Kristen on Event-Led Growth at Inbound Talks: Strategies for Success

Welcome back to Sidekick Strategies Expert Interviews Inbound Talks edition. Of course. Today we have a very special guest, Kristen Koenig, the regional Vice President of Video go to market GTM at RingCentral. Kristen is a powerhouse in the SaaS and video technology space, leading global efforts to scale and revolutionize how businesses use video for meetings, webinars and events. With extensive experience in enterprise sales, digital channel partnership and an impressive track record of leading high performance teams, Kristen has a unique perspective on the evolving world of event driven marketing. Woo wee. She recently shared the stage at Inbound 2024 in a captivating panel discussion titled Maximize Impact Turning events to year round marketing Gold with a great group of humans like Jay Schwedelson. I love that guy. Katie Lambert and Daniel Murray. So Kristen's insights are pivotal for any company looking to harness the power of events, repurpose content and integrate event driven strategies into their year round marketing efforts. By the way, that sounds like my organization and I'm loving that we're going to be doing this interview. We can't wait to dive into these exciting topics and explore the future of events in modern marketing. Kristen, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. George.

I'm super excited you're here. It would be really boring if it was just me talking about this but we are going to dive into this. But my first question, I always love asking folks, how the heck are you doing post inbound?

Post inbound. I'm honestly like everyone would say, a little tired. But also I feel very inspired after we've been in this world over the last five years and going through the ebbs and flows in the pandemic and afterwards and it was the top event I have been to in my probably last 15 years. It was truly remarkable. So I feel honored that I got the chance to speak. I still to this day and inspired.

Yeah, I love Inbound. I love the crew that puts it together. I just love the people that go. It is really an amazing thing. And the fact that you got to speak there and we get to have this interview. I am super excited. Kristen, let's dive into the good stuff for the audience. Here's the thing. In the inbound 2024 talk there was mention that events should be at the heart of your company's marketing strategy. I'd love for you to take a couple minutes and maybe elaborate on how events have evolved from these like single moment to maybe year round engagement drivers. What should people be thinking about?

Absolutely great question. So my whole history within events the last 15 years I really started in person. That's been my, you know, depth and breadth of my career. And then throughout the last five years, in particular seven years, I've learned a lot about video content marketing as well as just just overall online presence. And I think us as humans and also our demographic that is coming up, the space is becoming digital first. So when we think about marketing, we think about omnichannel marketing. And, and that's where I want from a customer perspective. That's where ones who are really succeeding with their communities, they're thinking about events and not just this cookie cutter transactional way. They're thinking what are the moments in time throughout my entire year that I can engage with my audience in a different way. And that to me is very, very powerful. So that's where it's really revolutionized and evolved over the last five to seven years and is people are thinking about the new demographic that's coming into the workforce. And two, not everyone's traveling to the big trade shows as as much anymore. So you have to really pick and choose of what is creating quality and value and what are the ones that you really need to focus on the goals. So is it legion? Is it for customer outreach? Is it for brand awareness? And there's different mediums of how to do that today, which is why I love this more omnichannel event marketing strategy year round.

I love this so much because one, you mentioned goals and your event should have goals and they can be different goals for each event. I love the fact of this like year nurturing, which almost leads into event led growth for community or building community. Because whenever you talk about building community, then you're talking about building trust and reciprocity which speeds up the sales process at the end of the date. Not why we're here, but it's helpful. It's. It's helpful. And then I love this idea. It came flashing in my brain when you're talking about it's not only all year, but then where are they at in their journey? So like take the buyer's journey, the customer's journey, the year of events you can do and the goals that they should achieve. All of a sudden. Dang on it, Kristen, that sounds almost like it's a little bit of a strategy.

Absolutely.

For event led growth. Right. So now let's dive into something that you kind of leaned into and I know you've had a journey around this and that's that like sometimes it's like, well, is a podcast an event? Is a webinar event do they have to come to a location for it to be an event? And you've worked with a variety of event types, like that's kind of what you mentioned. So I want to know, like, how do you recommend to companies? How do they. And not that I don't know, I want to ask the question, but I don't know if there's a right or a wrong one. But I'm going to still ask the question, like, how do you recommend companies choose the right format to maximize the impact of the events that they're actually choosing to do throughout that year?

Great question. We have some white papers and some documentation on this that we put together and also strategy with our customers. But I always think it starts with the ultimate goal. So I always love going into the beginning of the new year. Everyone's going through annual planning right now. This is the perfect time to assess. We have been doing it here at Ringcentral and you assess what events worked well last year, what didn't work well, those that you attended, those that you had hosted, and what were the formats of each and what were the goals of each. And it should be looking like a full strategy and resource that you really analyze. What are those things next year and what are you going to slot in? What are you going to take away? So this is a strategy that we do here at RingCentral. So eating our own dog food with our own event marketing team, but also ones that we teach our customers about. Because if you're just going to rinse and repeat, you know, budget stays flat, all budgets stay flat. But if your budget stays flat and this event didn't perform last year and it was for Lead Gen, let's just say it's a trade show you needed to attend. But most people who showed up at your booth even though you got 50 scans are vendors, partners and current customers. Then it's not a Legion event that you should be at. Maybe you scale it down, you do brand awareness. And then for Lead Gen, what we're seeing is a lot of ones at the top of the funnel coming in in a digital format, which is online events. They might not know about your company, they might not know about your offerings, they're not gonna go straight to your in person event. You need to see at the top of the funnel with the online community and how you tease it in different ways. So you hit on the point, George. But I think in general that's how we are looking at it for all of our customers is the right events at the right time and the Right. Moments in the buyer's journey and then also just customer segmentation. That's what we're actually really talking about is the segmentation of different people and having the right events that support that strategy.

Oh, Kristen, you said. I love the word segmentation, by the way. Hub heroes, you know that I've said this before. Segmentation equals proper communication for the people that you're actually building the experience for. And now we're talking about an experience around events. Kristen, I want to double click into a thing that I know you're passionate about mentioned in the Inbound Talk. And I think it's important to get the juice for the squeeze, if you will. I don't know where that saying came from, but hey, I'll use it, I'll use it. Repurposing content, right? And when I say that repurposing content from events, it was a major theme in the Inbound talk. But what are some practical ways businesses can turn event content into like high impact assets like podcast episode, blog articles, social media snippets like talk us about what I love to call this content confetti ability out of events.

I love that. That's a really great term. I'm going to steal that. But you're going to, you're going to coin it. Of course. I love the content confetti. You know, I think we said this within the session. You know, not everything needs to be repurposed, right? You need to have the most memorable moments repurposed. But the biggest thing that I want to make sure the audience understands is you really need to ensure two things. Why you're speaking on a certain topic is one, for your speakers to become your basically advocates for the session. So actually giving them content, giving them snippets after the sessions. Do you know how many events do not do that? Hey Kristen, thank you so much for speaking. Here's a snippet from the show. We would love for you to post this. Minimum to no events have done that and I speak at a lot of events. So using your speakers to create brand awareness, community. And they are so proud to speak just like on this podcast today. I'm so proud to be speaking with you, George. I'm sure you're going to send me the episode after so I can repurpose it and share it with my community. So speaker advocacy is huge. Let's talk about actual audience advocacy. The biggest takeaway for your events to repurpose content is if you have an event and the actual attendees are the ones saying this is what I learned that is a successful event. So after inbound posting on LinkedIn and saying, I just attended this event, this is all the nuggets that I learned is huge. That's how you know your event is successful is when they're creating their own advocacy. So there's so many different things you can do. For repurposing, I come down with a few main areas, which is audiograms, which is us talking, having quick quotes because not everyone wants to listen to 30, 40 minutes plus of a podcast, but audience audiograms, blog post, obviously video snippets are huge. There's so many different types of repurposing content that you don't have to do one. You can choose different things. And we do this at RingCentral. Again, keep saying eat our own dog food. Really well. If you look at our social, we're repurposing the audio, grants and anything from the event. But it comes down to how you leverage that. The company shouldn't be just leveraging the reposting. It's your customers and the audience members and your speakers. They should be advocating also post event, not just the organization itself.

Yeah, I love this so much. I literally just slacked my content strategist. You, you said speaker advocacy and audience advocacy. Because when you're talking about that, I was like, yeah, why didn't they send me a snippet? Like, I would have definitely shared it. Like, you know, so I love that and I want to dig deeper into that in the future of like, how can we do that for organizations? I, I also want to double click here in a minute. You mentioned the word video, which by the way, I love me some video. Like I, I, I just love creating video interviews, tutorials, all that good stuff. So we're going to circle back around that in a second. But I want to ask the question, it is around metrics because if you don't measure it, it don't make sense. Right. And you've got to be able to know, are we being successful here or are we just wasting time? And so Kristen, in your idea, in your mind, like, what are some of the key metrics or analytics that organizations or companies should be focusing on to measure the success of the events that they're actually creating?

Yeah, that's a great question. I first want to say it depends on where you are in that event journey. What that means is when you attend an event or host an event for the first time, those metrics can look very different than one that you continuously go to because then you're building community. And I'm sure some of the HubSpot inbound sponsors and exhibitors see that that have been going years on end. So those metrics might look different for those than us, which their metrics could be. How many returning customers are coming by, how many new leads that are coming by? Are we creating traction and brand awareness being like, is this activation actually making sense for what we're doing? Is it related to our brand? How is our, I call it like an auxiliary or you know, ancillary event? Maybe it's a happy hour. How many are getting to that? So I think for the ones in our shoes of what we're creating is how many people from a lead gen are stopping by. Also cross sell for RingCentral. It's all about, you know, current customers of RingCentral are they coming to learn about a new product. So that is interesting as well. But then when you're thinking about content repurposing after an event that you're creating is how many impressions, how many reshares, how many people are posting. I alluded to this earlier. How many people are actually posting about the event that's not, you know, a cookie cutter influencer that was paid to do it, but ones who are doing it naturally. And I think authentic content creation is going to be the brands that actually see the most traction. And that's really hard to measure right now, but you see it with everything I'm talking about, which is the initial new customer lead gen, the current customers or the cross sell as well as the footprint where that content's being shared, which could be many different metrics. And we look at all of those things when we talk about metrics.

I love this so much, the idea of authentic content creation and I would even say authentic human centric content creation. Oh my gosh, just double down on that. So I told you I wanted to circle back around on this video conversation. So how do you see the role of video evolving in the world of events? Like what specific opportunities does video offer for extending the life of the event and the content that you might create from it?

That I could go into so much right now. Video is going to evolve before our eyes in 2025. I think it's going to be massive in not just disruption. I don't want to say disruption because it's already happening right now, but I call it an evolution of video because you can see it as, you know, we said it in our sec in our session, but the tick tock ification of content and how can businesses do that more easily and you see artificial intelligence video tools coming back up in the workforce. A lot of people are doing more with less and that is what I'm seeing across every company. So if you have a team of less than five marketers or even like we have a lot of customers who are one person show marketers and if you have to do more with less to put out content, post an event, you would love to upload that content and slice and dice that information and maybe put, you know, a canva graphic on top of it. Those things to make simple, simple tweaks and simple tools easy to use and affordable is going to take over and that is something that's going to be seen in 2025. It's not going to be this expensive, hard, complex process. The world needs simplification as well as affordable technology in order to do our jobs better and stronger. Not replace us, but do it better because of a lot of budgetary issues in a lot of businesses right now.

That might be the rewind spot of this interview. I'm just going to say there's, there was a ton of gold in there. I mean just like doing more with less and just so much. Listen, ladies and gentlemen, rewind. Listen to that. Get your notepad out. There were just, there were some golden gems there. Speaking of golden gems and doing more with less and I it's funny because you mentioned the single marketers and my heart goes out to them like be so here, let's help them. Right? And when I say let's help them, what are some of the common mistakes, Kristen, that you see companies, organizations, these single marketers or teams making when it comes to incorporating events into their long term marketing strategy?

The number one, I see, number one mistake I see is and I it kind of alludes to what I just mentioned is you, you are one person. You cannot be everywhere to everyone and sometimes they're too stretched that they don't get back to people. The responsiveness is hard and they feel like they're swimming upstream without a paddle. So what I love to say to our current customers or partners of ours is what is working? Do that really well and keep on. Because when it's working and it's continuing to do well brings typically revenue, it comes back to revenue and then you can hire someone and do a little bit more. I think when you're spread too thin and you have too many strategies going on versus I'm always a person who's the rule of threes. So we're going through annual planning right now is what are the three top things you're going to do in the year that's actually going to move the needle? And if those things are going to derail your top three things that are going to move the needle, that needs to be put aside. And it's not something that I'm someone who is a yes person. I love to join podcasts like this one, and I love to help people. But I'm one person. And I think as I've aged and matured within my career, I've known when to put things aside and when to focus on other things. And that, to me is a summation of prioritization. And that is what I just stated is prioritization. And making sure it's very clear is not to say that your strategy can't pivot through the year, and your strategy can do that because the world changes every quarter to every six months to every year. But I'm saying don't lose sight of doing really well on things that you're going to focus on. And then if something comes up, replace one of them versus taking on more. Does that make. Is that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, Makes perfect sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And just watch out for that hurdle, that pothole, if you will. So let's. Let's shift gears for a second. You talked about clients and customers. You mentioned RingCentral. I even mentioned it in the intro. I want to talk about technology. And so what role does technology, especially platforms like RingCentral, play in helping businesses manage, scale, and even repurpose, like their event strategy?

Absolutely. I think technology, you know, within events. And I can say this because I've been it for a long time in event technology. Let's just be honest. Most things are very, very similar out there, and it's been similar for over well of a decade. There's really only a couple companies who have really made it big, but we still have such a segregated and disparate market. So that's why I truly believe there's going to be more consolidation coming out in 2025 and beyond, because people don't want to use, you know, five to 10 different platforms. When I was at Freeman, we did a study, I was on that team. And that's, on average, the number of platforms that event marketers are using.5 to 10, I think it's like 5 to 10. For smaller businesses, it's like 6 to 7.5 to 7. And so when you think about it, you need to have your strategy first. Don't pick the technology to fit your Strategy do the opposite. The strategy should dictate the technology that you choose. And so for me, I love to understand from a marketer's perspective is as they go into 2025, are the technologies you have fitting the strategy that you created? Because to me that should dictate should you swipe tools out, should you think of something different that should dictate what makes sense versus not. And so I truly believe that tools are going to become less complex, they're going to become more simplified and integrations are going to be at the core of the event marketing world. When you go into CRM and martech stack not just events as completely separate arm of the marketer or internal.

Oh, so good. I mean just we're just adding a ton of value to people who are trying to leverage events for their growth. So here's the thing. I go back to that single marketer or my brain, Kristen goes to that like smaller business because you even mentioned in the last answer like if they're smaller business sometimes things come down to budget and you want to create an experience, you want to create an event. So I'm just going to ask the question, maybe we can add some value if that's where the, the seat that they're sitting in is. For businesses that might not have huge budgets. Right. Because we by the way, inbound huge. I'm just going to throw that out there. Okay, but, but, but you can't throw an inbound. Right. So for businesses that might not have a huge budget for these like larger scale events that a lot of times get the spotlight. Kristen, what are some cost effective ways to create like really high impact engaging events but on like a smaller budget?

So smaller budgets can mean a couple different things. It could mean a dinner with you know, that could be, you know, you do an event. We've done this in New York where you have a dinner with 20 top qual customers mix with partners and prospects and that could be a great quality. They meet each other. You could have you know the different icebreaker questions you could present a little bit. I've had so much success within small unique dinners on low skill budgets. In addition to that, when you think of budgets and not many of people would think of this on the phone because you always gravitate to the in person. Believe me, I love in person but it's also very expensive. I see a lot of businesses complementing their event strategy using digital events and online events as the smaller ones to create community and create that brand awareness. I would say those are the smallest Budget events at Ringcentral. Right. But they've actually created some of our biggest quality metrics of ROI this year, which is crazy to see. So I think when you think about, you know, where to put your strategy, it's all about the content that you're creating. There's memorable moments like a quiz game like Kahoot. Jay does this on, on his event. You could do a Kahoot at low cost, which is trivia. You can bring in some, you know, fantastic fly throughs and commercials. You could produce a very high end event for 30 minutes to an hour to a full day and give your customers, and give your partners and prospects really, really good takeaways that they can take through their business. So I think it's twofold. I think it's the low end events for in person that can be very great experiential, but then also those online events that can use for community expansion.

I had to jot some notes down on that one. I was like, hang on, let me get my notepad out real quick. All right, so man, time flies when we're having fun. So I'm gonna go ahead and ask you this last question. And for this one you might need to get your crystal ball out, all right. Because I'm gonna have you maybe look ahead a little bit. Like imagine aspirational type places like looking ahead from where we're at to where we possibly might be going. What trends or innovations in event marketing are you most excited about? I guess what I'm saying is how do you see the landscape continuing to evolve over the next few years? What should organizations be paying attention to? Like what, what, what are you like, oh, that's coming or I'm excited about that.

So I have three, obviously I said back, I have rules of threes and I have three major trends. One is no shocker to a lot of people. Artificial intelligence has yet to really bring value to the event marketing industry. It is in video. But how can the simplification in the AI speed up the event planning process and management? Because that's doing more with less. I think that AI is going to be built into event creation in technology. So you put a specific prompt and then can it spit out the event, give you some graphics and give you this automatically within maybe an hour or less, maybe five minutes? That is revolutionary. So I think AI is going to really transform our industry. And, and I think people, the big dog, should be very careful about that across the board. In addition to that, I believe that no one has cracked this. There's some big Tech companies who have, but they still have it. Inbound has a great community. But if you think about it post event, how many people are still interacting unless it's ad hoc or a la carte. So my personal opinion is when events become true communities is when it's true disruption is going to take place and that's going to be related to the content that people share together and moments they share together and learnings that we learn from each other. Because I learned on this call from you and all the questions that I'm like, oh I didn't, I didn't, I've never heard of that question before. I wonder how I would answer it. So there's so many different things we can learn from each other and that builds community and that helps build, build brands and that helps give to the event audience of maybe I should attend this event. Maybe I should go to their online, you know, thought leadership webinar later this, you know, later next week. That helps. So those are the three things is AI content and community.

Again, rewind because that's so amazing. And my brain as you were talking was teleporting to like imagine if there was like a community. It was like inbound 365 days a year, right? And you and you literally had this like micro content that was coming out daily based on all of the things that happened in that event. And like people could help each other and learn together and like call me inbound team, call me like anyway, like.

Literally this is what I'm saying, like this. No one has cracked this. The biggest tech companies haven't cracked this in the event tech space space. Like the biggest tech companies who host some of the largest events haven't cracked it with their communities. So this is something that's going to be cracked over time and whoever does it or wherever it goes, those are the trends that I'm seeing in my crystal ball.

I love this so much. Kristen, thank you so much for your time and sharing such valuable insights today. I mean your expertise in event driven marketing and your strategies for, for turning events into year round engagement engines will no doubt inspire and impact the listeners and the viewers and hopefully it's getting them to rethink how they approach events in their own businesses. If people want to connect with you, where do you want to send them?

So I'm on LinkedIn. So Kristin Koenig on LinkedIn, Kristen N. Koenig. And I just wanted to add, you know, you could probably tell I'm super passionate for what I do and I think you know when you want to connect with passionate people who love what they do. I have so much time. For everyone else who wants to connect with me online, shoot me a dm just like, you know, you and I connected, George. But I'm there on LinkedIn and you can follow me and we can chat.

Absolutely. And of course you will have value added to your life if you're chatting with Kristen. For everyone tuning in, the key takeaway here for me is that events are no longer just moments in time. They are part of powerful reusable assets that can fuel your marketing and sales efforts throughout the entire year. By leveraging analytics, repurposing content, and embracing video, you can extend the life of your events and continue to engage your audience, AKA the community that you could be building long after the event has ended. Thank you for joining us on another episode of Sidekick Strategy Expert Interviews Inbound Talks Edition. Be sure to make sure you hit that subscribe if you're on YouTube, like it if you're on any of the other channels. And remember, don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy hub spotting along the way.