Keith Miller:
Hi, I'm Keith Miller, the marketing manager for Orr Protection Systems. We typically do six conferences across the country, physical conferences, that are supported by Revenue River, through HubSpot Registrations. When the pandemic hit, we were not able to do that. So we needed to pivot to a virtual conference. We wanted to do something elevated, we didn't want to just live stream people talking into a Zoom camera. And so we wanted to create a platform. The challenge was how do we elevate it, how do we build a platform that won't break, that is really simple, and that works for our audiences, but it's kind of a choose your own adventure? So they go behind the registration wall and they get to watch video on demand. And so the challenge that we through at Revenue River was, "Hey, we don't have a lot of time. Here's a lot of video. You need to organize it, and you need to build this within HubSpot."
Marion Boyce:
With the arrival of COVID-19, we were in a unique position where we were able to think through what a virtual conference would look like, and started our brainstorming discussions between both of our teams.
AJ Driscoll:
So one of the major things we had to overcome was that we were promoting the live events for Orr since December of the year, and now we were in late March, early April, and we had to pivot within two weeks to start promoting the virtual event. This was challenging because we had a full marketing campaign in place and everything was going along, but when coronavirus hit and we had to make that switch, we had to do it very quickly and we had to make sure it was still high quality.
Marion Boyce:
Our teams came together to brainstorm what our strategy would look like. This very heavily involved AJR marketing strategist, as well as Kate Ahokas, our creative director to come up with a framework for execution.
Kate Ahokas:
So we knew that we were working with an audience that wasn't necessarily the most tech savvy. Looking at our analytics, a lot of them used antiquated browsers. So we couldn't go too outside the box as far as the functionality, but we wanted it to make it a interactive experience, and so we worked heavily with our dev team to be able to create a seamless user experience that would allow for anybody who came to the page in the platform to be able to engage with any of the different sections of the site in an easy fashion. Whether they wanted to play videos, download resources, sign up for a live Q&A, or interact. We wanted to give them a best practice, easy to use platform that they enjoyed coming to.
AJ Driscoll:
Luckily, when we were tasked with creating the virtual conference, we had a great foundation in place and a lot of established relationships with software. So we were able to spin up our program very quickly. So we used HubSpot, BitYard, GoToWebinar, Zapier, 7th Sense, all to create our strategy and be able to leverage all that software to complete both the webpage, the experience, the registration process, and the marketing. We're able to use all of that to make it a really successful promotional event, as well as running the event.
Keith Miller:
We've worked with Revenue River closely to kind of determine, all right, this is what we would expect from the physical events, I think those expectations are healthy to apply to this digital event. If we really want to elevate what a digital virtual conference looks like, I think it's healthy to apply some of the same expectations. One of those was, it was a bit of a shot in the dark, but we said, and we knew it was a stretch, we said, "Let's get 600 registrants." And we hit that mark and then also leads as well, we hit all those marks and kind of exceeded expectations, and they were very comparable to what we do in the physical events. And so, by all metrics, it was a successful thing.
Marion Boyce:
The sheer engagement in the live Q&A sessions with Lee Kaiser, Brian Lilburn, VP of Sales, as well as Del, another sales rep, it just really helped us create more awareness, more engagement for the team at Orr Protection and with their manufacturers.
