The Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) is the go-to place for product marketers with online resources, 24/7 communities, global events, reports, awards, courses, mentors, and more. The organization hosts huge marketing summits in Chicago, London, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, and San Francisco, with conferences added regularly in new cities and online.
With live events back in full-swing, the stakes are even higher. People are wary about travel and cautious about going to events where attendees gather from all around the world. The added risks means that the return needs to be much more certain. Given those challenges, event marketers have to employ more social proof and promotion tactics than ever before.
Rose Johnstone, Head of Community and Events at the PMA, gives an overview of how her organization has been utilizing Vocal Video to build trust with event goers, which means establishing social proof. These are just some snippets from their latest webinar with Vocal Video.
How do you use Vocal Video to promote PMA’s events?
Rose Johnstone: Something that is important for events-focused companies is authenticity. Coming off the COVID pandemic, the return to in-person events has presented a lot of challenges for our audience to gain to have that element of trust. People are cautious about booking tickets months in advance of a date, especially for an in-person event where travel might be required.
A massive win for us is that we are really bringing events to life. It's not just another post on social media listing off the conference topics or repurposed content from the website.
We have videos featuring speakers that are highly engaged. Our speakers participate in a sneak-preview style video. Vocal Video is the biggest win for us for scale, authenticity, and building trust at face value.
That is how we began our journey.
How do you build trust with event speakers?
Rose Johnstone: We release videos regularly. We produce content to promote each event.
As soon as you have one awesome video, that becomes the template. You have to include that in your outreach. Speakers love to see where and how they're going to be featured. As people get to know the speakers via social media, it builds an element of credibility. We do everything we can to support event speakers, panelists, and presenters.
Since they’re on video, speakers are able to present their authentic selves. Speakers watch the other event promos and understand what that end product will look like on social media, which inspires more people to create a promo video, and ultimately, sign up to present on their own topic.
Seeing an example video instantly takes away that fear of “what if I mess up?” or “what if they publish something with a spelling mistake?”’
It’s crucial for event speakers to have an answer to all these kinds of questions before putting themselves on camera.
How does trust come through in professional-grade video production quality?
Rose Johnstone: With Vocal Video, you can only publish a high-quality video.
We started small and scaled. We tested Vocal Video and got some great success with our initial videos. I think we underestimated the good response rate that we would get from our existing speakers.
When we built up the base of videos, it was really easy and quick to scale up because of the high production quality that Vocal Video guarantees.
We had a huge period of hiring last year and our team rapidly doubled in size, but it meant that from the outset we could trust those fairly inexperienced team members to be requesting and producing Vocal Videos in their first few months on the road. We knew the parameters that Vocal Video had set meant that we were going to get a good video out of it.
Vocal Video makes the social proof process incredibly straightforward. Anyone on your team has an easy job: you’re essentially just watching the one to two minute video and making sure that there's no bloopers. You add on automated subtitles and go from there. That was why it was so easy to scale and roll it out across all our other communities.
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