How We Built a Successful Event Series to Build Awareness and Credibility

myClin is a leading Clinical Oversight Platform, offering a transformative collaboration channel and the most documented, data-driven clinical trial oversight. Used across all phases of clinical research, myClin’s technology aims to enhance participation, engagement, collaboration, and compliance in clinical trials.

Timelapse helped rethink their positioning and messaging, redesigned myClin.com from the ground up, continuously provides web support, set up adtech campaigns, created live action and 2D videos, assisted with webinar planning and communication, constructed multiple email marketing campaigns, and are currently managing all social media accounts. However, our favorite project to date is the Clinical Innovators Summit Series.

We helped design the Clinical Innovators Summit Event Series to build credibility and increase myClin’s relevance. Targeted towards Clinical Operations professionals, QA & Compliance professionals, and myClin users, the Clinical Innovators Summit offers attendees the opportunity to network, learn, and discuss how to simplify, unify, and advance Oversight and collaboration processes in clinical trials. Each CIS Event is full of case studies, panel discussions, and breakout sessions lead by clinical trial professionals from high-potential, high-growth MedTech and biotech companies. The ClS Event Series is hosted in different target locations such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and soon London providing myClin the opportunity to connect with a variety of prospects face-to-face.

Starting off strong, the first Clinical Innovators Summit hosted in Philadelphia yielded the highest traffic on the myClin website ever to date. The second and third Summit’s, CIS West Coast and CIS New England, hosted in 2019 also proved effective for driving website traffic. While some events have been more successful than others, each Summit generates a healthy amount of leads while building credibility and awareness for myClin.

But what pieces ultimately helped make the series successful? Using the AIDA model, all of our marketing efforts for the Clinical Innovators Summit can be broken down into 4 categories: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.

Arguments could be made that each marketing activity supported all four categories which is true to an extent, but assigning categories helps prioritize and bring perspective to each marketing activity.

Awareness

Once the panelists, location, and dates are set, the first and probably most intuitive step is making sure people know the event exists.

To raise awareness for each Clinical Innovators Summit, we created a set of graphics to share across social media platforms and promote via LinkedIn Ads.

At first, the graphics were posted on the myClin Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to increase the target audience’s exposure. By the third and most recent CIS hosted in Boston, we began testing carousel ads against single image ads to see which provided the highest number of conversions at the lowest cost per click (CPC) and highest click-through rate (CTR). The campaigns were close in performance, but the carousel ads ultimately performed better.

In the end, the ads were successful at raising awareness, as 14% of registrants reported that they heard about CIS New England. Together, the social media posts and ads not only brought attention to the event but also drove more traffic to the myClin website.

Interest

With our target audiences aware of the event, striking interest was the next key component in driving registration.

Striking interest can prove difficult in a world with large quantities of information being thrown at prospects. Harvard Business School professor, Gerald Zeltman, found that 95% of purchasing decisions take place in the subconscious mind — meaning consumers decide their interest in a service or product very quickly.

In the case of the event series, we gained interest through a custom site displaying the advantages of attending CIS along with a short recap video to quickly engage with viewers and cut through all the noise.

The site gains immediate visual interest with its clean design, animated logo, and thoughtful layout. To further drive interest and make the benefits of attending the event readily available, the site includes a quick summary of what will be learned at the event, quotes of why previous attendees enjoyed the event, and speaker and agenda information to create interest in the panelists and topics covered.

The website also hosts a short recap video which provides viewers with real footage of how previous attendees benefited from attending CIS. This is not only a great mechanism to quickly generate interest and catch the audience’s eye, but also helps build credibility. The video creates a lasting emotional experience for viewers and a positive impression that the event is enjoyable, relevant, and insightful.

Desire

Also used to generate interest, the attendee satisfaction displayed both in the recap video and quotes on the website helped build trust. This gave prospects the desire to register for the event and create a similar experience for themselves.

Once the prospects were interested in the event, they needed to be convinced of their desire to register and attend. While there is some overlap between creating interest and desire, what provokes the desire to do something? Solving someone’s need. While a need might not initially be realized, through marketing efforts, they can be brought to light with a provided solution.

For CIS reaching the audience via email proved an effective approach for creating desire since details such as the speakers, agenda, and the event summary could be presented in a more convincing manner and further in depth than on the site. The extra marketing channel allows for personalization and delivers more space to elaborate on how the event could solve prospects realized and unrealized needs.

For example, when marketing CIS New England we highlighted key speakers to further display their knowledge and relevance. Since the prospects most likely did not have a desire to hear from the speaker prior to the email, the campaign brings to light the desire to meet one of the CIS panelists or at least hear their expertise in one of the sessions.

All in all, the email campaigns were very successful in creating a desire to register, as 66% of registrants heard about the event from email.

Action

Lights, camera, action! But really — the most important step of all is making sure the registrants take action and attend the event.

Friendly reminders and targeted follow-ups with clear calls to action and calendar invites were used to motivate registrants to attend and non-registrants to register. To encourage the action, emails with copy such as:

“Interested in Clinical Innovators Summit New England 2019? There’s just one week left to register and we would love to see you there!”

were sent to non-registrants who had previously expressed interest through clicks. This put the subtle pressure of time on prospects to register and not miss out on the event.

Likewise, a countdown was used on other reminders, clinicalinnovators.com, and across social media to create a sense of urgency. Other information such as Uber & Lyft codes were also used in the reminders trigger actual attendance. On the myClin site itself, a section for CIS and a bright notification bar were added to the site to grab the attention of visitors, hopefully resulting in more registrants.

As a final step after the event, follow-ups were sent to attendees containing the slides from speakers, a satisfaction survey, and a brief thank you message. To help improve attendance for future attendance, a separate follow-up was sent to non-attendees asking for feedback as to why they may have missed.

All together the marketing activities supported each other and acted as one to not only raise awareness and credibility for the Clinical Innovators Summit, but for myClin as a whole.