Inbound Stories: Luke Gibson - Why event businesses are slow at deploying content marketing

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Hello everybody. Today we've got Luke Gibson, he's the former MD of Euromoney Specialist Events Group. And we're going to have a really interesting conversation today about what are the things that keep the CEO, the MD of an events business away from doing the cool and interesting things that we always talk about, more specifically the 365 event engagements and online communities, etc. But before we get into that, I would like to, yeah, let you Luke, introduce yourself and if you can let us, let us know a little bit more about, about you and then we can just kind of delve into, into the topic. Welcome Luke.

Thank you very much. Thanks for interviewing me. I hope you find my views still current. I was 12 years at Euromoney and before that I was 8 years at Informa. So I've been in events for 20 odd years and things have definitely changed over that period of time. I've just decided to take a bit of a break and I'm now just trying to get bored so that I can get hungry and excited to do something new and interesting from here. But I think, I think we met at the conference summit and I think although my experiences are Informa and Euromoney, the point of that summit is a good benchmarking exercise. And I think your point is right, we talk about a lot of the same things and sometimes we're coming back and we're still talking about doing stuff and we haven't actually ever done it, but we go away with the intention to do it tomorrow and the following year we go away with the same intention. So I do understand your point and the questions really around the inertia of that with, with, with bigger corporations or possibly smaller ones. And I think although I'm talking from my experience, I'm not really just representing a Euromoney view because that wouldn't be appropriate now. But it's also the benchmarking with colleagues at other companies. So we get together and we talk. What are you doing about this? What are you actually doing about it? And we all seem to be at the same place so you know, we're talking about everybody in the event space.

Yeah, I think. And again like the reason why we, you know, I've known you for probably three or four years and at various events and again, he's always the same conversation and most of the people that we meet are colleagues we've met back in the day and again. So just to frame the conversation, the way that this interview started was when I kind of said to you, okay, look, why is it that over the last three years we have been hearing in the events industry, in the industry, events that 365 engagement is key, that innovation is absolutely critical and developing online communities is where event organizations should be looking at for the next five, ten years if they want to succeed and enter their communities. And every time we meet we actually kind of have this conversation and we laugh because it's like, okay, what's going on? Why is it not happening? So what would be your views? Because I think the reality is many organizations are either not doing that or doing a little bit of it. So what would you say about that? What do you think is the reason?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think there's an element of legacy there on a lot of levels. So there's legacy people, there's legacy technology, there's legacy behavior. When you look at when we first started looking at content marketing, you know, it's the right thing, thing to do because you know, it makes a certain amount of sense and you know, it's in a way how you'd like to engage with a company. If they're sending you interesting information, that's fine. If they're just hitting you with their product all the time, that gets really dull. Even if you like the product, that gets really dull. So you know in your heart it's the right thing to do. But then when you come to measuring things, you know, it is difficult. You know, you get different open rates, but we're never dealing with massive samples. This is classic marketing and I'm not a marketer by background, as you know, but you know, your open rates are never going to be so large that you're going to get great statistics. So you're going to do this stuff for quite a long time before you're proving much. You've then got the debate between, you know, I get someone to read some interesting content and I'm tying my product to it in a loose way. But how far in that365 communication is your content really sort of nurturing somebody towards a buying decision? You know, you see it with enterprise software or something like that where over a three year cycle they'll talk to a client and eventually the client, they'll shape the client's views of the type of product they're going to buy to the point where when they come to buy it, weirdly, it's only that software that sort of meets the needs that the client thinks it then has. I think with our products we're really saying at the bottom line, come to our conference or come to our series of conferences or buy our media, which involves the events. And you know, there's a debate between whether I'm my high level of engagement I might get from the content or the 365 communication that we're talking about and that proof that that actually makes me more likely to buy. So you've got a slight channel attribution issue. And at the conference this year, we had a fabulous panel of people who weren't actually constrained because most of them were owners of the business. And there was a question right at the end that I didn't even want to bother to ask because I thought it was a silly question. And they asked, how did you, you know, what, what, what's the main channel? What's your most effective channel? And I thought, well, hold on, we're talking about here about this completely integrated marketing community 365 conversation. You know, it's not just about one channel, but straight away everyone responded or the phone. So you've got this problem, you've got the old heroin that you're hooked on that's, that's bashing people over their head and getting them to buy and the new stuff. And it's, it's quite difficult to come off the old stuff, I think because you can prove that works, everyone will turn around and you create incentive schemes like for this. So you believe that the person bringing in that deal on the phone, you know, bringing in that customer on the phone should be rewarded for that. You don't look back at 365 days of communication. Well, you can do. So that brings us to the next point, really. Is that so the first thing is, I think to summarize that point, I think you've still got the heart says this is obviously the way to do it, but the empirical data doesn't necessarily prove it to the degree to the next point is I have an old cheap way of doing something which is emails and phone calls, and now you're offering me a very expensive way of doing something. Well, I've got to be very convinced that the old way isn't working for me to spend the money on the new way. And it is going to be more expensive. And I think it's interesting if you're coming from a publishing business that's run some events and as some of them now are, the events is actually where the profit is and the publishing is almost the lost leader. It's very often that. And again, I'm not speaking for a particular company here, but you know, I've seen this and I've been asked this. It's very often that, you know, the publishing side of the business is still seem to be driving the brand and the communication and the engagement with the market and the conferences is just the money at the end of the rainbow. But actually you've got to work out, you know, is the tail wagging the dog in that situation? Because shouldn't all of the communication that's going out, if the profits in the conference, shouldn't it all be geared around actually being content marketing for the conference? And then on the other side, we see quite a lot of startup conference companies. When I say startup, I mean in the last six, six to eight years, even where they've started as conference companies and they're doing more and more content. And I think that's quite interesting. You're seeing them fill that sort of publishing void or that communication void because they feel they need to. But when pushed, they're still bringing in the booking over the phone, you know, or off an email or off a piece of marketing that follows all of this content stuff. So you get the feeling that people are, and I was definitely guilty of this, they're doing lots of content stuff because it makes us feel good and makes us feel like we're in the markets and we're serving our markets. And yet when you say you're running 100 conferences a year, you've got 13 this month, 15 next month. The bookings are tracking ahead or behind. You're used to pulling these levers. You pull this one, you pull this one, you pull this one, and that's where you got your bookings from. So you've added a few extra things, but you go back to pulling the.

Same old levers because ultimately that's kind of what's kind of closing the deals.

Yeah, I think you do, you know, and I think that there'll be. It'll take a long time to wean ourselves off that. I think there's other legs, so there's. Legacy behavior is really what we've talked about there. I think there's some legacy systems as well. When you come to. When I say, can you really attribute, you know, the. You've got to get to the point where you're really tracking what that customer does. So you can show that actually they do open my monthly piece, do open my weekly piece, and they do. And there's a correlation between the people who consume the content that I'm creating and their rebooking rates. You know, you've got You've got to basically be able to have that technology. Now. I don't think that technology is really hard at all. And I think most of the newer companies are able to track what people are reading and attribute it well, but whether they're even doing proper CRM, I don't know. But when you talk about the older companies, when I started in conferences, first, first job, you know, people at conferences always go, oh, maybe we should run off and do this ourselves. And then they used to turn to each other and say, oh, but we don't have the database. The database, you know, this magical reservoir which is not swamp, but in most companies, but it's this magical reservoir of customers that before LinkedIn and before the Internet, you know, it was seen as the holy grail. And I think the mindset people, when they talk about ROI and ROI of 4 and ROI of 8, whatever, they're still talking about direct mail. And we grew up with direct mail, so our whole mindset is outbound. And I know you run an inbound agency, so it's music to your ears, but the legacy is outbound and outbounds what's been getting results and therefore. So you've got legacy systems around that, you've got legacy processes. But if you start from the beginning, you'd maybe go with a full CRM and you'd say instead of it being about the product and treating the database as a reservoir of potential buyers of a product, you treat your database as your repository of customers and you'd worry more about what the customer is doing rather than the products you have that you're forcing out them. So then you would start moving down much more of a CRM kind of route and you'd be interested in what those customers are interested in and you might start developing new products based on what they're interested in, rather than trying to get them interested in what you're doing. So that sounds kind of obvious and what we should all be doing. But if you think of the legacy, you know, that's, that's not where we start. So, you know, we'll take time to come off that. There. There's one other legacy which we maybe will come back to. But who are we hiring and what are we expecting them to do in what space of time? Certainly this is something I suffered from because if whilst I was the MD of a business unit, you're on money and you have a lot of freedom and I was director at IBC and then Informa, and you have a lot of freedom, you're still To a point, looking at headcount and productivity and conferences really with the, with unlike publishing where you've got a certain amount of renewals, with conferences there is a productivity quality workload into play. And so, you know, if you're going to double your number of staff or you're going to pay them double or pay for staff who attract double the salary, you're putting quite a lot of cost in there. And I think you're asking your staff to do the data work. You're asking them to be able to communicate to customers and write effectively almost in a journalistic style, or at least edit other content to make it that readable, which then requires a hell of a lot of knowledge in the market of the market. You're then expecting them to have all the tracking skills to set up the Google Analytics or whatever it would be to have the social media skills and all the rest of it. And I think that that skill set is very broad to find one person. And I've not seen a lot of people say, you know, here's my online guy, here's my old, you know, here's the data expert. And we experimented with that a bit. So you have a data mining person and then you have a comms person. But the best thing that I think we ever tried to do was to say, okay, we've got a process and a way of doing things that we've been doing for ages and it's where the majority of our money is coming from. Why don't we, and I mean, this may be an idea for other people, why don't we ring fence the other thing, actually just do it. Because if you ask somebody to do something new and you say, right, you're gonna, you're gonna be doing three, I want you to do 365 day a year marketing to these people. I want you to communicate, create content, build the community and all of that. And by the way, we've got an event in six weeks time and I want you to get the bookings in on it as well. And your incentive scheme is all based on the numbers of that event. You're asking to do two different things. And even though you're saying I want you to do the first one, really what you're really saying is, but I actually really want you to do the second one. That's what I'm paying you to do. So this is for brownie points and this is for hiring, firing and incentive schemes. So which one are they going to devote their time to? The old school, you know, you might have an opportunity to say team A and team B and actually let's keep hooked on the old stuff, but let's have a different team or a different couple of people even doing something completely different and therefore they're not being asked to do the old thing at the same time. And you're not confusing your priorities. Now you could say, well, it's not so different, it's just a migration maybe, but it seems to be a very slow migration. So, you know, I think that might be. We tried that and then we had the wrong person and then it didn't quite work out and then we fell away and you know, we went back to sort of pulling the same old levers with a few others added, you.

Know, so you're saying probably look like in some cases it's people like you might have gone and do that. But again, perhaps because of the lack of tracking, perhaps of the technology or trying to do the new things with legacy technology, then you couldn't find the roi. So then you have to go back to your ways because it's, you know, ultimately you're running a P and L, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And you've got short term and longer, longer term objectives, but you know, you don't want to have a bad quarter and yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think it's very much about legacy. I don't think that the belief's not there, but I think the numbers don't scream in your face enough to say, you know, this investment is clearly going to pay off in the shorter term. You know, it's where marketing is going to be. You know, it's where you want to be. But a bit like all of these things in life. You know, I know New Year's resolutions are coming up, but you know, I know I want to be thinner. You know, I know I want to be fit, but I can always start. And it's like that because the payoff. And unfortunately humans are wired this way, aren't they? But the payback is going to be in three years time. I'll be really glad we started to do this, but I don't need. In a week's time I'm still going to be bringing most of my bookings in over the phone. So you've got to really invest, I think for a future point, I think.

So we've got, I think you've mentioned a key part which I'm finding a lot and I think it's kind of one of the things that I always think that with large organizations the legacy technology the legacy, the legacy people, everything. Legacy is a big obstacle. So, and then you've talked about again, the attribution is, I guess, an element of technology.

So.

How can an MD of an organization, how can you break away from that? How can you then start looking at, okay, you still need to run your pnl, but you know that there's all the startups or the newcomers doing all these innovative things with the funky CRM, with whatever it is that they're doing, they're doing something good, they're kind of eating up on the market share. Then you've got associations that perhaps are catching up into how they go about it, you know, because obviously they're based on membership models, etc. Etc. And they do to the members. So how, how to break away from that? Because I think the reality and then as everyone says is going back to the old ways is just eventually going to become a legacy thing. So how can you break away from that?

Well, I think what you're touching on as well is that where you're seeing success in the events industry is, let's leave the community word out of it. But you're certainly looking at niches and specialism. So you know, the mass provider of I can run a conference on this and then that and then the other seems to be on the way. And I think you're able to see, and you see it with consultants going into conferences as well. You know, if you become the specialist voice of that niche with your series of global conferences, then you're onto something and then the next thing is to then be successful. So even, even within a bigger business, as I was running, if you subdividing down into, right, here's our specialism, let's say it was in certain type of retail or a certain type of banking or a certain type of asset that we're talking about the financing of, or it was global Grain, one of the businesses. Once you've got dominance of that niche globally, then I think you've got an opportunity to make that a small team and then start saying, okay, we're going to deal with these people all year round and we're going to see the benefits. But you know, within a corporation, if you can create the growth for that small part of that business, then you can ring fence that and you can invest in that. Because once you create growth, you've given yourself the headroom to invest really. So, you know, look, we're half a million pounds up on this business, by the way. I'm going to spend another 150,000 investing in marketing and customer contact systems for next year. You know, that's not a difficult sell if you're an employee or the owner of a business, you know, or an employee of a business because you're creating your own investment. But I think it's about focusing on that particular piece of that particular model. Niche is the only word I can really come up with, but I won't go into some of the ones that we were dominant in. But you can just imagine in the same way other companies have the canned lion or whatever, you should be able to create the growth in order and those are the businesses you're going to want to invest in for the future anyway. So you should be able to create your own profit surplus and effectively invest in that business in that niche and then you can run it around that particular group of customers. You get off that database that's too old. And how do you. Well, that's, that's probably each individual company's conundrum, really.

Yeah, I think that data is kind of the big conundrum and I think perhaps marketeers always keep on very, very concerned about data. Oh, we have our data, we have X number of hundreds of thousands of contacts that we need to update them. We need to do A, B, C, D and F with them. But by the time you look at it, they're like massive projects. They're going to take ages. And in my view, in my view, I think they're looking at the wrong side of things because I think, you know, start looking at not all the data that you have, as you said, as this big repository, start looking at all these people that are actually not engaging with you, etc. Etc. So what you're saying is that like the areas of specialization, which is again what we've seen all these kind of little groups of organizations being very successful of being specialized, they've been very successful at developing knowledge areas and engaging with the communities in that area. So what you're saying is that it's perhaps one of the solutions is continue to focus on those specific niche areas. Try to focus on how you can demonstrate that ROI in those certain. Or how is that?

I think so. I mean, I think you've just got to do it. I think we all know what we want to be doing. There is an issue around time and resource and cost and systems. So if you isolate that into a small growing area, then you should be able to invest in that. And all of those things are investment. Often the marketers that I think we're finding now are very, very keen on inbound marketing. You know, I think the great thing about marketers is that they, they consume, you know, best practice from the wider industry. So they're always asking you, they always want to be doing the latest thing. Often you have to ask them, well, are we going to get a return on this? Is it that straightforward? You know, oh, it should be like this. We should be able to do this and track that and you go, okay, fine. And often as the md you're going, sure, what about next week's bookings? But you know, slightly the problem but I think that the Malta's will is there whether it's a single job to go from the data or the management of customer records or whatever it is we're doing in a CRM world through to the comms and the interviewing where you really got to know your content. So you know, it's not just a marketer's role here and it starts to get integrated. And I think the legacy is the way we've defined their roles but also whether the skill set goes all the way from data to content to comms sales. Really, you know, I'm not sure. So I mean I think that needs looking at. I don't think we've looked, I've looked at that properly.

I think, look, you've touched on one aspect and I think to find to wrap up the aspect of going, let's say taking these specific sections or sectors or dish niche areas to do like your test pilots in many cases I normally think why in my situation I say okay, why is it so difficult to go off pissed and do things a little bit different? And when I'm saying off pissed I'm talking about yes, why don't you just kind of basically use the CRM only for that little division. Why don't you just kind of at least bypass it? Why don't you bypass all these kind of departments that like would normally it's just red tape. How flexible, how flexible is it for someone in your position to go and do it and do it that way without kind of upsetting the other individuals within the organization? Is it feasible?

It does depend on the organization and you know, certainly I think you can make a case and say, you know, if there's a group marketing director then you know, which there was at Euromoney and there was informa. It's very easy to say, right, we're really going to pilot something here and we need to take this data out and we need to ring fence it and we need to not Share it with other people, which was the DNA of most big companies is that data shared, you know, ownership of customer and stuff like that always gets very, very complicated. But I think if you've got a project that you can prove what it is you're trying to do, you shouldn't have too much trouble selling that. You better believe in it. I think, you know, I think you'll see. I mean in my position, I was very aware that, you know, it felt like traditional levers were less effective. You know, we had direct mail, I mean we hung onto direct mail for quite a long time because we had a lot of email suppression or so on. So you know, aha, multi channel marketing in the old days, you know, if we get the brochure through still, or at least the sponsors like to hold something printed. I mean it's very old school, but direct mail's hung around for a long time because email is so intrusive. I think that gives us gets you all the way back to inbound marketing. Because email was so effective and so cheap, you know, it was overused. And then it becomes very intrusive and then we're back to, then we are where we are now, where we're saying, hold on, I've really got to send you something very interesting for you to bother to actually open it and actually representing the brand. And then when you start having somebody's periphery customer or someone else's core customer in a large organization. So you have to really think that through. And I think.