Checked In with Splash
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Checked In with Splash
Don't Leave Event ROI on the Table with TikTok's Nina Skoko
In this webinar replay, host Camille White-Stern sits down with Nina Skoko, Global Partner Marketer at TikTok.
Nina's background is rich with media experience, from her days at Wall Street Journal to her time at CBS to her current role at TikTok. Throughout her career, Nina has found a passion for creating impactful stories that connect brands with their consumers.
In this episode, she shares specific ways she uses post-event content to create stories that live beyond the four walls of her events, allowing her to maximize the ROI of her programs.
Tune in to hear Nina share:
- Tips for creating evergreen content
- Criteria for identifying high-impact content
- Strategies for creating "FOMO without resentment" for guests who couldn't attend
- Real-life examples of event content TikTok created at Cannes
- Best practices for enabling sales with event content
- Processes for distributing content post-event
- Ways to measure the success of event content
...and more.
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If you enjoyed today's episode, let us know. Support our show by subscribing and leaving us a rating. If you want to get in touch with our team or be a guest on our show, email us at podcast@splashthat.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Follow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/splashthat-com
Learn more about TikTok: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tiktok/
Check out our The Power of Event-Led Growth episode with Nina: https://splashthat.com/podcast
This is Checked In with Splash. My name is Camille White-Stern. I lead Experiential Marketing here at Splash. I'm so thrilled that you joined today's virtual discussion. We're diving deep into strategies and techniques and tools to help you turn event content into pipeline momentum and maximize your event ROI. If you've attended any of our recent Splash webinars, you know we frequently discuss the go-to-market motion of event-led growth, or ELG. ELG is all about strategically using events to drive revenue, growth and expansion.
Camille White-Stern:With an event-led growth approach, events are at the heart of your marketing efforts. The conversations you and your attendees have during an event can really help you better leverage other marketing channels, such as media pitching, blog series and social content. There's so much more added benefit when you consider how events can really fuel the rest of the marketing mix. You can and should be extending the life cycle of your event content to squeeze out all the ROI you can from a single event or event program. The best video clips, quotes and learnings from these various experiences can be repurposed all across your marketing channels. That's why I'm so excited that we have a content and event expert in the house today. Nina Skoko is the global partner marketer at TikTok. Nina is going to be joining me in a few minutes on the stage to dive into this discussion and share some tips, tactics and insights into how to make your post-event content work for you and your organization.
Camille White-Stern:But before we get to the good stuff, let's just run through a few housekeeping items. At Splash, we support marketers worldwide, including those from leading brands, and driving more pipeline from their events. Our tool helps to reduce event setup by 85%, enables you to reach your buyers more often and makes it easy to unlock event-led growth through fully branded, repeatable event programs that power tangible business results. We've got through all our important housekeeping items. Now let's get into why you're here and tuned in with us today to squeeze as much ROI from your events as possible so you can meet the modern buyer where they are and maximize your event channel's impact on your business's bottom line as possible. So you can meet the modern buyer where they are and maximize your event channels impact on your business's bottom line. Folks, we've got a lot to cover today, so without further ado, let's get started. Please help me give a warm welcome in the chat to TikTok's Nina Skoko. Nina, welcome.
Nina Skoko:Hey, Camille, this feels iconic doing a webinar in Splash Studio, a place that I use for our webinars. This feels like a dream come true.
Camille White-Stern:I love it full circle moment. Now you get to be the talent du jour. Thank you so much for lending us your time today. Your career background is so impressive. Please, if you don't mind, just brag about yourself for a hot second and give our audience a peek into the experiences that got you to where you are today.
Nina Skoko:Thank you so much for that kind introduction. So at my core I'm a storyteller, which I'm really excited we're going to talk all about today. But that's been essentially the red thread through my career. I'm really passionate about creating impactful stories that connect brands with their consumers and drive action. So this really started because my whole career I've worked in media, but essentially I always joke it's been an evolution toward, like from the most traditional form of media to TikTok, which is the essentially newest form of media probably out there. So I started my career at Wall Street Journal, which is as traditional as it probably gets in terms of media, and then I went to CBS and then now I'm at TikTok and I've been here for a few years and have just really loved working with our partners and our brands and telling impactful stories to the market.
Camille White-Stern:I love it Very, very impressive logos and organizations that you have worked with. So, folks in the audience, this is our time. We get to basically do a live brain pick with Nina. Let's maximize this time that we have with her and just dive right into the conversation. Nina, I'd love to start with just kind of like unpacking smart content management and how to repurpose right. So I'd love for you to explain a little bit about the criteria you use to identify high impact content from your events specifically. I know that you were just at Cannes Lion Festival, so I'd love to hear if you have any kind of concrete real life stories from that specifically to share with us.
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I can give a little bit of background on my role now at TikTok. So essentially, I am a lead on our partner marketing team, which is essentially that we go to market with all of TikTok's third party product partners. So we work with creative companies like Adobe, Canva, agencies like Vidzi, Vayner. Additionally, we work with measurement companies like Nielsen and Kantar, as well as just like any kind of company that will help you grow on TikTok. We're the ones that work with them. We're the ones that go to events with them, create content with them.
Nina Skoko:So our team really looks at a holistic strategy where we're trying to tell impactful stories with these third party partners and how people can grow on TikTok. So, because we have that approach where it's not like we just focus on events, we just focus on video content, we really see events as a hallmark and a pillar in our larger content strategy. So for us, it's not a like it would be a nice to have content that came out of event. It's a must, it's compulsory and I think, even if your organization is set up in those silos, that's my top tip is that you really see it as like compulsory that you create content or have content that comes out of your event. So essentially our approach is I always ask myself if I repurpose something or if I film something in an event, will it be entertaining or will it drive value to someone that was there or wasn't there? It has to have the same amount of impact.
Nina Skoko:So we do this in a few ways. We create moments where audiences can create content themselves. So we've partnered with branded effects companies and partners and created custom effects for the event. So we just did this at CAN with a party that we did with Adobe. We created custom templates and Adobe Express and a TikTok filter so people could create content on the spot and then really show the fun they were having. But we made it possible that if you were at the event or not, the template and the effects still worked like no matter where you were. But then, additionally, we set up content studios either on the go or in the Carlton, which is where TikTok was based, and then we invited partners to come and we did interviews with them. I do ask usually when we do content and events, to not make it so timely, because it is tough having event content that ages really quickly, especially if you're small, nimble teams. But we'll do a mix of that, where it will be like evergreen content in our studio and then, you know, ask audiences to participate in content creation.
Camille White-Stern:So you mentioned evergreen content. To me that means, like you said, you're not just using it immediately post event. Do you have some sort of way of kind of like structuring or organizing a library of that evergreen content? I guess I'm curious, like I can think of a few concrete examples of when you would definitely want to strike while the iron is hot, immediately post event. But I would love if you have an example or any tips for, like when to revisit utilizing more evergreen types of content that you do get from your events.
Camille White-Stern:And you said you know when you're capturing the content, you try to sometimes like avoid making it timely, like. Do you have like a concrete tip for that? Like I know I think about that myself for these webinars. Right, I want this to be played on demand. So I'm not necessarily mentioning, like the day or the date in this recording, but any other things that we should be thinking about ahead of time, as we're kind of like organizing the event or planning to capture content at the event. That then lends itself to being able to tap into that kind of evergreen event content lends itself to being able to tap into that kind of evergreen event content.
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I mean, the magic of post production really works wonders in this area. So if you are remixing event content, where essentially, let's just say you're filming event content, you're filming a panel or you're filming something that you did that you might not have like directorial agency over, you can obviously cut out keywords. So I always will go through and I use different tools to be like okay, if they say a date or if it's timely, I will try to cut it out. Obviously, you have to be very cautious of not making it seem like Frankenstein-y. There's always ways to do it, especially if you have worked closely with your creative team or with an agency, especially on video platforms like TikTok. Close shots actually work really well on the platform so you can get rid of a lot of the background. So let's say, there's a lot of logos. Or in the case if you film something at Cannes, it can look very summery or beachy. You can actually do tighter frames and it's harder to tell where that video was taken. So if you want to use a wider shot, right post event, if it's like very clear that you're talking about Cannes, for example, and that's no problem. But if I'm like, oh, we're seeing a lot of conversation about this topic and we did a panel on that, I can I can do closer shots to make it more evergreen and more timely, and then obviously we'll use our evergreen branding package. So it doesn't feel as can specific.
Nina Skoko:In terms of organizing a library, we try to do it based off of customer needs. So I have a library of content where it's like if we want to post about performance or we want to post about helping brands create on TikTok, so then I'll add it to a wider library of resources that we have that our team can just pull from and it's more about what the audience is asking for. And then we can just like drop and either repurpose it for social or use it as a sales enablement tool. And it's like much easier because when a client is hitting you up and saying like hey, do you have any resources on how to create, then they can go to how to create, versus me saying like all can 2024 videos. It's like who's gonna look through that? Who wants to watch the hundreds of videos that we captured there? So we try to really organize it by customer need versus by the event.
Camille White-Stern:I think that's really smart because, at the end of the day, we're running events and we're leveraging content to grow our businesses right, and so just being really thoughtful about being customer centric feels just like a no brainer but might not always be considered. When you're thinking about how to manage things internally. Right, you might be thinking about how to make things easy for your team, organizing your content library around customer needs or interests. Ultimately, then, you're actually better setting up your team, your sales team, to be more successful in kind of sharing and distributing that content as needed to help influence the sales cycle or anything like that. So I think that's brilliant.
Nina Skoko:Hopefully that is yeah, oh, sorry. Also, if it's evergreen, how amazing it is, is it that you can drive impact months past your event? That's the best thing you can do Because, as event marketers, we know your success is measured beyond the four walls of your event. So if you can make it evergreen and you can post videos months past and they still drive performance, you're only enriching your content strategy and you're only enriching your argument that you need to keep going back to that event.
Camille White-Stern:Preach Nina. Wow, yes, I could not agree more. I mean, as I kind of mentioned in my opening, if you're not thinking about how you can not only extend the life cycle but the impact of your event once the event concludes, you're just missing out on so much valuable ROI, and there are a lot of ways to measure ROI. We're going to get into that a little bit in terms of like measuring ROI of event content. But when you're thinking about the success of an event or the impact of an event on your business, there are so many ways qualitative, quantitative ways that you can measure that success. And the kind of extending, like I said, the kind of the life cycle or impact through evergreen or repurposed content is absolutely one of those key ways kind of talk about.
Camille White-Stern:I think you've shared so many helpful tips already around like kind of thinking through how to identify that high impact content, those opportunities for you know, capturing content. I love that what you said. Just it should be compulsory, right? Like if you are investing time and resources into an event and you are not capturing content in some way, you are missing out on so much valuable business impact we talked about like how to kind of manage that content library leading up to and post event. You mentioned kind of. You have your like brand evergreen, like brand templates. How do you maintain that brand consistency? Well, when you're adapting event content for different formats and platforms, can you share a little bit of your process there?
Nina Skoko:Yeah, so TikTok's mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy and that's at the heart of everything that we do video, event, everything has to ladder up to that mission.
Nina Skoko:But generally a TikTok we have similar conversations actually with our clients when we talk about how they're going to approach their TikTok strategy.
Nina Skoko:Which I actually think is really helpful when you're thinking about remixing or repurposing event content for different digital platforms or your website is that I think generally we all used to like work in a world where it was like all marketing content needed to be like matching luggage or things needed to all look the same.
Nina Skoko:But what if we kind of step back and strip some of those like rules and restrictions out and you just focused on, like, the really special and beautiful elements of your brand, ie the sound of your brand, the tone of your brand and the key elements and your brand personality, and that way you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of you know when you need to remix something, you're not so stressed and you're saying like, oh my gosh, that person said a sentence that we wouldn't normally say, or that person didn't sound as polished as they normally like would. That's okay, because people want that authenticity and if, essentially, the essence of what they said or what they did is still core to your brand like, you should feel free to test and just add those elements in later. As I said, post-production is a friend to everyone. You can use your fonts, you can use your sounds and make it match the rest of your marketing efforts. But just play around with footage. You never know what people are going to really respond to and like.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, I think that's huge. I feel that you said a buzzword for me, or a word that resonated for me, which is authenticity, and I feel like I say this maybe in every single webinar or conversation that I have, but it comes up, I think, for a reason that everyone is just a human being at the end of the day, and so to be able to recognize someone else's humanity and like I think that is best enabled through authenticity, right, is such a sweet spot to be able to play in. And I also like your kind of the permission slip that you've kind of given all of us to say like let's question some of these like rules or guidelines that we have in place. Listen, we don't want to be off brand. To your point, like if it's true to the core of your brand's identity, then you know, then it might work. And that's, I think, just like a really helpful reminder for everyone to hear and to remember that it's okay to experiment and test new things.
Nina Skoko:So I love that you all took the bigger risk doing a panel and doing an event. You have less control over the content creation and what you can put out into the world at an event than you do in post-production when you're filming videos or you're writing blogs or you're creating content after. There's really a lot of ways you can make it your own as event marketers. We all watch our panels and we hope that they go to plan, but you get a lot more agency post-event in the creation of content after than you do for. So you already took the jump, so you might as well test with the post event content.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. That's. That's absolutely such a I love it. It's a pro tip, it's a like such a positive way of an encouraging way of kind of like going about everything. So we talked a bit about content creation and management and repurposing. I feel like we must dig into the distribution side of things and how to be strategic with that distribution. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts to share on how to balance personalization with scalability in that post-event content distribution. Maybe that also influences what you're doing in post production, kind of on the creation side. But then I'm curious, like how are you then distributing that content? And kind of walk me through how you think about that.
Nina Skoko:It's hard. I'll be transparent. That balance is very challenging, especially when you do. Maybe events for that are B2B events. That can be a real struggle.
Nina Skoko:Our approach generally has been in a few ways. So, after an event, I'll reskin our registration page for Splash and I'll add key resources that we spoke about on the day. I'll add frequently asked questions. I'll add next steps if we're doing follow up webinars, because at the end of the day, we all do events because our company has strategic action that they want to drive and an event is a way to do it. But, as we all know, usually an event might be a brief for that strategic action and we can't expect all of the audience members to change their behavior that day, that hour, whatever. So it's up to us to keep nudging them to do the behaviors that we told them at the event is our expectation and that we want to do together. So we'll use the splash pages essentially a hub with all of that content that we want them to engage with or utilize and then keep sending people back there.
Nina Skoko:So obviously it's great to have one place that all the event content is and then people can keep going back, but also sneaky it's a way for me to see how many people keep going back, because Flash is really great measurement tool, so I can see okay, someone kept clicking on this one article, so maybe we need to do a webinar on that topic. And it really makes me understand, like, okay, then maybe I should add more articles to the page that are about this topic to answer that question. And it really allows me to then like personalize the experience. It also allows me to give the feedback back to our sales and partnerships teams to be like hey, I'm seeing a lot of people are really interested in this, maybe less so that and then we can like create a content plan based off of that, ie, we can hit them with emails after we can do follow ups and really craft the conversation based off of that approach.
Camille White-Stern:I love that. That is so smart and it's kind of what you were talking about earlier using your events to inform and fuel your content strategy. It sounds like you have a really mature process of not only like managing and executing your partner event strategy but letting that work in collaboration with your content strategy. A little just like a quick question off the cuff, if you don't mind me asking like if you notice. So you talked about like using that Splash Hub to see, like, ooh, like we are noticing you know a lot of people clicking on this one gap. Like if you're like, oh, we, and does that happen where you're like we notice a lot of people interacting with this article or this type of content on our splash hub post event, and so does that ever kind of fuel or inform your content team creating more new content?
Nina Skoko:Oh, it has to. I mean, we have to listen to what people want. So I think we've spoken about this a few times that at TikTok, everything we do we really try to bring the platform to life and everything. And then in our working approach, we need to be this like cyclical feedback loop, so just like TikTok, where if you're watching certain things or you're commenting on certain things, the platform really takes that into account. We try to do that, the same, in our events. So we'll create forums on Splash too, where people can say, like hey, I really wish you spoke about this at an event. Do you think you could do something with that?
Nina Skoko:So we really try to take one the data that we're seeing from those hubs to inform that. And then two, we actually do usually have like a form, a splash form, that says that gives people the opportunity of like did we miss something? Is there something we could have done better? And then give them the opportunity just to give us that direct feedback. Especially, we do a lot of educational events for our partners. We have such a great relationship with our ecosystem and we've established this trust that if you give us feedback, we'll address it, we'll add it to our next event, or we'll do something to make good. Ie, maybe we can't do a physical event, but we'll do a webinar or send articles or feedback, or we'll send up time with your sales team that makes audiences really engaged and feels like the brand is listening to them, and that's invaluable information.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, I love that Listening to your target audience, listening to your customers, is so important. Recently hosted a webinar with Kat Tooley, who it was kind of standard practice to just make a lot of assumptions about your target audience or your target attendees or your customers, to design experiences based on those assumptions and just expect that they're going to show up and engage and then take the actions you want them to. You're hoping that they'll take post that event or that experience, and so it's. I love to hear that you are asking your target attendees, your audience, for more of what they want, or to at least voice what they want. And that's I was asking Kat, like how do you kind of go about curating content for a large scale event like Inbound right? And that was her number one tip ask the people what they want.
Camille White-Stern:So I love that you're finding really smart and creative ways to ask them. And then you're also looking at other indicators, the data, as you mentioned. What is the data telling you? What are people actually also telling you through that splash form or other mechanisms? So that's really helpful to hear how you're kind of balancing that personalization with scalability. I would love to learn a little bit from you about some innovative ways to leverage partnerships for expanding content reach. So I feel like this is definitely your domain as a partner marketer. I'm curious specifically at a larger scale event like a Cannes Lion Festival, where there's probably a lot of content being created. How do you kind of work with your partners to cut through the noise from all the content other people or other brands are creating and and make sure that the content that you and your partners are creating are really is really standing out and and kind of capturing eyeballs and ears, so to speak?
Nina Skoko:Yeah. So obviously this is very core to my role. We go through very strategic sessions with our partners pre-event on what our content plans are together. So essentially we'll say like, hey, this is what our concepts are for the event. Either we're going to pull somebody to interview them, or maybe we'll do like a TikTok trend, or maybe we'll do something with them, or maybe we'll do this, and then maybe our partner will say, okay, hey, we'll do the B-roll and we'll do this. And then maybe our partner was saying, okay, hey, we'll do the B roll and we'll do other things at the event.
Nina Skoko:So just, obviously, this is the case if you're doing an event with a partner. They're obviously a really great way to expand your reach and create more content, because you can really divide and conquer and create really rich content strategy that fits both of your brands. Because you know what we'll post on TikTok for business or the TikTok channel will be very different than what our partner will post. But we can still be tell a better together story, we can still be really thoughtful in how we do it and we can work together at the event so that we're reaching to audiences, telling maybe the same hypothesis, the same thesis, but we're doing it in a way that's true to our content strategy and our brand and really enriching both of our platforms. But then obviously you can work with partners as vendors or suppliers as well. So we work with partners from across the gambit.
Nina Skoko:So you can work with people like you know, a creative platform or a creator company to either invite creators to come to your events, which I always think there's nothing better than having a creator company. To either invite creators to come to your events, which I always think there's nothing better than having a creator at event to explain how to do things or just to liven it up and create content there. Or hire an agency to help create, post content and help you really reach new audiences across digital platforms like TikTok. And then you can measure the impact of this content using content marketing platforms like a Dash Hudson, a Smartly, a Sprinklr or a measurement platform. Like I mentioned, we partner really closely with key measurement companies like Nielsen and Kantar, who can see different results of your TikTok campaigns if you decide to repurpose your content for TikTok. So there's obviously many ways that you can do it. You can partner with someone at the event and then you can really reach new audiences, or you can partner with people to create that enriching content strategy. Post-event.
Camille White-Stern:I love that and would you say that applies. Is that also kind of how you think about leveraging and or showcasing just like user generated content from events, or do you think about that in a different way?
Nina Skoko:Yeah. So, for example, we have a partnership with a one of the kind of original creator marketing companies, influential. So we did an event with them at Cannes called the TikTok Influential Award, where essentially we celebrated brands who are really leaning into TikTok and we did very TikTok-y awards like the Fire Award, the Main Character Moment Award, the Sheesh Award, so it was really just like a celebration of creativity and fun. So we were trying to figure out ways like how do we really bring creators into this, how do we bring TikTok into this? So we invited creators to present the awards for the CMOs that were winning them. So in doing that, the creators obviously introduced themselves the type of content that they did, but they all had such a great experience too that they were creating content there.
Nina Skoko:We filmed interviews with them and because the theme of the event was like celebrating TikTok, first creative, we asked some of the creators and the CMOs like, hey, what's your tips for TikTok? First campaigns. And then that's a question that applies whether you were at that event or not. So we filmed that, we're gonna remix it, but it really our content strategy was really complimentary to this event and we're able to remix it, but it really our content strategy was really complimentary to this event and we're able to create UGC content and bring kind of UGC stars to life, love it.
Camille White-Stern:I love that so much. So then you kind of mentioned, as you literally just said, like that example, that content would resonate with people who were at that awards event and not. So what are some other ways that you would engage? Or even in that specific example, like, how did you go about, or are you going about engaging non-attendees with event content? I wonder sometimes if people are hesitant to do that and they think like, oh, the content that you capture for an event is only relevant to those who attend the event. I think that's a false notion. I feel like you would agree with me. So what are some of your tips for taking content post event and using it to engage really anyone in your audience, not just those who were at the event?
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I feel like you have to create. I think we said this when we were did our podcast together, the splash podcast, fomo without resentment. It's all about the tone. It's all about the type of content you're creating. Obviously, if you're going about a video, you want to make it that, whether you were at the event or you weren't there, that that you're learning something and maybe you're taking some of the key lessons from your panel or from the event and you're asking it. So, no matter if you have no context on the event or you have all the context, it's just an added double click or it's an added touch so that you learn more.
Nina Skoko:Obviously, I don't recommend doing things like you missed out or things like that, because not everyone can go to every event. Obviously, there's a really great reason why someone would have missed my event if you were like included, but not everyone can go. But if you can just like make sure the tone is very much like hey, we're here, I want to let everybody know XYZ lesson. I think that that's just like so actually inclusive. You're opening up your event doors so that more people can hear about the thought leadership that you're trying to share with the industry.
Camille White-Stern:I love that. I love that so much. People talk a lot about how to make your events inclusive and I think most of the time that conversation is really focused around answering the question how can I make this experience feel inclusive to people who are at my event? But what if we broadened that question and asked ourselves how we could make an event or an experience still feel inclusive to people who weren't even there? So I think that is just something really important for us event organizers to think about and be mindful of. Let's talk about sales enablement. You mentioned previously how content that you capture from events can better enable sales to be successful in their roles. Let's dig into that a little bit. Talk to me about how you collaborate with sales teams to ensure that post event content is effectively being utilized throughout the sales cycle.
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I think one point I really want to say, like generally as a theme throughout the conversation, is a lot of the work you do pre event is integral to all of this post event content. Having those very honest conversations with your sales team in terms of what strategic action you need the event to drive and then what are the double clicks and drum beats that you need after, is the only way to do this strategically thoughtfully, in a way that isn't going to perhaps strain team resource. I will say there is nothing worse post event than getting that ping hey, can you please send me all the decks from the day or all the materials? I'm like does someone really want an email with 20 links with all those decks? That really don't make sense without the context of the person explaining it. So having very blunt and strategic conversations, first and foremost about what this event is and what it is not, is integral for success. So I think establishing okay, what does this event need to drive? Does it need to drive awareness of a certain product? Does it need to drive adoption of a certain product? Does it need to drive certain actions? Being very clear on those things will help create those sales enablement tools.
Nina Skoko:So essentially, you could say, okay, this is what this event is going to do. We're going to create content around these, let's say, three to five pillars. You'll create the content. You'll get the decks or maybe one sheets, things that can be read without somebody explaining it to them and say, hey, this is everything that you need. Here's a package, here's an email template. We're going to hit everyone who went to the event, or maybe people who couldn't come, with a post recap survey, but it's up to the sales team to kind of drive those actions after, and if you give them a really thoughtful kit with everything packaged, that's really important.
Nina Skoko:So we've done this a few times. So we had a partner summit where essentially, we were briefing our partners on brand new products that were coming on TikTok and we wanted our partners to really understand how the launches of these products would help them and help them level up and help their customers more. So we created packages for our partner management team to be like hi. So here's an email template for these types of partners. These links will make the most sense. This video will make the most sense. Here's a whole package you can send to them. Then we do FAQ docs If they have follow up questions. Here's what we prepped, and having those really strategic conversations that you and your sales team or you and your partnerships team are on the same page is key for this post event sales enablement strategy so thorough.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. I am obsessed, this all comes from experience too.
Nina Skoko:I've been the one on the receiving end of those 20 links emails. I'm like, oh, I don't want to read any of this, I will not be doing anything.
Camille White-Stern:More really comes down to just being prepared ahead of time, right. And then are you seeing like a good adoption of these kind of sales enablement little tools and packages that you're putting together? Curious if you have any tips for driving accountability there. You know, I feel like this comes up all the time in the broader kind of conversation of sales and marketing alignment. So you talked about having those very clear upfront conversations. Besides having those conversations, there also obviously needs to be some level of accountability and I'm curious how you inspire that, like how you and your team put so much work into upfront, into enabling sales. How do you know that the work that you're doing is being utilized? Where are you kind of like seeing that?
Nina Skoko:Well, that's the beauty when we host a lot of things on Splash, I can hold my team accountable and say I'm not seeing a lot of clicks, I'm not seeing a lot of traffic after I made this beautiful hub for you with all this content. So, thank you, splash, for my receipts, for my team. I think there's two ways to go about it right, because we all put so much time and effort into these events, you want to make sure that the actions that you're trying to drive are getting pushed through. So I think there's a more personalized approach than there's, like you know, the general attendee approach, where I'll make emails from splash post event to be like here, if you're interested in this, check out this video or check out this piece of content that we created after, and then kind of do a more wide reaching email campaign for attendees. So that really hopefully checks that box in terms of okay, I can't do one on one approach with everybody that came, but I can at least make people aware that the hub exists. And then there's content that got produced after the event For partner specific events.
Nina Skoko:We have a newsletter for our partners. So I'll also call it out in our general newsletter as well and say like, oh, if you missed the event or if you want to like remind yourself of something that happened, I'll just keep reminding people that the hub is still live. My splash page lives on forever, you can still drive traffic to it, you can still watch these videos, and we'll just keep reminding people there. So that's kind of the broad approach that my team makes sure that we keep doing, and then, with our sales team, we obviously train them, we do meetings with them and then, with our sales team, we obviously train them, we do meetings with them and for the most part, we do see that our team is really leaned in because you know our partners and our brands. Their success really matters a lot to us. So usually once we give them everything that they need, they fly and we really see that people just eat up the content. They love it.
Camille White-Stern:Thank you for sharing that because I think this comes up a lot for me in my conversations with other marketers. It's like we're doing all this work on the marketing side. How do we make sure sales is picking up or putting down, so to speak? So thank you for kind of walking me through your process. One just quick follow-up question. There is like what are kind of your expectations for? So?
Camille White-Stern:You kind of talked to doing the one-to-many follow-ups host event and it would make sense that sales would be kind of owning more of the one-to-one outreach and follow-up. What are your expectations around the timeframe of when this is happening? Is it like in the day or days post event? Is it like a week? How do you kind of balance that kind of like holistic post event follow up strategy that marketing or partner marketing and sales are collaborating on? What can you like? Give me a little bit of a peek behind the curtain and breakdown of like in an ideal world we send the post event email through Splash and then this thing happens and then sales does their thing. Like what? What's your kind of ideal state and timeline in that regard?
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I think there's a two pronged approach to this. So I think you do need a long tail strategy where, essentially, you have to say, like not everything is going to happen overnight, unfortunately, as we know. So you need to have a strategy where it's like okay, we'll email them, so we'll do like our fast follows, obviously. Where we'll do like this post event recap, post event survey, please let us know, because people forget, right, they were like, once they've left the event, as much as you like to think you stay with them forever, I don't think so, you know. So, actually, usually we do. I'll say you can have the swag at the event, but please fill out our survey first. That's usually my most successful way of getting people to fill out that post-event survey, to be honest, is saying swag and a QR code, please scan this, please help a girl out.
Nina Skoko:So we obviously have our short-term strategy where we're really trying to get like okay, did people get what we were trying to do? Did we see those knowledge shifts? Did they understand that we wanted them to understand about certain products or take strategic actions? We measure all of that immediately. But then we have to have a long tail strategy because some of these things.
Nina Skoko:They just don't happen overnight. We need to see like are you adding these products into, like any of your materials? Are you taking any of the actions or the advice that we gave you? And then we'll just like kind of create a drumbeat content strategy with our sales team and like how they follow up with them. I think having honest conversations, though, with your team is really important on what event content can and can't do. So it can be an educational tool, it can give context and can give inspiration, but it's not going to do everything right. So how is it going to be like, okay, I'm telling you what this is, but then what's the context that your team needs to give them in a newsletter or in that sales email?
Camille White-Stern:That's really helpful. Thank you so much. You kind of just led me to the perfect segue, because you started talking about some of the different things that you could look at, like some of the immediate indicators and then maybe more like lagging indicators of success. So I really want to talk about being as data-driven as we can and understanding how you think about measuring success. So what would you say are some of the most important metrics for measuring long-term success and impact from your event content?
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I think essentially there's a few ways that we look at it. So there's obviously the short-term goals like post-event. We'll do a survey and we'll ask people what they thought about the event. We try to make it as short as possible just to get as much out of them. I think people are on survey overload right now, so we try to get like kind of baseline on how people were feeling and any feedback, especially around content. That's really helpful.
Nina Skoko:In terms of post event content, we again look at it different ways. So are people revisiting that splash page? What are they clicking on? What are they doing?
Nina Skoko:But then I also tend to create like quite a robust library of post event content for our social and digital platforms. So for me I treat those event, that those pieces of event content, the same way. I would treat like a bespoke piece of social content or bespoke TikTok posts to how much traffic did it drive? Like how much engagement was there? Did it go to a landing page that I needed? Are we seeing that there's repeat visits? So I really treat this post event content in the same manner. I treat all my digital content and sometimes I'll use the post event content for maybe a product launch that we have coming up. So we filmed with partners at an event, maybe a few months prior, but then we knew we were going to launch a partnership together, so we held on to the interview until the launch. And it was so helpful because I didn't need to create a new piece of content. I just repurposed this interview from an event. How great is that? It's two for the price of one.
Camille White-Stern:Love it. Working smarter, not harder. I'm into it.
Nina Skoko:Especially if you can create, like I'm saying, content. Studio could literally just be a corner, so your audio isn't so loud, so you can film interviews and if you know something's coming up, you could get sound bites from that person and say like hey, we're going to be doing this, or like, just get as much content you can from the person, because the magic of events and industry events is that you have so many people in the room that it's really hard to get their time, or maybe they have to fly, or maybe it just like wouldn't work out as serendipitously or magically as it could in an event. So take that opportunity, create content with them. I love it.
Camille White-Stern:You are preaching the gospel today, nina. Okay, just kind of two final questions for you. We have talked about, obviously I'm assuming your main tools you're using to kind of create, manage and distribute repurposed content at scale is going to be TikTok. I should hope so. I'm curious if there are any other tools you know we talked a lot about, like post-production is your friend, use it wisely. Any other tools that you feel just like really warrant a shout out or that like really help you and your counterparts at TikTok successfully take event content and then repurpose and distribute?
Nina Skoko:I'd say really invest in a content management system so that you can get great reverb on your post event content. So this could be a company like HubSpot or Smartly Dash Hudson Sprinklr. Essentially probably it's social media or content management tool. Essentially, if you want to keep making these videos and you want to make a really robust strategy, you need to get a sense of what the impact is, what type of audiences are responding to this content, just any insight on your post production creative strategy is integral to creating a really robust plan and it'll also inform your next event content strategy. Ie people liked an interview style, they liked remixing just the remixed versions of your panels. They liked you know, when you leaned into trends like all of that reverb just helps optimize your content strategy and helps you really create like a more impactful event strategy as well.
Camille White-Stern:I love that, speaking of you mentioned, you know you might use some of the kind of insights gleaned from the interaction and engagement with post event content to inform future events, like a webinar. Talk to me a little bit more about how you take what you what you're learning or what you're seeing from your audience engaging with and interacting with your event content and then use that to flip it and fuel your event strategy. We've been talking a lot about using your events to fuel your content strategy. Talk to me a little bit about that kind of like reverse direction and if you have any like concrete examples of like this. We got inspired for this event because we saw this happening with our post event content. Would love to kind of just wrap up there and make sure we're kind of looking at the full loop here, the full feedback loop.
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I think, like for us, we treat everything as a cycle and we treat everything as a feedback. So it tends to be pre event. Where we really treat pre event content as like an experience to your event starts when you send your first email, your invite email, from Splash and you create a Splash page and then the event and then your post-event content and then you're like OK, now we have to outdo ourselves for this next event. And the beauty of the post-event content is you're getting an idea of what people are asking in the comments, what they're responding to and what they want. So we've seen, for example, that we had an event with our partners and I thought that we're going to be asking a lot about one topic transparently. And then they were all like we want to hear more about measurement, we want to hear about how to work with third party measurement partners, we want to hear more about TikTok measurement solutions. Everyone's just hungry to show off their work right. And you know, as digital platforms evolve, as event marketers, we all know that's becoming more and more complex. So we created digital content and send it to them.
Nina Skoko:But people still wanted more. They had really specific questions and they're like we want to talk to these teams. So we created webinars, we created forums that people could keep talking to our marketing science team. We actually created a dedicated webinar series for our marketing science team, for our partners, because there was just so much interest. And then at the end of every webinar we had with them, we created a poll. We actually do it in Splash Studio we love Splash Studios. We create a a poll and we're like we give people like four options for their next webinar or like things that they want to hear about. So we're like okay, you get to choose the topic of the next webinar and that's become like a really great way for us to see like, okay, this one one top for webinar, but we can like send people content on the one that got voted second or we can hold it and then it gives us like a better content and feedback loop.
Camille White-Stern:I love that. That is so smart. Again, it goes back to asking the people what they want. They will tell you, listen to them, and then you deliver on that. Then they're going to keep coming back again and again and again and continue to engage with your brand and hopefully at some point, take the actions that you want them to take. I love this, nina. Thank you so much. We've got a few minutes left, so I just want to thank you deeply for sharing so many gems and helpful tactics with us today.
Camille White-Stern:Folks in the audience, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did. I wasn't taking notes because I was practicing active listening, but luckily this is recorded so I can go back with my team and we can pull out all the things that we are not doing that we need to start doing, because Nina is a living legend. You're a living legend. I just I bow down to you. You are just brilliant, and I know myself and my team we're walking away with a bunch of new strategies that we will be putting into practice to fuel our own events and content strategies here at Splash. Any final words of wisdom or advice or encouragement that you want to share with our audience before you head backstage.
Nina Skoko:Yeah, I think we all work so hard in our events. Show it off, create that content. You're missing a big opportunity on the table If you're not trying and filming. It doesn't need to be difficult. You can start small. Just go with your phone, interview people ask them, just try and if it doesn't work it's okay, it can stay in the cutting room floor. But just keep trying and seeing what's going to work for your brand.
Camille White-Stern:I love that so encouraging. Get out there, shoot your shot, people, don't be afraid to try new things. This has been phenomenal, Nina. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You are an absolute gem and a rockstar. TikTok is so lucky to have you and we were so lucky to get some of your time today. So thank you again. Thank you, alrighty folks. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for hanging out with us. Until next time, take care. All right, folks, that's it for today.
Camille White-Stern:If you enjoyed today's episode or are a fan of the podcast in general, please let us know. Support this show by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating. We so appreciate feedback we receive about the show. So if you ever want to get in touch, you can email us at podcast at splash thatcom or, better yet, join our Slack community, where you can message me directly. Last but certainly not least, if you're a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform can take your events to the next level, like we have for MongoDB, UCLA, Okta, Zendesk or even Sweetgreen, visit our website at www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care.