So you're not overwhelmed. And with the tool, if you missed your session that you signed up for, you can still watch it throughout the month if it had already happened. And so I thought that that was really cool because I did miss a session and I went and I'm like, oh crap, I missed it. Or I was really late to one, Tyler Lessard.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, I went to his and I was late and I'm like, oh crap, I'm gonna miss like Everything but it actually started from the beginning so I didn't miss anything and I really liked that about it but I think it was the perfect length the sessions weren't too long and Having to a day just made it it was easy. It was easy to Think about attending because of that
00:10:43
Speaker
Well, you said the word overwhelmed in the middle and that you weren't overwhelmed. I know you are. Well, I may have been overwhelmed working on it, but to someone that is attending, you don't feel overwhelmed. Like if you go to a conference and you've got, Oh, I got to go to this session. I got to go to this session, you know, right after the other, it just felt easy. Hopefully as well. Like if you added it to your diary, you would have seen it. It was 11 Eastern and two Eastern, which are like,
00:11:11
Speaker
not lunchtime, not middle of the morning. Most webinars are like 11, 2, 3, something like that, where you're like middle of the day, mid-stretch of your sprint to the end of the day or your sprint to lunch. So hopefully those times worked out. But yeah, even at that, both of them were half an hour. So probably you could get away with an hour a day. If most webinars are an hour, you could probably get out of that.
00:11:35
Speaker
And I know you had challenges, which we've talked a little bit about some, but what were the biggest challenges you faced, like when it came to guests, scheduling, promoting, all that different stuff? Yeah.
Challenges in Virtual Event Planning
00:11:49
Speaker
Um, do we have any champagne or like something strong around need a shot? Yeah. I'm just going to have a drink because I'm already feeling a bit hot. Just thinking about it.
00:12:00
Speaker
There was a couple, nothing too dire to be realistic about it. One actually really irritated me. One of the bigger names that I wanted to have on to really help bring in the crowd. And they accepted the calendar invite and for whatever reason, something happened on the day, couldn't do it. No big deal happens. I expect that with big deal speakers as well who are doing this all the time. So we move it and that event comes and goes. Like no reply to the email, checking in, are you able to make it?
00:12:30
Speaker
and nothing. I think I followed up four times and eventually they said, oh well I can only do it tomorrow otherwise I'm on vacation and then I can't do it. And we couldn't do tomorrow because that was Saturday. I would do it personally but I can't have our video team come and make sure it's okay and all that stuff. I would never ask that I have anybody. So I was really disappointed by that and I've never named the person because that's just how it is I understand but that was a bit poor form for me. And then your mind is a big deal speaker.
00:13:00
Speaker
that was what was more important. If it was like a session on the side or one of the last ones, not great, but we can work it out. Let's go and find another way of them, which was a bit of a problem. And the only other thing actually that was annoying
00:13:15
Speaker
This comes when you don't know every single one of the speakers I confess I know most of them like a lot of them I've worked with before or we've had on our shows and other things We know what they're gonna do We know there was good value and I would never ask them on if they weren't good for the content That's the primary but they've got to be able to help me promote it to you. Otherwise, what's the point generally speaking? Okay, I can give you the best event ever But if no one comes who cares they have to be able to take that box too Some of them either did a very poor job of that or just couldn't do it
00:13:45
Speaker
and that sort of works against me as well. So much as I was very happy to have everyone that came, I'm amazed by the content, like genuinely some of it was outstanding.
00:13:54
Speaker
Some of them, it's like they think a retweet is a promotion. A, that's not. B, that's not. And C, that's not. But further to that as well, you get some who just didn't do anything at all. And understand, you know, my big deal conference might be a tiny deal to them in their big company or whatever else. Maybe they don't need the leads, whatever it is. I do get it. But like for the basic, like, can you not put a tweet out because you're speaking at something? Or if I've written your tweets and I've written your links in posts and emails, like,
00:14:24
Speaker
do one because if you've invested half an hour in this thing so you might as well do it. That was the only part I struggled to get my mind around and that happens. It really does. We've seen it before so shouldn't be a surprise but that did sort of
00:14:36
Speaker
bother me a bit because I'm looking at the number of registrants thinking, that's an amazing session. Like how many people would love that if they promote it? But I didn't. Right. So would that change how you select speakers and upcoming or maybe what you ask them of them to do when it comes to promoting?
00:14:55
Speaker
A little bit. I think we knew this beforehand and we sort of did it, but maybe not quite as obviously. So now instead of saying, we'd love to have you speak and we give you the leads if you can help us promote, it's a little bit different. We say, we have to see evidence of your promotion in order to give you the leads, but we want to anyway. And maybe that selfish, maybe not everybody does that.
00:15:18
Speaker
But risk rewards, what's the harbor you put in our LinkedIn posts? I mean, come on, that's nothing. It's like half a minute to do that. And yes, you're investing your time as a speaker, but you're also getting a, well, maybe they don't think of this, but you're getting a exposure to our whole list, our whole everything, every audience that we've got. You're getting our production and you can have the content, you can reuse it, any of those things. And then you also get in the lead, which is what most people want.
00:15:45
Speaker
I'm just asking for a LinkedIn post, which is nothing. So maybe they don't think of it that way. I'm trying to be a bit more explicit about that. And maybe for your next event, we could make a, like a speaker's kit. These are the things you'll get if you agree and, you know, kind of like what people look at on a website before they decide to pay to advertise or something, really make it. It's now a rule. They've got to do an ice ice baby rap. Otherwise they don't come on.
00:16:16
Speaker
That's fun. I think we should do make that a rule. Um, so one of the things I wanted to ask is when it comes to that promotion in the past, with some of the webinars that we've done with vanilla soft, we spent a lot of time putting kits together and writing all these multiple Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts for them. And they never used them. They would just always retweet. Is that something that did you do any of that for them?
00:16:44
Speaker
for those that maybe weren't posting yet. Yeah, I did notice a couple of it's particularly the like more high brow ones that you're not. Maybe this is my fault too. I mean, it's in our influence often what we talk about, it's all about selling. So they always say, if you've got one point of contact in a company, that's not good. If they go dark new, that's it. You've not got anything else. So maybe the truth that applies to this too.
00:17:10
Speaker
Picking out any session you want, some of the ones that this happened to, I only really talked to the insert role and not the marketer as well. I should have asked for or got the marketer on site as well, because let's say you're a massive deal influencer, right? You're one of the top people in your industry. You're not going to be sitting there writing your LinkedIn posts, maybe. Like probably most people do, but I know a lot of executives who don't do that. I know just how much people charge people to do that as well. And it's a lot. So it happens.
00:17:39
Speaker
Maybe I should have got a bit more onside with the marketers, I think, and then it would have happened. But yeah, for example, there were two or three. I mean, I'm not going to name them and I'm not going to tell you if you guess, but go to my Twitter feed, you'll find a couple of them and mention more than others. That's me getting their little social boost because otherwise nothing happened. So as much as it was annoying, I found the backhand way and it didn't look like they promoted it, but I got some of their audience somehow. Yeah.
00:18:07
Speaker
And unfortunately, sometimes you have to do those things to get it going. Well, it's more than just trying to get all those speakers confirmed, even though they're a huge part of it. When all is
Organizing a Virtual Conference: A Complex Process
00:18:21
Speaker
involved in setting up something like this, either this one or GiveCon, what do you have to do to put on a virtual conference if people aren't familiar with what goes on behind the scenes?
00:18:33
Speaker
It's like building a house. You think you planned everything, the roof doesn't come because you didn't order it and then it comes on a rainy day and you forgot to pay for it and you didn't have the money for it. There's always more in something that happens that you forget than you can possibly plan for and that's part of it. You have to accept it unless you've done a million of them and fair enough, but that wasn't the case for us. So from start,
00:18:55
Speaker
You need just trying to think the tool that we use was Hey Summit. And again, thanks very much to Stacey. I mean, it probably wouldn't have even happened point blank without you and Hey Summit. So there was that and that solved this huge problem because straight away you're looking at a lot of money and I mean a really serious amount of money to host it on anything else. So you need a hosting platform because you just cannot build it yourself and I would never recommend you do that.
00:19:20
Speaker
Then you need, just generally speaking, the concepts and to work it out with the team. That was probably one of the bigger parts. I didn't do an amazing job with that, to be fair. I just kind of decided we're doing this, which isn't the best way to do it. Not really anyone in the team got to say, no, I don't like that name or anything, which is that that's a weakness of me. I accept it.
00:19:40
Speaker
But the concept, the working out the agenda, working out the topics, working out the speakers, working out bandwidth and all of those things and the promo plan and how much bandwidth the promo plan needs and the timing of it and all of the other things like that. When you're doing other work too, you've got to tie in and around the calendar of, well, this webinar is needing this promotion, but we also want to promote that and all the social media feeds full up. There's a lot of that stuff going on.
00:20:05
Speaker
So generally speaking, looking at the calendar of the entire team, what have we got to do? When does it have to happen? And what gaps do we have? Well, that's really the main thing that was time consuming that we had to work out. And that's sort of where I think we did a good job because we're able to work out those slots we had available rather than just throwing stuff out. Then, as you said, it's a lot of the speakers. That was quite a long time. If you think of it as 45 speakers, which is probably 45 people,
00:20:33
Speaker
That's a lot of people to deal with one-to-one, a lot of questions, a lot of back-of-four females meetings. Then we had 10 sponsors. That's probably about two people per sponsor. So again, 20 more, which makes it about 65 people. It's getting even busier now. And just like a lot of back-and-forth on things like we're making your speaker image.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I think Elena hated making those images, but more nearly as much as I hated sending them. Just imagine typing that email in Gmail, copy, paste, send, change name, change image, like over and over. There's so much of that.
00:21:06
Speaker
And then once you got the whole thing set up, the website is a whole other beast. This was like Stacy's hell as well as mine, making the website look good, even if you can, adding all of the content, adding the timing, adding the recordings, put in a description. God, what else?
00:21:25
Speaker
picking what fields you want on the form and just so much of that admin stuff that you don't even think about or see. You'd probably go to the site now and you think, oh yeah, easy. It's just like a template or something.
00:21:38
Speaker
No, you're wrong. It was basically zero. You've got placeholders and that's it. I just had an idea to make it easier for next time. When you have all those speaker images, let's just have a spreadsheet of all those people and we'll upload it as a custom field of their image. We can just send a HubSpot, insert personal token email, and you don't have to copy paste, copy paste 65 times. You couldn't think of that. No.
00:22:08
Speaker
I was about to say we love Stacey, but you said that now and I feel resentment. So what was the most productive or best channel that you used to promote the event? Did
Effective Promotion Channels for Events
00:22:26
Speaker
you notice one winning over the other? Well, going against the actual answer I was going to give, LinkedIn was by far and away the most popular one. I was one of
00:22:39
Speaker
I don't even generate that many people to come watch us every time, but I promoted it a lot of times and we did a lot of specific stuff to make my promo go a bit further. I was one of the maybe top 10 producers of registrations, but everyone else who produced a lot as a speaker, it was Allington, like every bit. The rest were the sponsors really helped all their way, a couple of them particularly.
00:23:02
Speaker
It was an email, and you can tell because the UTM still makes its HubSpot and I know HubSpot overwrites some of the UTM, so it's obvious.
00:23:09
Speaker
That's, and maybe even as we're recording this, people post LinkedIn posts about our webinar or something. It's not working quite as good anymore, like a little bit less. It feels a bit like the Facebook drop back in the day. I think maybe not quite as dramatic, but it's getting that way. So if you can't send an email, it's sort of like head your bets, head your expectations a little bit. So anyone who did do a marketing email, yeah, it helped quite a lot. And you can really tell the difference.
00:23:37
Speaker
Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I remember the moment I could tell you one of the sponsors did it because 100 people dropped through and it was just obvious. Look, they sent an email and we can tell that.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I think also with LinkedIn, it's almost becoming more like Facebook in the way that people are using it. And people just aren't paying attention as much or it's just oversaturated with so many different things that you're getting hit with. So when you can send those emails, I think it does make a huge difference. Now, some people that have the pull can put something out there and you get tons of people sign up from it on LinkedIn, but not everyone.
00:24:19
Speaker
It makes a huge difference. Sadly, not me. You're getting there though. Trying. So as far as like the topics, did you choose the topics? Like when you were looking at the people and you're like, okay, I know them. I know they know a lot about this. Did you ask them to speak on a certain topic or was it that you would say, Hey, you want to speak and what would you like to talk about?
00:24:44
Speaker
For the most part, I had an idea just knowing who they are, what they might talk about. For a context, there were two different talk tracks on the conference as a whole. I had the sales-specific side and then I had the startup and bootstrapping founder stuff on the other side. Two different things.
00:25:05
Speaker
a range within each, but I didn't want it to be too much of one topic. For example, where we maybe were a little bit heavy was cold email on the sales side. There was maybe three or four on that. And then on other topics, we maybe had one. So a bit different there.
00:25:23
Speaker
I basically drew up a massive list of everyone who I thought would be a good speaker, what things they might talk about, and then I crossed off. I don't need seven cold email people and what else do we have? A bit of that to begin with, to build the bulk of it, but toward the end and especially
00:25:40
Speaker
If you're looking for a headline type of person, they might have something they're excited about today. You sort of can tell them, like, I want you to talk about this. And most of the time, they'll be fine with that because they don't have to think about it and they'll take it. But sometimes it depends who it is. They prefer to suggest to you, oh, no, no, I just did one about this last week. It was really good. Let me do that one again. I've got a new book coming out or something.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, there you go. They've just got the PowerPoint up and they're going through it. Same thing again. So a little bit of a mix, but for the most part, I knew what I wanted them to do based on not having too much of one topic within one of the topics. Otherwise it would have been a bit too much. So Ali, if you had to do this all over again, which I assume you will next year, what would you do differently?
00:26:29
Speaker
Well, there were these two people that were a pain in my ass the whole time, the Jacksons, I mean. You get rid of them. No, I would double their hours if I could.
00:26:43
Speaker
In fairness, you were both incredibly helpful. I mean, the whole thing doesn't happen whatsoever. It doesn't even come close if you both did everything you did. So thanks very much for it. But for different next time, I think even again, we were way ahead of this. Even so, we still could have maybe had some more time to promote it, I think.
00:27:02
Speaker
It did feel a bit of a squeeze and I think that's mainly because, not even about the event, I think it's because of what we had just before it. I think we had a webinar kind of running into a bit of that promo time, maybe a couple of other little things here and there, which sort of made us feel a squeeze. Not in terms of what we provided, but I think it's in terms of like, if I'm picturing Elena's average week and working with us,
00:27:25
Speaker
that was a bit closer to the wire than it should have been for you. You were doing a little bit too much. There were too many emails you had to do, too many whatever else is. It's a bit of that, I think. Just a bit more time. And that again, even today, our video producer, Daniel, who did a stellar job, over 23 hours of video content he edited in a month. He's gone on vacation stay. By God, he deserves it.
00:27:48
Speaker
I think he got extremely tired towards the end, like really tired. So I hate doing that to anybody on the team. So I think even the time thing again, you could say I was, what was it? March 31st was the GiverCon date, which is when I kind of started for this and it was the whole of June. So June 1st. Two, three months sounds like quite a lot. It was, if we could have done maybe an extra couple of weeks, I think it would have made just that bit of extra difference.
00:28:15
Speaker
So I was thinking one thing that we should do different would be, you know how HubSpot, everybody in the company went on holiday, the week of July 4th? So after the next growth month thing, the whole marketing team gets to take the whole week off. Rest week? Yeah. Rest week. I love it. No, rest month. You think David? Yeah.
00:28:42
Speaker
I think we should have a team holiday or something to Miami. Yeah, let's do it. We'll be talking to David about that later. What advice could you offer to someone that's listening if they're thinking about doing a virtual conference?
Advice on Organizing Virtual Conferences
00:29:00
Speaker
What would your top advice be to them?
00:29:04
Speaker
You really can't just pick out an idea from nowhere, kind of like I did. I was lucky very much that, I mean, I wouldn't have done something we couldn't have achieved, but there's more available to me because of the resources and the skills and the talents we have. So I couldn't have done a month without the ability to work with you both, with Daniel, our producer, with a whole bunch of people on our team who did a lot of things to get the whole thing up from the ground. It would have been like a day on Zoom if it was me by myself.
00:29:34
Speaker
that would have been pretty crap. The first one we did was a day, but it still involved a lot of people and it was a lot. So probably you've got to see what you have available to you in terms of bandwidth and resources. So for example, never consider editing any video if you're not specialist at that. I don't even think about it. I'm very lucky we have Daniel for that. And if I didn't have Daniel, I wouldn't even think about it. It would be straight on Zoom. So it crosses off your options and then you go from there.
00:30:04
Speaker
And basically, simplicity is always the best. I mean, I didn't want to have anything too complicated. I didn't want to have two things going at the same time. That's just going to go wrong. Making it as easy as possible. And then basically, from that, you treat it as anything else. It's who do we want? Why do we want them? What can they talk about? And let's double check everything. Is every single one of them going to attract a customer? And as I say that, the cat is very attractive in what I'm telling you. And clearly, we must be on to something.
00:30:32
Speaker
But yeah, it was basically just about, let's make sure this makes sense. And then we'll go from there and we sort of add scale as we can. Luckily, I was able to do the first event and sort of learn some of those lessons, get it wrong, and then pile on from the next experience. But I think I got your, I think I answered you, right? Yeah, yes. So we'd like to ask one more question of our guests. And it's just for fun. If you weren't the growth marketing manager at Vanilla Soft, what would your dream job be?
00:31:03
Speaker
Does it have to be realistic or can it be anything? Oh my gosh, I was going to say the England football team manager but that's a piece of hell actually.
00:31:18
Speaker
I wanted to be a journalist when I was a kid. I used to write articles about a review of a soccer match and all that stuff. We have work experience in the UK when you're about 15. You do two weeks of work experience where you make coffee and stuff like that. I applied to a local newspaper and they told me, hey, just so you know, one in 3,000 people get a job in this market every year.
00:31:44
Speaker
probably won't do that. So I kind of keep like to it a little bit. And if you think about it, we make content, so it's similar. But yeah, I wanted to do that. And you know what, when I was a kid, I wanted to be the commentators on the on the matches. And then second best was the was writing about it because you still had to be there. So right, maybe the commentator had no bit left field. That's right. Yeah.
Contact Details and Social Media Connections
00:32:10
Speaker
All right, so if people want to connect with you, how should they reach out LinkedIn, Twitter? What's your favorite channel for them to reach out to you? It's so boring to say LinkedIn, isn't it? Everybody does that now.
00:32:22
Speaker
But it's true. So yeah, I'm there. And lucky for me, I have a kind of weird name. So I'll probably come up somewhere near the top if you type my name in. I do a bit of Twitter. That's more me just worrying about stuff and complaining if my football team's losing. But primarily, that's that. And one of the things that I did after our session at Growth Month was I did start that TikTok account that you too dared me to do.
00:32:43
Speaker
Yes. I'm like doing okay. I'm trying, but I'm not very consistent. I like your videos though. They, they speak to what people are experiencing and they're funny. So it's, and the one standing at the window with the rain falling or you're looking all sad, looking out the window. I think that was the one that Stacy died laughing about.
00:33:08
Speaker
I like the one where he's sitting in the shower. Oh yeah, that was funny. Yeah, that one was good. That's the most recent one about.
00:33:17
Speaker
like pop old school pop-up video where he's reading the email and all this. So you're nailing it, Ollie. You're doing good. In my book, I'm an old lady on TikTok, so I might not be your target audience. I'm enjoying it. Meanwhile, in his editing, I need to read this.
00:33:41
Speaker
I'll get my cat involved. You'll love it. It'll be great. I'll try my best, but yeah, it's a bit of fun, really. I use it to post in other places, really. It's not really about how far I get there. Yeah. Well, if you want to, please go and follow Ollie. You'll get some good information. And he's, he's, I actually like following you on Twitter because you talk, share a little snippets of things that you're getting from other people. And it makes me laugh because I'm like, yes, I hate it when I get those things.
00:34:09
Speaker
But anyway, so go follow him. And if you want to get in touch with me or Stacey, you can follow us on Twitter, Alayna underscore Jax. That's A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X, or you can follow Stacey on Twitter. That's S-T-A-C-Y underscore J-A-X. And you can find both of us on LinkedIn, Alayna Jackson, Stacey Jackson, and make sure to subscribe to the B2B mix show. And we will catch you next time.