In today's crowded digital landscape, marketers are often caught in a relentless pursuit of intent, meticulously tracking signals and optimizing for conversions. However, this session, "How Modern Marketers Win Mindshare Across Buying Committees," challenges this conventional wisdom, asserting that true demand generation starts much earlier: with mindshare. The key to winning deals lies not in capturing existing intent, but in cultivating a memorable presence long before buyers even begin their formal evaluation.
“We don't have an attendance problem. We have a memory problem. A memory problem.”
- Kelly Cheng, CMO of Goldcast
Stop chasing intent and start building lasting mindshare. Discover why human connection, authentic content, and a "362-day playbook" are your secret weapons in a world of AI sameness. Learn to truly stand out.
I'm Kelly and I'm really glad to be here because for the next 45 minutes we're going to talk about the thing that decides more deals than demos. Any pitch, any piece of content that you'll ship this next year and that thing is mind share. So, forget about the pipeline for a second. I want you to think about the last time you bought something for your team, for yourself. Maybe it's a tool, maybe it's a platform or an agency. And before you sat through any demo or any, you know, talking to any sales rep, I bet that you already had two or three names in your head because everybody does. Nobody starts from scratch. And your buyers do the exact same thing to you. Right now, they either have your name in their head or they have your competitors. And that's before sales ever got the call. So that spot in your buyer's head is not given out for free. um that's really fought for and that's what most of us are calling mind share because we're not in that fight right now. Most of us are busy measuring everything that happens after mind share has already been won or lost. So demand starts with mind share not intent. And so I want to start with
the mind share thesis which is demand starts with mind share not intent. What you see on the screen but think about how most marketing teams are built. We chase intent. We buy intent data. We score intent. We route intent. We celebrate intent. And nobody wants to say this out loud, but by the time the intent shows up, the hard part's really over. Because intent isn't the beginning of demand. It's the receipt. Because if your buyers don't know who you are, you're never going to make that short list. And you can't capture demand from people who have never thought of you before. So mind share versus intent. There's the 955 rule. Take a look at the
slide here. At any given moment, 95% of your market is over here. Not in market, not shopping, not taking meetings, not filling out forms. And this sliver over here, the tiny 5% sliver, that's what most of our budgets, our dashboards, and our tensions live. We're all fighting for that tiny 5% sliver. But not in market does not mean not deciding. that 95% is still forming opinions about who they trust. They're forming opinions about, you know, who they want to partner with in the future. And when finally they cross that line into that intent space, that 5%, they're choosing from a list that's already written in their heads. And that is what mind share is. Mind share is being on the list before the list even exists. So you have to show up before the signals do. Look at how this buying journey has changed. You can't wait until the the buying signals start. Your buyer now uses 10 channels 10 channels across their buying journey. More than 60% of buying decisions happen before any kind of formal evaluation process. And it takes now 300 or more touch points across six or 10 buying influencers to win a deal. And then vendor short lists have shrunk from four to seven down to fewer than three. So if you read all of those together, the math just doesn't math. There's more stakeholders, there's more touch points, and there's few here spots on the list. And by the time that intent signals fire, that list has already been written. So you really have to show up before those signals do. I have a
really, really strong point of view on this, and that is trust doesn't come from an impression, and it comes from human connection. When someone spends real time with you, whether it's an in-person room or it's a digital event asking questions, reacting, going back and forth, they remember you differently. And that's a level of trust that no kind of AI which is flooding the market can ever earn. No ad or email will ever earn you that type of trust that you can have with that human connection. So the room builds trust. Most teams stop at the room and that's the mistake. You have to build that trust in the room, but it doesn't have to stay in that room because video that
is captured from your events both in person and digital carries that same human trust with it. It has a real human voice, has a real human person and it's a real human moment and that is what reaches the 95%. The room builds that trust and video makes it travel and that is how you build mind share at scale. So, let me land my part in this.
Yesterday's fight was for that 5% right there. Today's fight is for the 95% mind share. It starts long before that buying cycle starts. And the brands that are winning the fight right now, they're not the loudest ones, you know, pushing more content out, you know, flooding the con uh market with AI sameness. They're the most remembered ones because they're the ones that are earning attention, you know, which brings me to the question that you're all here is how do we actually earn attention right now? Everything is changing so quickly. There's so many trends that happen just weeks and weeks apart. What's earning attention right now this quarter in your buyers inboxes and feeds and nobody sees this real data more than our next speaker. Um he is the USA Today bestselling author of Stuper People Have Done It. He hosts the number one marketing podcast in the US. Do this, not that. And through Guru Media, he's behind more than 200 events every single year. So when a tactic dies, he is that one person that knows 6 months before any of us stow. So please give a huge Nashville welcome to Jay Schwedson. >> Um, hello. This is my first CNC connect. I am so excited to be here. If you don't know who I am, you are both lucky and I also uh a little bit about me. I cause anxiety. That's what I do. I I gave up on caffeine. And so this is me with no caffeine. I used to have three Celsius or Celsius. I don't know what the answer is that a day. And then my wife thought that was going to be the way I collapsed on stage. So I'm caffeine free. Why am I
telling you that? I don't know. I actually don't know. So um listen, I'm going to take you through some things you're going to be able to walk out of here with to actually capture mind share. But here's the reality of it, and I believe this, okay? If we meet aliens, I just saw Disclosure Day, so I'm all in on aliens right now. I do believe aliens are real. This is what we're going to do. I mean, I love you all. I really do. Peace and love, but like every email I get from everybody is register. You We need to stop. We I know you have an event. Congratulations. I know you have something you want me to register for, but enough. Okay? It's too much. Now, you're not going to capture mind share, right? You're not capturing mind share by saying register. It's not like someone's like, "Look at this email. They they're letting me register. It's cost $1,000. I can register for this. This is amazing." And then you go and you show your significant other. Look at the email I got. Say nobody's ever going to do. And if you do do that, you have a problem. A significant human problem. So if you're sitting there and your KPI is the number of registrations, that ain't it. It's those random mentions. It's what's happening on dark social. It's when people are slacking about your event when you're not there. That is mind share. That is actually mind share. So if I said to you, what was the most memorable thing at your last event? I'll tell you mine. So I just had an event. It was a virtual event a few weeks ago called Eventtastic. We had 15,000 event people at this virtual event. And we had a uh a live cannonball dude. This guy got in this cannonball cannon. who was on virtual and he shot out and I'm putting on the event and then he landed on this thing and for like 3 seconds he didn't get up and I'm like oh my god I just streamed death to like a lot of people. I don't know who's going to sue me but I'm going to be sued by many people including that guy's family simultaneously. Then he got up and I was like yay he lived. But I don't remember a single session. I don't I really don't. And you're not going to remember anything probably from this session here. I'll give you something you can remember. This is real. So, I cannot touch my toes. I go to the gym three days a week. You can't tell. My kids and wife make fun of me. They say I'm still a slob, but um I try to stretch and I cannot touch my toes. I am going to show you right now. And for everyone that's streaming, you can see me trying to touch my toes. This is legit. This is as far as I can go. Here we go. That's not That's not very good. That's not good. I'm going to get a message from somebody later that says that's like indicative of some horrible disease. Um, hopefully it's not, but when you leave here, you're going to be like, I don't know what he talked about, but I remember that session when the guy couldn't touch his toes. And that's connecting on a human level. That is everything. That's how you get mind share. You're not going to get mind share by having a session, the seven tips to whatever. Who cares? No one remembers any of it. I'll give you an example. FIFA World Cup has been going on. It's been everywhere. I was all in. I know nothing about soccer, but I was all in. Oh my god, the USA is playing. Stop what we're doing. I'm watching. I know every player, every single player. And then we lost to Belgium like a week ago. I knew this guy's name. Apparently, he's the best player in the history of the United States. I have absolutely no idea what his name is. A week ago, this was my hero. I have no idea what his name is. I don't know if it's Steve, Rodney, Bill, Zero idea. But here's the thing, that's what happens with our events. This is literally what happens with your events. How does it stick with you? Your event is just part of it. That's not how you're really doing it. This is what happens. Okay. After your event ends, big event, small event, a little dinner, giant event, what does everybody do? Like, whoever puts on the event, thank God someone give me a drink. I don't want to hear the word event. I'm going on vacation. I am not going to look at Slack. We did it. High five. Our CEO was happy. It all worked out. Let's relax. Let's take our foot off the gas. We did the thing. No, you didn't do the thing. Mind share is not doing the thing. Mind share is every other day of the year.
So, this is the worst slide ever. They say, "Don't put lots of words on slides." Here you go. And my slides are always horrible. But here's the deal. You don't need an event playbook. You need a playbook for every other day of the year. You need a 362-day playbook. What are you doing with all that stuff coming out of your event? How do you take that event and make it part of your brand story? Right? What is your calendar leveraging all of it? And here's the secret. If you want to follow everybody's playbook, it's not going to work. If your go to market is, okay, here's our plan. We're going to do an early bird. We're going to announce the hotel block. Then we're going to do the keynote announcement and we're going to announce the keynote that nobody has any idea who that person is except for that person and their mom. Then we're going to announce the agenda. Yeah, that's going to be so exciting. Then we're going to highlight a few sessions and then we're going to start our discount emails. Whoa. That is a recipe to nowhere'sville. That is not a content strategy. That is a strategy of wow. I want to create wallpaper. And here's the thing. I want to say thank you to everybody out there that does that because in order for things to stand out, for this stuff to work, we need the wallpaper. So, I want everyone in this room to continue to send out all of that stuff, all of the sameness. Please go to AI and have it make all of your content. So when I work on stuff and send it out, it'll stand out. I need you. We all need you. So thank you. Doing a solid. But here's the deal. So the day after, drop that one slide that everybody took that picture of. Post the funniest moment backstage a couple days later. Go back to the speakers. What's the one thing you wish you said that you didn't say? Email a new AI prompt. Keep it going. And then what's going to happen is when you're not in that room, when they're thinking about, you know, what brand really does a great job with whatever, who should we be considering for whatever, that is when they're going to think of you. That's how you get mind share. You don't get mind share by just buy this, register for this, discount this. That is not mind share. That is no share. So we have to constantly be thinking about what can we do to have a playbook that people actually will care about. It's hard right now. The other
problem is AI. I mean, I don't think you're going to go to a session at this event without somebody saying AI. I think it's actually become illegal in four states to do that. But the problem is we are going to AI and we're asking it to make stuff for us. Help me make this post. Help me make this page. Help me do this thing. And you know what AI does? It's really good at being generic and not standing out. Adam Miseri, the head of Instagram the other day, he went he did a post on Instagram and he was talking about the best way to have your content on Instagram go really far. And he said, "If you make a video and there's a dog barking in the background or you mess up, anything that's real, use that video. Use the video that has screw-ups in it because it's showing humanity. That's what's actually circulating further." That is the irony of all of it. What works now is the opposite of AI. Let's look at Mark Zuckerberg here. First of all, the guy's a giant nerd. He would probably say he's a giant nerd. Two or three years ago, you would see posts from Mark Zuckerberg and you would actually think, is that guy a robot? Like, he's an actual bot. I think they came up with the term bot because of him, right? And then all of a sudden, he's like, "Wait a minute." And he starts posting videos of himself on surfboards drinking beer with no shirt on being jiu-jitsu man. And then when they have to talk about their event, they have him go out there and do this. Why? Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they do a generic template like the rest of us do something boring? What does he have access to? He has access to all the data in the world, right? And he knows, no, that boring template that nobody's going to care about, that's not going to work. If I said to you right now, if I said to you, "Close your eyes and I want you to imagine a webinar invitation email or a webinar invitation post," you would say, "Oh," there'd be two circles with people that literally nobody knows who they are, senior vice president of nobody cares on some sort of dark background. Okay? And it would say webinar, free webinar, free webinar. Who even pays for a webinar? Free webinar blah blah blah. It's garbage. That is how nothing works. This works. That works because it stands out. You're like, "Oh, what's that about?" And we're a simple-minded species. When we're scrolling like, "Uh, wait a minute." And it's not like you're going to look at this like, "Wow, he's smoking hot. Those glasses are dope. I'm so into Mark Zuckerberg. I got to call my significant other. We need to break up." If that happens again, weird, but that's not what's happening. But you're going to do a millisecond pause and you're going to be like, you know, wait a minute. Let me check this out. And that is how we win. And this whole idea that AI is going to take your job is the biggest garbage on the planet. First of all, uh it's so true about pop culture. I spend 30% of my day talking about pop culture. I could go deep on Love Island right now and you probably think I'm kidding. For those of you who don't know, I'm not going to ruin it. And everyone's like, "Oh no, he's about to waste this entire session." There was a couple on there, Melanie and Insincere. I call him insincere because his name is sincere, but the guy's a clown. And he cheated on her three times. And I'm not going to ruin it for you. But he stayed with her. I just ruined it for you. She stayed with him. Bad dude. Very bad dude. Great season. It's over. Now I'm into Real Housewives of Orange County later this week. I'm not kidding. What are we talking about? I have no idea. Anyway, AI is not taking your job. Everyone's like, I picked the wrong session. A Someone's got to do like the fake phone call. That's what I do when I go to a session I don't like. I I get my phone. I pretend I got a phone call. Oh, I got to walk out. I got to walk out. out and I walk right out. So, and if you any of you do it, it's fine. Judgment free zone. Amazing. So, what we look at in my organization, we work with a lot of events trying to drive their engagement, registrations, people to show up, small events, big events, all this stuff, all this brand stuff. And so, we analyze, we run about 40,000 campaigns a year on social and email and all this stuff. What is the highest engagement event content on social media? And this is in ranked order. This is the content on social media, okay, across all platforms promoting and talking about events that is driving the highest engagement. It is not your keynote announcement. It is not your agenda release. It is not some other really boring garbage that you think is important at all. It's behind
the scenes. All we want to know is what is going on behind the scenes. If you said to me, "What what did you eat for dinner last night?" This is more interesting than anything I just said. I'm going to tell you I ate for dinner last night. I lied to everybody. People like, "Hey, you want to come to this dinner?" And I lied to every single person yesterday. So, I said, "No, I got this really important dinner I got to go to." It wasn't true. I wanted to be in my room watching TV and hiding from everybody. So, I got this horrible pizza and I ate it in my room and it was fantastic. But that was more interesting than anything I just said because it feels like oh behind the scenes walking the hallways, believe it or not, you get your leadership walking in the hallway. Hey, this is going to be great. I'm going to this session. I'm doing this. Whatever. That is more compelling than just a picture. Hooray. If you are using stock photos in anything you're doing, you should quit. We were not put on this earth to share stock photos with each other. That is not why humanity exists. Just isn't. That is the telltale sign. Hey, we need to um get our subscription going with Shutter Stock and Adobe Photo. We got to up it this year. No. Emergency red flag. Stop. Don't do that. That's a bad sign, right? Memes are also great. Oh, we can't do memes. That's off-brand. No, it's not. As soon as someone says off-brand, that means there's going to be no engagement, no mind share, zero mind share. Okay, these are the things that actually get people interested in what you're doing. I mean, literally, I I love the record hallway walk-in talks. They do so well. The worst part about it, though, is it's like the worst angle ever. My wife thinks I'm the worst photographer, which I am. And no matter what I do, and my daughter, so I have a I have a 18-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old son. My wife and daughter are like, "Take a picture of us." And we're at the point now that they my daughter comes over to me and she positions me with the phone and she goes, "Don't move. Just press the button." Because whatever I do, it's like a horrible angle apparently. And I'll do the walk and talk and my kids are connecting me on LinkedIn and they'll be like, "It looks like you have eight chins. What's wrong with you? Why are you getting that angle?" But you know what? Maybe that's why it does so well cuz we all look like crap on these walk-in talks. Walking selfie videos have a 49% higher completion rate than standard videos. So you want to know how you get mind share is don't do what you've always been doing. How about Cvent? CE's a very important company. Billions of dollars all these things. They would never do anything. Whatever. Look, they could post memes. They're posting memes. It's okay. If they could do it, you could do it. It's okay. This is how you stand out. This is how you win. This is how you get mind share by not just doing the same stuff you've always been doing. There is a right way to use AI. Having AI create your content, that ain't it. That's not the way to do it. You want it to stop making stuff for you. But I'm going to tell you the way that I would use AI right now. And it's really easy. I hate sometimes you go to like sessions or whatever and they talk about AI like, "Oh crap, I don't have access to that thing. I don't know how to do that. How does that work? I have Claude Schmod, you know, pro version seven." Like, what? So, here's what you want to be,
and this is the worst slide ever. This is a prompt. This is an actual prompt. And I want to tell you why this is the most important prompt for me that I use everywhere. Here's the gig. When you're thinking about, well, what content should we put out? How should we talk about our event? How should we talk about our brand? And then you have a really important marketing meeting. You're like, "Well, we have that new product release. We should talk about that." Or, "I really think it'd be great if we talked about this." Or, "Last year this was really popular. We should talk about that." That is 1984. That's not what we're doing anymore. Here's what you want to do. You want to take this prompt and you want to go take this prompt and go to every major AI LLM. You use this prompt on ChatBT, on Claude, on Perplexity, on Grock, all of them. And what this prompt says, it says this. You're a real prospective attendee evaluating whether this event is worth your time, money, and attention. Review the event's website, agenda, speakers, pricing, sponsors, venue, and all available marketing materials. Generate the 50 questions you would naturally ask before deciding to register, attend, sponsor, blah blah blah blah blah. The 50 questions you would naturally ask. Now, you stick that in every single AI tool. Now you take the output from all of those different AI tools, right? You take the output, you shove it in chat GPT or whichever one you use, all the answers from the five different tools, all the 50 questions it gave you. And then what you're going to find and you say, okay, out of all of these, I want the questions that overlap across all of the different AI tools. What questions are the same across all five of the major AI LLM? And I guarantee you there's going to be a set of five to 10 questions that are the exact same questions across all the different AI tools. Now, you want to take those questions that they're asking about your event in your industry, and that should be the driving force behind your content, your offers, what's on your website, on your resources page, the title of sessions, because across every AI tool, that's all the data in the world. These are the questions, no matter where you go, that everybody wants answers to. Stop answering stuff that you're interested in and find out what everybody wants. And here's the secret. When you do that and you start making all of your content, all of your offers, all your stuff from the questions that overlap across all the different AI tools and you put that on your site and here, there, wherever, you're going to show up that much more in all the AI tools because these are the questions that they're trying to solve for. This is the single easiest thing you could do with AI that can radically change your engagement, your mind share, and also showing up in AI more. One other thing as we're talking
about things to stop doing, I can't take it, right? I register for one of your events, anything. And what do you all do? No offend I'm not saying you all. Maybe you don't do it, but everybody else, not in this room, every other room, you all send out an email that says, "Thank you for registering. You've got to be kidding me. That is not it. That first email, which people don't realize, the first email you send to somebody, there's two very important things that happen. The first email that you send to somebody is the single most important email that you could send them. It also has the highest engagement rate. But why is it the most important email? It's not because you're establishing your brand or some other garbage. If you can get the first email that you send to somebody opened and clicked and engaged with, the likelihood of you staying in that person's inbox goes up by over 85% for the lifetime of your relationship with that person. What? So, what happens is if I send you an email and I've never sent you an email before and you ignore it, what you're telling your receiving infrastructure is, I don't know who that guy is. If I get more emails from him, put him in the junk or spam folder. Now, if you get an email from me and you open it and you click on it, you engage, what you're telling your your infrastructure from a technical perspective is, "Ooh, I like this brand. I like this guy. the next time he sends an email, have it go right here into my inbox. All right? It's a technical thing. So, what happens is you need to do everything you can with that first email to not just say thank you. You need to get them opening and engaging and clicking and whatever you have to do to make that happen. For example, the subject line, thank you and a VIP gift inside dot dot dot. Thank you. You now have access to this dot dot dot. Amazing that you registered. You need to see this dot dot dot. Thank you. Now you get this super discount on hotels, blah blah blah, whatever. You need to get that first email engaged with. It is not a receipt. We treat that first email like a receipt and we don't realize it's the most important email that you're ever going to send to somebody. So let's just talk about the
truth. The truth about mind share. The truth about all this stuff. Here's the deal. We don't have an attendance problem. We have a memory problem. A memory problem. That's why I always like Taylor Swift. If I get married again, which I'm not, I'm very happily married. It will be at Madison Square Garden 100%. I still don't understand. The whole Travis Kelce thing is weird to me, but they didn't ask me. Nobody asked me. Um, but you you think about Taylor Swift. She's everywhere. Not just when she's on tour. Be more like Taylor Swift. You're like, I'm not a Swifty. Well, you should be. You should be. I'm a Swifty. Why not? I wear friendship bracelets. It's a judgment-free zone. That is the thing. That is how we're going to win. We're going to win by being memorable. You're not going to be win by doing the sameness. The worst thing you could do is when your event comes around after you've taken that twoe vacation because you lost your mind from the last event. Now it's 6 months out from the event. You're like, "All right, what's last year's playbook? Let's look at that thing again and let's roll that back. Make a few little changes." That is how you absolutely fail. So, before we get to some Q&A, I I wrote a horrible book. It just came out. Uh, but I do want to let you know we went, I don't know how, but it went to a bestseller list on USA Today, which is weird. Top hundred book in the country. Every dollar that we get from the book, um, donating to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. Um, and we have raised since it came out two and a half weeks ago, $130,000 that we've done in the fight against cancer. Thanks. I appreciate that. Literally, it's a paper weight. It's probably the worst thing ever written. But, uh, if you want to get a copy, you can scan that and you would help in the fight against cancer. And then if you ever have emergency toilet paper problems, there you go. Problem solved. Uh my wife's like, "Why do you say that?" I'm like, "Because I wrote it." I know. Uh she goes, "You are an idiot." And that's probably true. Got a podcast. Horrible podcast. We hit number one in the country 17 times this year, which is also very weird. I make it very short. Here's the secret to podcast I learned. I used to have my episode used to be an hour and I realized the shorter I make it, the more people listen. So, I'm pretty sure if I get to zero minutes, we're gonna be like we're gonna crush it. We're gonna be like ahead of Amy Polar. So, that's my next plan, the zero minute podcast. I think it's gonna take off. And no, it's connect on LinkedIn, on Instagram. I share horrible memes, all the other garbage. And uh with that, Kelly's coming back out. We're going to answer some questions. I'm very excited. All right. >> All right. Let's get into some of your questions. Uh first one, what's your number one tip for getting a CEO who is stuck in their ways to buy into this? For me, I think the problem is people
ask for test budget. We have some budget to test something. Test has a negative connotation. Tests fail. You don't want test. And it's also very transactional. So if you ask for test budget, it doesn't go well. You'll never get test budget again. What you really want to ask for is a 10% laboratory. Can we have 10% of our budget, 10% of our database, 10% of our social post, 10% of everything to have a laboratory that we can iterate in? And because when something graduates out of the laboratory, it's going to change our revenue exponentially. So you fight for an ongoing laboratory and not a singular test. I think that's the biggest fail in terms of marketing. What about you? >> I like to inspire. So look for examples. That's I like to do some background, some research and see who are some companies that do this really well that I can show my CEO and say this is what they did. This is what they invested in. This is the case study and this is what they got out of it. I think that that really really motivates someone to try something they may not be interested by seeing the results from someone else that did it. Maybe even a competitor. I think that one hits hard if a competitor did it. That's how you get your co's attention. >> Totally. >> Totally. >> Um, next question. This AI prompt >> at what point in the process were you doing that? Once sessions are developed in order to run this prompt, it's too late to make sweeping changes like you're suggesting. >> The 50 question prompt really applies to everything and anything. It's not just a singular thing about your event overall, right? It could be about your industry. It could be about your sector. It could be about anything. It doesn't matter where you are in the process. The really what the the point of the 50 question prompt, but you should retool for anything you do, is what are people looking for? What are people searching for? What are people wondering about about whatever it is that you're considering, right? You could even say, oh, you have a landing page for, let's say, a webinar, and you could say, okay, if people that visit this webinar, what are the 50 questions they would ask before they registered for this webinar? and you give the URL of that landing page. You do that across all the different AI tools and then you you consolidate what the different questions are. It doesn't matter what the topic is. The 50 question thing just give you a better perspective on what to focus on. >> Next question. >> Next question. >> All right. >> All right. >> Every time we try something creative, it dives in legal or brand review. How do you get riskadverse leadership comfortable with marketing that stands out? >> Well, you're like, you know, you're the leadership person. You're the CMO. Oh, how do you >> But I I work for really fun brands. Like look at this. >> Yes. Well, I I will say competition is really really important. Showing what competitors are doing really really important. So um going out there and actually using AI for this function is amazing. There's a little thing I don't think people know about enough with with AI. So if you use um Chrome the browser, I mean if you use Microsoft Edge, again you're weird, but if you use Chrome the browser in the upper right hand corner there's a little button that says Gemini. People sleep on this button. If you go to your competitor's website or any other event's website or people in your category's website, okay, and you say, "Okay, you could open up actually five tabs at one time. You say, "Analyze this site and compare it to us, our site, our event. We want you analyze the pricing structure, the content structure, everything blah blah blah blah blah." It will shred that website just by clicking on that little Gemini button. And then you take that to your leadership. And you know, to Kelly's point before, leadership freaks out when other companies in their category are doing something cooler, better, or whatever. So freaking people out is the best way to succeed. >> I'll give an example. So I used to work for a incident management software company and uh finding bugs and incident outages was was the thing. And so there was this campaign that the marketing team pitched to leadership that got flagged, but we ultimately went through with it. And let me explain to you for anyone that's an engineer or QA software engineer. If you see your homepage or website and then suddenly it goes black and there's code that runs like that, your heart stops. So that was the campaign. We did takeover ads for all the different like big media companies and we took interstitials that expanded over the whole website. We did that on our own homepage uh which was extremely risky. But ultimately I think what we did right was that we built a case for really understanding our audience which is how do we get their attention that got their attention and that associated our brand to them. >> Well I love it sort of. >> All right next question. Uh we what are the top five things you recommend to drive postevent engagement. >> So I think it's really important to save a little bit of budget believe it or not for some a paid social motion after your event. I'm not talking about a lot of money. I'm talking about literally hundreds of dollars. You don't need a lot of money. And what you want to do is whatever the posts are that you put out, you want to boost them. Okay? Whether that's on Instagram or on LinkedIn or wherever, you want to take the audience of everybody that registered and attended your event and then whatever post event uh po social post that you put out, you can upload that custom audience. Okay? And then it will only be boosted to the people that are in that custom database. It literally will cost you $100 a week and you'll get every attendee, every registrant to actually see what you're putting out there. The days of organic social and you not boosting posts is really, really dying. So, you always want to have a little bit of budget to do that. And then also on connected TV, people think business of business or shouldn't be doing connected TV. Again, you could upload these custom audiences to connected TV on YouTube, on LinkedIn or whatever. Save a little budget. That will radically change your engagement postevent. >> Postevent engagement. My favorite thing is repurposing video content because like I said earlier, there's nothing more that hits home more than than that trust that you build in the room that you can scale outside of the room with video. Um, so repurposing is is my jam. You have to do it well though. You can't just be lazy and, you know, submit it into an AI tool. really do have to be intentional about your brand templates to begin with because AI can help the process, but you do have to be intentional about it. And you can't just put the whole 45 minute video. That's not repurposing. That's just on demand. Um, it's finding the right clips. It's it's getting it to different formats. So, it's a blog post, multimodal, adding video to them. Uh, so that content just grows and it becomes derivative content. All right, next question. I think this is one of our last ones. I think we have time for one more after this, but do you think cell phone video content resonates better with customers or does professional content shot in nice cameras resonate more? >> I I I don't I think it's a no-brainer.
Table stakes is camera video. Okay, that you're human connecting to other humans. Here's the here's when really fancy videos are good. Okay, if you have somebody that's already bought into your company, they're a current customer, okay? and you have a new really detailed product release that you have to go in the weeds on to learn it, right? Like Cvent rolls out something, it's going to take hours to whatever. Yeah, you could have a nice fancy video that somebody's invested in your company uh wants to learn from in some sort of super long form, but short form video, you are always trying to communicate with a human. It is just you bore people to tears with green screen garbage. What's your hot take? >> I think so. My hot take is while I love high production video, I think that you're right, there is a place for it. I do think that the place for it now is you don't see it as often. I feel like there's much more space for the authentic low production video because it brings that human connection. When you have a company, let's just say Elon Musk do a vertical video. Don't you feel like you're having a conversation with him? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's the difference. >> Yeah. And then we see in the data. I mean, look at all the engagement metrics. Do it and test it. You know what? If we said 10 different ideas here and you try them all and four of them work, you're like, "Oh, Kelly and Jay are clueless. I'm clueless. She's not." But that's the reality of it. You need an arsenal of different things that you're trying and doing and not everything's going to work for everybody. But that's why you got to test this stuff. And if you have leadership that doesn't allow you to test that, get a new job because that's horrible. >> All right, I think we are time is up today. So, thank you again for joining us for this last 45 minutes. Thank you all. >> Thank you, Jay. Bye, [applause] everybody. >> Bye.
Ask AI the right questions
Intent is a receipt
Be unforgettable, not just present
Don't just say "thank you"
Ask for a "laboratory"
Human connection matters
Think beyond the event














