Using Big Marketing Event Ideas to Drive Pipeline

This is a guest post from Mike Taylor, Demand Generation, Virtual Events and Content Marketing at InsideSales.com. @mikegtaylor, linkedin.com/in/mikegtaylor

Digital marketers love data. We’re always refining our process to sort and qualify leads more effectively, using A/B testing to drive just a little more marketing pipeline, or tinkering with SEO to squeeze out that added Google boost. As the company behind the first total sales acceleration platform, InsideSales.com understands the importance of analytics, but our greatest wins come from a back to basics approach: a marketing idea, propelled by some great channel partners, and a little simple math.

Marketing strategy: Taking a big leap

The Red Bull Stratos program wasn’t just one of the great marketing event ideas, it was also a milestone in human achievement. Daredevil Felix Baumgartner teamed up with Red Bull to set the world record for highest jump, plunging 24 miles from a balloon in the stratosphere on October 14, 2012. It was a jump 52 years in the making. Baumgartner and the Red Bull team recruited Colonel Joe Kittinger, a retired US Air Force pilot who had set the previous record in a series of high altitude jumps back in 1960.

For Red Bull the marketing strategy, was a record setting event too. The dive was the most-watched Youtube livestream ever at that point, with around 52 million views. That translated into serious ROI. Sales rose 7% in the next 6 months, and a whopping 17% over previous years (according to research firm IRI). It didn’t take clever ads or whimsical marketing ideas — we’d set a world record, and consumers wanted to be part of that.

Making the dive go off without a hitch was a serious technological feat, but getting media coverage to drive the marketing pipeline was simple. We set a goal, divided the work up between our field marketers, and added up channel partners until we got there. So if we wanted to pull in 10 million viewers with 50 field marketers, we’d start with some basic division: 10 million ÷ 50 = 200,000 viewers per marketer.

That sounds like a lot, but we had the connections to do it and the content offering was an easy to sell. If a field marketer can get a TV station to promise 40,000 viewers, and a radio station to bring in another 20,000, they’re already 30% of the way there. And with YouTube alone bringing 9.5 million viewers, we ended up shattering our goals. Because we had a big, creative marketing idea that no one wanted to miss, it was a sure hit.

Marketing event ideas to drive webinar attendance

Your webinar might not have the drama of a world record jump, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use big marketing ideas to drive your event in just the same way — that’s how we made our Sales Acceleration Summit a success. We created a brand new category called sales acceleration to bring automation to the sales team, then took it to our channel partners and our email list. We signed up speakers and sponsors with the promise of 10,000 viewers, and got our partners to promote us by promising a 5x match on leads if they could hit 500 registrants. The event has become a Hubspot must attend event and has reached over 80,000 sales people.

Use this simple math equation for big results — a network of motivated partners, each bringing their own share of leads (work backward from your goal) and a big idea. The rest was just simple math.