Originally, I published this article on my LinkedIn after the second edition of TRC, a conference I promoted for Matchr (in this company, I’ve been working as a Head of Marketing). I decided to publish it here, so you can find all my content in a single place.

“Hey, Andrew, they literally don’t know who we are and what we do!”

For marketers, hearing such words is like a cold shower.

It was my cold shower taken one year ago, right after Matchr—the company where I’m responsible for marketing—hosted the first Tech Recruitment Conference (TRC) in Amsterdam.

One year has passed… and we hosted the second edition of TRC. It was completely another story. Just one fact: The number of mentions of Matchr increased by 1140% compared to the previous year!

It turned out that the cold shower paid off. This growth in brand recognition inspired me to write this piece to share my experience growing a B2B brand through event marketing.

In this article, I share the following:

  • Why hosting events became a crucial part of our B2B marketing strategy
  • How do we create a manageable event strategy and ensure consistency and execution and what resources do we use to maintain event strategy [spoiler – almost everyone can do it]
  • How did we integrate events into the content ecosystem of our brand
  • The practical approaches that helped us to increase brand awareness by 1140%.

The article is written for marketers, event managers, founders, and CEOs who are embracing events as part of the customer acquisition strategy.

Note: When I started writing this article, the headline was, “875% Up:…” But at the moment of publishing the actual number increased—meaning that highlighted activities work even since almost one month after the event!

Why hosting events became a crucial part of our B2B marketing

The recruitment consulting business where Matchr operates is a battlefield where two extremes are met.

On the one side, the entry threshold for new companies is low. And during the post-covid tech market recovery, many did so. Therefore, everyone could start their own business.

On the other hand, this is a world where personal connections matter. During the last year, we sent 16,000+ cold emails that resulted in 0 new clients. All our clients came from word of mouth, personal connections, and… self-hosted events.

Events are a way to connect with potential customers and set us apart from the competition. Very few agencies in the market embrace a consistent event strategy. Almost all big events are organized by companies that specialize in this and for whom events are the core business.

We stepped into this field with limited resources but huge enthusiasm and a goal to drive the recruitment community forward. As it turned out, the approach worked well. Our last big event, TRC 2023, gained NPS=56%; we increased brand awareness almost 13x, and we have several potential clients in the pipeline.

However, creating and maintaining the event strategy needs precise planning, resource allocation, and consistency, especially when you are a small agency. In the next section, I’ll explain how it works.

How We Created a Manageable Event Strategy and Ensured Consistency and Execution

Before we dive into the branding and marketing part of the article, I’d like to cover more high-level aspects of the event organization and execution to give you the context of how we work.

Matchr is not an event agency, and events are not our core business. For us, events are a way to stand in front of our potential customers, build relationships, and trust, and increase brand awareness.

This means we need to balance organizing events and many other marketing tasks, including content creation, communication, branding, lead nurturing, etc.

There are 4 aspects of the successful event strategy:

  1. People
  2. Planning
  3. Focus
  4. Money

1. Have the right people on the bus

With the right people, you can do anything you wish.

Here is our “event” team:

  • Adriaan Kolff – visionary, an amazing keynote speaker. He pushes things forward and builds external connections.
  • Victor Zhuk – experienced event organizer and dreamer who is not afraid to think big. He makes all that magic happen on the spot.
  • Andrew Demianenko (it’s me) – responsible for branding, marketing, content, and digital communications.

Of course, when it comes to organizing big events like TRC, we need additional support. And this is where our internal team comes to the stage. For example, this year, overall nine people from our company were on the spot.

2. Create an event calendar and stick to it

We plan our events in Q4 for a year in advance. This is not a unique practice, but it is unique for us because when we started, there was no plan at all. We just decided to “host a conference in November.” Then we decided to organize a meetup. After, we thought that it would be great to host 10 webinars, and did it…

The “without plan” approach worked but once we were increasing the number of events, we had to cancel some of them for different reasons: no sponsors, no location, no speakers, etc. This is where we realized that planning is key. And for 2024, we already have a plan with specific dates that include different types of events:

  • Recruitment Meetups: In-person events for 60-70 people.
  • Recruitment Leadership Events: In-person invite-only events for senior leaders.
  • Webinar series for recruiters and sourcers: 15 webinars in 2 series throughout the year.
  • The Recruitment Conference (TRC) 2024: Our flagship in-person and virtual event.

Will it be a comprehensive list? We don’t know 🙂 We can add additional events or reformat the existing ones. Everything changes. But we have a starting point to stick to.

3. Laser-focus your [limited] resources

When we started hosting events 1.5 years ago, we did it wrong. With such limited resources, we went too broad. Amsterdam, New York, Cape Town, Berlin – we had events in so scattered locations that we found ourselves getting almost nothing out of them. People didn’t know us either in Berlin, either in NY, or anywhere else.

As a solution, we agreed that we should host events only in our main target market, The Netherlands. That was the right decision for us so we started building community through our events in Amsterdam.

4. [Who will pay?] Search for sponsors

All our events except TRC are free for the attendees—meaning that we need to find ways to cover our costs. This is where sponsors play their role.

A couple of tips to help you find sponsors:

  • Reach out to companies who sponsor similar events.
  • Develop various sponsorship offers, even non-obvious ones (for example, we have the option to sponsor an Energy Up session).
  • Make sponsorship packages feasible for companies of any size.
  • Create media kits and landing pages where potential sponsors can get all the information. For example, here is ours.

Once you have the right people, the plan, the focus, and the money (or at least a plan where you will get them), you can start implementing your strategy.

How Did We Integrate Events into the Content Ecosystem of Our Brand

For many years, I was working as a content marketer. That’s why I know the real value of the content and resources needed to create it. Events themselves are amazing sources of content, and from the very start at Matchr, I was thinking about how to better connect events with the content we create to get a synergy effect.

I’ve got several solutions:

1. Making sure that events are well-presented on the website. We created a dedicated Events section as a part of our Learning Center where we post all the info about upcoming events.

Visibility of the Events on the main menu
The events listing

2. Creating a dedicated section for online events. This enables us to “store” all the online events within a single place. Therefore, visitors can see a comprehensive picture of our online events and watch the recordings.

Online events on our website

3. Making events accessible from other content pages. For example, we have a webinars block integrated into our blog page:

4. Creating a way to stay in touch with us. Instead of simply subscribing to event updates, we offer to subscribe to a monthly newsletter that includes not only events but blog updates, industry reports we create, current openings, and other useful content.

Keep the subscription form simple. Collecting email during the first touch will be enough.

4. Content repurposing. There are a lot of ways to repurpose content, from writing social media posts to creating Shorts, Stories, infographics, and so on. In our case, we wrote articles based on previous webinars. Here is an example of one of them about scaling talent function in hypergrowth. As a result, we’ve got evergreen content that consistently drives traffic from the Organic Search. For free.

5. Event posting on social. On a strategy level, one can choose to post about events on the B2B-brand account or create a separate account. As we are pretty new to the events in recruitment and don’t have significant communities like famous events have, we keep posting on our company’s account. However, as we’ll be growing and the amount of content will be increasing, we are considering moving to separate accounts dedicated to events in the future.

Now you know how to make sure that your event content is not lost and this will help you attract an audience in the long run. It’s time to dive deeper into how to increase B2B brand visibility. This is what the next section is about.

How we increased our brand awareness through self-hosted events by 1140%

This may sound obvious, especially to those who have been into event marketing for years. But we started from scratch and were so focused on events themselves that we “forgot” to showcase our main B2B brand 🤦🙂.

As a result, we found ourselves in a situation where the attendees of last year’s TRC conference in Amsterdam knew nothing or very little about Matchr and our services. Moreover, we were missing opportunities to showcase our brand to broader audiences who hadn’t attended our events but saw advertisements, social media posts, visited our website, etc.

1. Brand your events similarly to your B2B brand

We missed this point last year and branded TRC in its own style, in many aspects different from the Matchr style. As a result, attendees didn’t associate our event with our brand.

2022:

2023:

In 2023, we designed all the visuals for our events, including TRC, webinars, meetups, etc. according to the Matchr style. No standalone designs anymore.

2. Ensure B2B brand visibility

This entails a variety of activities to build a strong connection between your B2B brand and the events you organize. Amplified by branded design, these activities (pretty simple in their essence) are at the core of promoting a company brand through event marketing.

Adding your company logo to all the event banners and content

Each visual element, whether on-site or digital, must be designed using your company’s logo.

Before, during, and after our events, MATCHR is everywhere 🙂

Adding your company description to the event landing page

Add a concise description, your company’s logo, and a link to your website to the event landing page. Don’t overwhelm visitors with excessive information – keep it short but visible. Also, feature the role of your company in the event (e.g., Organizer).

Booth area alongside sponsors’ booths at the event

The booth area is a great way to connect with attendees and explain more about what you do. This year, at our booth, attendees had an opportunity to play Sjoelbak, a Dutch board game.

Use branded stuff on the spot

Brand everything, from banners to lanyards and even arrows that show direction on the spot:

Feature your company during the event day

Find the moment to share from the stage about your company. The highest focus of the audience is at the beginning of the event. Also, the end speech is a good chance to a good chance to mention your company one more time.

3. Motivate people to share your event on social media

We didn’t use social paid ads to promote any of our events. All the visibility we got was 100% organic. To increase the number of posts and mentions, you can use tactics that we used.

Sending online badges before the event

Create personalized badges and send them before the event so people can share them on social media. The downside of this approach is that it is pretty time-consuming as you need to personalize the image and send personal emails to each attendee. However, this work can be easily outsourced.

An example of a personalized digital badge

Ask your internal team to give your event a shout

This is a great approach to promote an event. Ask your teammates to share the event on their social media. I’ve already made some calculations when I wrote about promoting an event on the zero budget. Here they are:

We have 36 employees on board. If each of them publishes at least 2 posts about TRC during 5 months, and each post drives, on average, 1,000 impressions, the overall audience reach will be: 2*1,000*36 = 72,000. On LinkedIn, such an amount of impressions costs about $2,000. We got it for free!

To maintain consistency in posting on social media, craft a posting schedule. According to our schedule, we had one post per day from one employee. This enabled us to consistently show up on LinkedIn over the course of more than one month.

Here is the schedule we used to promote TRC with the help of the internal team

Create content for speakers and sponsors

In most cases, keynote speakers have big networks on social media. Why not use this opportunity? Design personalized banners so they can share them and promote your event across audiences that haven’t heard about it. The same goes for sponsors and other partners involved.

An example of the speaker banner

Running a posting challenge

It is a very straightforward way to increase social mentions and brand visibility. And one of the most effective ones. This year, ran a TRC challenge that entailed 5 tasks to do during the event. One of the tasks was taking a picture and posting it on LinkedIn with the #trc2023 hashtag. People love such kind of stuff, and it worked.

TRC 2023 networking challenge tasks

When crafting challenges, try to integrate them naturally into the event flow. For example, our challenge was announced by Adriaan Kolff during his keynote presentation, The Power of Networking. So, it becomes not just “one more challenge” but really organic part of the event, with its sense.

Taking amazing pictures on the spot

Find an amazing photographer. That’s it :).

After we shared TRC photos (check them here) with attendees, we witnessed one more wave of posting about us on social media. The reason? People loved the pictures and wanted to share them. The quality was so great that many people used photos from TRC as their profile pictures on LinkedIn.

Kudos to our photographer, Roman Rudakov! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rudakov_roman/.

What a picture!

Collaborate with media partners

Media partners are everyone who can help you give your event a shout. We don’t have a PR department, so we just asked people from other companies whom we know or with whom we partner, to share about TRC on their social media. In return, we placed their logos and backlinks on the TRC website. This is a win-win tactic. If you scale it, it can have really great impact.

Use the event hashtag

Define the unique and easy-to-remember hashtag so people will use it in their posts. This will help you track the mentions and respond to them accordingly.

As a result of these activities, Matchr became widely recognized among our target audience, and we were really excited to see that people tag our company in the posts. This was a huge breakthrough compared to the previous year.

The B2B Event Marketing Maths: 1140% Growth in the B2B Brand Awareness

Calculating brand awareness is a tricky thing. One of the relatively reliable methods is tracking brand mentions on social media. This method doesn’t require any additional costs or complicated research.

So, the maths is easy:

In 2022, only 5 people mentioned Matchr (our B2B brand) when shared posts about our main event, TRC, on social media. This year, the number of mentions skyrocketed to 62!

Reflecting on our journey at Matchr, particularly the remarkable increase in our brand’s awareness, offers a moment of introspection and learning. The path to achieving an 1140% rise in brand mentions has been both enlightening and challenging, underscoring valuable lessons that have shaped our approach to marketing.

Here are some key lessons we’ve learned:

  • The Value of a Targeted Approach: Our efforts were most effective when they were finely tuned to resonate with our core audience. This wasn’t just about hosting events; it was about creating meaningful engagements and forging genuine connections.
  • Integration with Our Brand Story: Each event needed to contribute to the overarching story of Matchr, ensuring a cohesive and consistent brand message. This approach helped in enhancing brand visibility and building a stronger brand identity.
  • Leveraging Community Power: Understanding the crucial role of our community – attendees, social media followers, and casual observers – in amplifying our brand’s voice. Encouraging organic engagement and fostering a sense of community proved to be significantly impactful.

As I look back, this journey has been as enlightening as it has been challenging. The growth in our brand mentions is a reflection of not just our strategic decisions but also of the resilience and adaptability of our team. As the Head of Marketing at Matchr, I see these experiences as a repository of lessons that will guide our future strategies.