Virtual Conference:
Content Creator Day
PROBLEM
With a lean team and an even leaner budget, MeetEdgar needed a way to increase awareness and lead generation in a highly competitive market. Their target audience consisted of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and content creators.
SOLUTION
The audience we needed to reach was aspirational and want to have a successful business on their own terms. After understanding this key theme - I came up with Content Creator Day. A day-long online conference that set out to empower this audience to start or grow their online businesses.
For this to be valuable for MeetEdgar, it needed to generate new email subscribers and new customers. Without a huge ad budget, I began reaching out to potential partners who had a similar target audience that we could introduce MeetEdgar to.
THE PLAN
Partnership Marketing
Without a huge budget, I identified 4 other SaaS companies with similar products that didn’t compete with our own. The pitch was popular and partners were excited. With these partners, we were able to increase our reach tenfold by leveraging co-marketing partnerships.
Building a Brand
For this audience, authenticity was key. It was important to me to intentionally not make this event a MeetEdgar branded event. The goal was to deliver value for the audience, a mostly net-new audience. By delivering that value, we could provide though leadership and solutions from a place of credibility and trust.
Content Creation
Leveraging market research on the audience we were targeting, I created an agenda and selected speakers that would resonate with the audience and created an immediate value. This included sessions with marketing experts, as well as other entrepreneurs who the audience could relate to.
Technical Operations
Without an existing webinar tool that could handle the volume of registrants, I had to get creative with hosting the live streamed content for registrants. The first year, we used YouTube Live with an unlisted URL to host the event for free. The second year, we upgraded to WebinarJam that allowed us a full suite of capabilities and support.
RESULTS
The event was promoted across a variety of online channels to the audiences of all of the participating “sponsors.” As a result, the first year garnered over 5,000 registrants with the second year gaining an additional 3,000.
While I can’t share exact numbers, the success from the first year brought old and new partners for the second year. MeetEdgar met their goals of increasing their mailing list and gaining new customers.