In this episode, I’m delighted to be doing another ‘Deep Dive’. This time, the topic is how to use events as part of your marketing strategy, take them online and still create an impactful and memorable experience for your audience.

We have all had online overload in 2020, and this episode aims to dispel myths of online events and share best practice to engaging your audience in an online event experience.

I am delighted to have Vikki Barcroft as my guest, Director of Events with Impact, based in the UK. 

Vikki shares her insights on how events have changed, how she has pivoted her business and successfully ran global online events as a result. And how events are changing in terms of how we feel about attending events, whether events you travel to remain an inclusive option physically, what attendees are looking for now and what you can do to take your event online with success.

You can connect with Vikki at https://www.eventsforimpact.co.uk/ 

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Full Transcript

Emma Drake:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works, with me, Emma Drake. Hi everyone. How are we all doing today? I hope everyone’s okay. I’m so excited to be bringing you another deep dive episode. And today’s episode is all about how to use events as part of your marketing strategy. I’m delighted to have with me Vikki Barcroft, who is director of company events for Impact. Vikki’s got so much experience and insight. I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you all today. So let’s dive in.

Emma Drake:
So thanks for coming on the show, Vikki. It’s really lovely to have you here today. Why don’t you start by telling listeners a little bit about what you do and the sort of events you work with and maybe how you got into events in the first place?

Vikki Barcroft:
Yeah, sure. Well, thanks very much for having me on, Emma. I’m really looking forward to our chat today. So I am the director of events for Impact, which is a business I started up almost two years ago to the day actually. And I started it really-

Emma Drake:
Wow-

Vikki Barcroft:
Yeah. So yeah, I’ll be having some very chilled celebrations about it been going on for two years. Yeah. It’s sort of to use my 10 years-ish of experience in the events sector, really to just try and help others, but in lots of different companies, it’s always a really, really stretched role and stretched team. But I really believe in how amazing events are. Obviously I’m a little bit biased, but I just want to help teams to give them a time really to take that little step back sometimes and look at the overall picture of events, look at the strategy, how they can align the amazing marketing channel that is events to the overall company strategy and objectives, and really get the most out of them.

Vikki Barcroft:
Since moving to Cambridge around eight years ago, it’s been very focused in the tech sector and working with a lot of startups as well, which I absolutely love. I love that fast paced, innovative environment. I just really buzz off it. So thinking back probably about 15 years ago, that’s when I sort of initially got that bug for events. I used to be in sales, a bit of business development, a bit of B2C sales. And I was always that salesperson that volunteered to go out to the events. It was an excuse to get out of the office, travel around a little bit and meet lots of new people. And I just thought, Oh, these things are amazing. I want to be a part of it. And that was basically-

Emma Drake:
Quite high energy events, aren’t they? You get a buzz from running them and doing them.

Vikki Barcroft:
I found it fascinating and that sort of conversation that you get started at events. So yeah, I basically just decided, Oh, okay, well events is for me. So I just rang the agencies that delivered those events for that company I was with at the time and just said, “Hey, so I know all about this brand. Fancy using me on your events?” And yeah, so I sort of almost overnight, I just started freelancing to be honest, just for this agency predominantly, and then just built up a few more contacts at different agencies doing slightly different events as well.

Emma Drake:
Brilliant, yeah. It’s really interesting actually, when you were talking about how you got a real buzz off of actually meeting people and hearing what customers are saying, and one of the things that I talk about on my podcast and one of the things I’m really passionate about is how, and when to use these different tools and techniques to reach your customers. And in the context of events, there’s so many opportunities there isn’t there to, in terms of formats and types of events you can have for brand awareness, if you’re speaking at the event, if you’re holding the event, if you’re going to the event, I mean, there’s so many different ways that you can reach new and existing customers.

Vikki Barcroft:
Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, I’m sure we’ll get onto it in a minute, but there’s a whole new format of events that’s obviously taking the world by storm at the moment and online, but there’s so many different things and it’s really important before you even think about doing an event to just think about why you’re even considering it, what is the purpose? And it happens so often, and I’m sure you’ll agree events just happen because while we did it last year, yeah.

Emma Drake:
Absolutely.

Vikki Barcroft:
It’s crazy to me. I mean there’s an event, it’s a nice thing to do, maybe an annual dinner or something, and you might need slightly looser objectives for those things sometimes. But generally speaking, the most important thing is to understand why you’re doing it. And then you can figure out how you’re going to do that. Whether it’s we want to talk to as many people as possible and showcase a new product or give that sort of little insight into what your company is as a brand and or whether it’s some real strategic partnership sort of meetings or existing customers to build relationships, whether it’s to actually to do some training or supports to either use your products or brand, or various different trading and events. Whether it’s really just down to networking, which I think actually over the past year, I think has become an objective, that’s a little bit more at the forefront.

Emma Drake:
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, definitely.

Vikki Barcroft:
It’s been the hardest thing I guess, to replicate. And I think it’s been the thing that people have realized they’ve missed most and how important that that is. And it’s fine to have what you might class as a soft objective. That’s fine, but just know.

Emma Drake:
Absolutely. It’s so important, isn’t it? And it’s something I bang on about all the time in this podcast, generally in my work. I did an episode, I think it was episode two is really when I started the podcast and it was all about goal setting. And actually the example that I used, Vikki was events because I think you’re absolutely right. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Sometimes I think people think, “Oh, we’re going to do an event or we’re going to go to the event because, well, that’s where everyone is. So everyone else is doing it. So we need to do it, right?”

Emma Drake:
That’s not a strategy. They take a lot of time, they take a lot of money, don’t they? So they can be hugely important and really interesting and exciting ways to reach your audience, whatever size of company I think you’re working in, if you’re starting out or if it’s a growing company, going to industry shows and trade and events, for example, and, or going out to showcase your products and services at events, it’s a really good way of reaching a lot of people and going to everyone already is, but you’ve got to have a purpose and a goal. You can’t just go and rock up, right?

Emma Drake:
And one of the formats that’s become a bit more popular and I think it’s more recent years and these bigger kind of trade shows and things. Let’s just take that example for a minute is these kind of smaller breakout speaking areas. So you can get really super niche topics within these broad trade shows or exhibitions or big conferences where there’s lots of little breakout in the exhibition space themselves that have these where you wear the headphones and you go up and there’s tiny little talks going on.
There’s maybe 20 people sat down and it’ll be super niche. It’ll be like this really intricate part, this bigger picture. I think it’s worth trying to research those topics because actually, like you say, getting a pass and going in and getting inside those tiny, super niche areas you’ve only got to make a few connections and there might be potential customers there, potential partners. It’s so good for lots of reasons, isn’t it? So it is worth checking out, isn’t it? The format of the event and all of those things.

Emma Drake:
I wanted to talk a little bit about how events have changed. You’ve already alluded to this a bit, Vikki, but obviously one of the reasons for getting you on the podcast actually is to talk about online events. And they’ve become a part of our lives, haven’t they, in the last year? So I should probably mention that we’re recording this podcast. We’re still in a global pandemic. We’ll be hopefully coming out of it. And online events and virtual experiences let’s say, have been part of our lives for longer than we care to remember, but all of 2020, and yeah, I just, for someone who’s in events, do you want to just talk a bit about last year, so March, 2020 and how events have changed in the last year, but what’s some of perhaps the positives are around that?

Vikki Barcroft:
Yeah, just over a year ago now yeah the world just turned sort of upside down really. And especially in the events industry. Events just got canceled overnight. I was actually leading a team and quite a well-known tech company in Cambridge. And we basically had to switch a global sales conference into an online event within about six weeks. And that was a very, very steep, but very useful, it turned out learning curve that sort of, that we had to go through.

Vikki Barcroft:
There’s so many things that I could talk about here. What was interesting was actually discovering how many platforms and how many different ways to do virtual events were already out there. They just hadn’t been taken up at that point. So at least it was actually some really great relatively established technology. Obviously that has gone crazy this year. How I wish I’d got some shares in some of that technology.

Emma Drake:
Right. I think we all do.

Vikki Barcroft:
It was just doing that bit of research and speaking to the right agencies and to different people who knew about it and figuring, well, okay, we’ve already got our objective for this event. We know that this is what we want to achieve. So how do we do this in the online world? So what are people’s attention spans like in online versus in a face-to-face environment? What sort of tools are already out there to do that all important networking and make human to human connection? How do we make sure that content is engaging when people are just watching a screen?

Vikki Barcroft:
You sort of think about it a little bit more like a TV show rather than an event. And maybe one of the more interactive style TV shows. I don’t really necessarily watch it. But think of it maybe about I don’t know until the night takeaway. You have some content, you have some shows and you have some people presenting things. You get the audience involved remotely, you get maybe some competition or queers or something like that going on, you have an audience that are watching, but can still interact and the phone ins or the text ins and all of that sort of thing. But I think if you fuse event with TV show, you’re on a pretty good track to make an interesting and engaging online event.

Emma Drake:
That’s a really good explanation actually, Vikki. I had not considered it in that way until you just said, actually, and it’s a really good way of looking at it because you’re broadcasting rather than interacting, aren’t you in person? I’ve seen a few really good ones and I’ve seen some really poor attempts as I’m sure you have. And we’re all trying. We’re all trying here. No one is perfect and I’m a big advocate of sometimes done is better than perfect. So let’s not be too mean to people that have had to go and it’s not gone brilliantly, but, but, but, but you do have to plan these things, don’t you? You do have to think, Oh, I can’t just wack that event online. That’s the stage. It just doesn’t work. Does it?

Vikki Barcroft:
Exactly.

Emma Drake:
People don’t want to go.

Vikki Barcroft:
Yeah, well, it’s true. So this, I think this is where I’ve seen it sort of, at least in my opinion, fall down the most is when people have… It’s been that sort of panic of well, we had this event planned and now sometimes even, well we’re being told we’ve got to do it online or whatever it is, or we need to do it on some level online and they’ve just taken their face-to-face events, the same agenda and everything, and just said, right okay, well, we’ll just get everyone on Zoom or hop in or whatever platform of choice it is. And we’ll just run our event. It’s like, well, this was going to be a two day conference. People cannot sit. I mean, we’ve all had to sit and stare at screens for eight hours a day on a regular basis.

Vikki Barcroft:
But when you’re just basically being talked at for that long for me, it just doesn’t work. I think make your content short, sharp, snappy, concise, like everyone’s capable of binge watching Netflix spending a lot of time in front of a screen, but it’s got to be engaging content. You’ve got to relate to your audience and that’s good practice anyway for events, right?

Emma Drake:
Well it’s been a real test, hasn’t it? Because the whole, well, I’m going to go because my competitors are going and I’m going to get a badge. I’m going to go wander around for a couple of days. That’s gone. So you really have to get those people interested in going, don’t you now? It’s not just a case of doing that. I’ve been surprised at, and we’ll come onto this actually, but I think I’ve personally, I’ve been surprised at, so I’ve seen the regular events that in the industry, I work in. I work a lot in property and construction in the UK, but then there’s global events as well. But I’ve been surprised at the pace that people have been going at to get back to normal with events. And I’m seeing the same venue pop up with the same format event, even though we’ve been through this massive shift in society, the same event that was pre 2020 is now going to be run later this year. And I’m thinking, have you really thought about this? Have these organizers actually thought about it?

Emma Drake:
And thought, well, what are people now looking for? Do they want to come away for two days? Probably. But we all want to get out, but that aside the content and the goals of those events have perhaps changed, I think. I think what people want from events, I think is changing. And I wonder if we’ll see that. I mean, over lockdown, I’ve seen quite a lot of these pop up events, quick events, really simple video led events. Some of them are B2B, but a lot of them reside on Facebook groups and things like that. And I think they can be a really useful way of getting traction really quickly.

Emma Drake:
I wonder how long they will stay around. And I guess my question is, what do you think is… How do you think events will change as a result of having had a year online? Do you think things will go back to normal or do you think things will evolve or stay the same? What’s your view?

Vikki Barcroft:
So, yeah, there’s a couple of things there. I think the sort of the ad hoc more sort of pop-up style events that you’re that company or that brand, or even an individual that’s just communicating directly with your audience and you feel like you have this lovely insight into sort of their world, people are broadcasting from their homes, so I think certainly from that sort of Facebook live and that style and in Instagram and all of their lives and stories. I think that’s a really lovely way to connect with your customers and your followers, your audience, and it feels like a direct conversation. It’s very similar how you have conversations or relate to your friends and your peers and everything.

Vikki Barcroft:
So I think that’s definitely here to stay. I think there was elements of that before the last year anyway. So I think that’s just going from strength to strength and then we’ll keep building. And I think having direct access to ask people questions who you don’t feel you normally have access to, I think is a really fantastic way to market whatever you’re doing.

Vikki Barcroft:
My main experience within events is, more for the past 10 years has been more B2B. And I think from that perspective, there’s a huge change. I would like to see people not just putting on the same events that had been planned for 2019, 2020, and moving away to something a little bit more inclusive, actually and more sustainable and that’s what I found with online events, that it’s really opened up a really great way to give people that option. Do you need to travel, fly halfway around the world to go to a global conference when you can watch it from home? You can still network with people from home, you can get the same messaging in the same content from not having to do that travel.

Vikki Barcroft:
Now, on the flip side, there is the people who cannot wait to get on a plane and I am one of them. I’m not going to lie. So despite all of that, but I just, I would actually personally really appreciate the option if you are talking global events, which is a few global events that I’m working with at the moment, different regions are going to open up at different times down in different countries are going to open up at different times. But more importantly than that, even individuals are going to feel comfortable or not comfortable at different times. And so I think making your event completely face to face this year, depending on the type of event, but certainly I’m thinking of a B2B sort of situation where you might feel as an employee, maybe obliged to go, but you might not be comfortable.

Vikki Barcroft:
I think that’s really exclusive in a negative way to not give the option for people to actually come out of what’s been a really, really tough year at their own pace. Resourcing will be challenging because effectively, if you’re doing an in-person event and you’re doing an online event, it’s effectively two events that you’re going to try and run. And I think there are ways to do it. There are ways to do it really quite smoothly. People sit on their phones to ask questions and to comment and to involve themselves in the audience. It’s less popular in the sort of events I’ve been running to still micron. I feel you get more interaction, you get more questions, you get more data.

Emma Drake:
Hybrid is the word of the year. It’s the word of 2021, hybrid. And that a cynic would say, that’s because we don’t know what’s happening. So we’re going to call it all hybrid. And then we’ve covered all the bases. It’s a hybrid working, hybrid. Is that a hybrid car? I can’t quite decide if we want petrol, if we want electric. We’re going to get hybrid.

Vikki Barcroft:
It’s a step in the right direction.

Emma Drake:
Exactly that. It’s exactly that. It’s one of those things that we just have to, people are learning new skills and they’re having to look at different ways of working like we are with everything and events are no different to that, I guess.

Emma Drake:
We’ve covered this a little bit Vikki, but one thing I like to do with guests is to get them to give listeners the top three things to look out for. So for you, it’d be the top three things to look out for or top tips when thinking about taking your offline event online.

Vikki Barcroft:
Oh, there’s so many that I could say. But I’ll try to name three. I mean, I’m definitely going to repeat myself a little bit here, but still the most important thing is to think about why. You’ve got to figure that out. Think about what you’re doing. That’s still the most important tip of doing any event and certainly thinking about it online. Definitely think about your content in a different way. Think about it as a TV show. And as part of that, remember that actually your deadlines are probably going to get shorter with a virtual event, opposite to popular opinion that, Oh, you can just do them overnight because you have to do a lot of prep with your speakers before. So I definitely say, great short snappy content, prepare it and remember your deadlines are going to be shorter.

Vikki Barcroft:
My third one is I think just, don’t be scared. You can run an online event, just replace certain things with other things. So you replace your venue with a platform. Everything that you’ve done, you just switch out a few key things and I think it’s basically just having the confidence to do it. You don’t have to learn everything yourself.

Emma Drake:
I think it’s a really good point actually. I think it’s the overwhelm people find and yeah. I mean, you wouldn’t do it, if you were going to run an event, even if it was a training event, even if you’ve done it before, you’d still, there’s a number of steps you would go through and a number of people you would ask for help from-

Vikki Barcroft:
Exactly.

Emma Drake:
So it’s no different. I think they’re really good three things actually. So thanks for coming on the show today, Vikki. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I hope listeners have been able to glean some insight from our conversation into if they’re thinking about taking on that online event or if they’ve got one planned already, it’s given them some tips. And certainly for me, it’s made me think about it slightly differently. So thank you for that and thank you for coming on.

Vikki Barcroft:
It’s been great. I’ve really, really enjoyed talking to you about it. I love talking about events anyway. You can probably tell that. Yeah, it’s been brilliant. Thanks.
Emma Drake:
And how can people contact you after the show, Vikki? What’s the best way if they want to get in touch?

Vikki Barcroft:
Eventsforimpact.co.uk is my website. So feel free to reach out there. All my contact details are on there as well, but I’m also on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn.

Emma Drake:
Okay. Well, I will put a link to Vikki’s website in the show notes for you as well today.

Emma Drake:
So finally, thank you for listening to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works. Don’t forget to check my show notes for those links that I mentioned, and I’d really love it if you would subscribe to my podcast and leave me a review. And also if you think there’s someone that could benefit from listening to this podcast, please share this within your networks. So I’ll just say bye for now and see you next time.