Marketers from different industries usually face challenges such as brand building, creating authority, lead generation, and creating content that really engages and educates the audience. 

As a marketer at Rock Content, I have also faced this challenge. But, by joining forces with other teams, we developed a regular campaign that has gotten us ahead of these issues.

One of the tasks I have been working on since I joined the Marketing Team is running the Jam Sessions, our series of live webinars tapping into brilliant minds from the marketing world to share their expertise with our audience. 

Later, we adopted the same strategy, but instead of inviting external experts, we started working with our own in-house talents — an initiative that helped us generate more than 1,000 leads in the past months. 

Today, I want to take you behind the scenes and share with you all the steps that led us to achieve this result. 

How it all started

An initiative from the former Rock University team brought the idea of creating a digital marketing training series, delivered by Rock Content’s experts, to the students in our base. 

It was an adaptation from a test that was run in the past, “Marketing Backstage.” As I’ve had experience running live webinars, I was invited to contribute to the project, which soon went to another level in our strategy. 

Rock Content is a market leader in terms of content marketing and has many experts working every day to make marketing better. So, why not count on our experts to spread the word and show how we get things done?

The initiative first aimed to broadcast to students only, but we saw a good opportunity to make it wider, not only educating the audience but also generating marketing results. 

After that, I became responsible for managing and running the Marketing Backstage session, and now I will tell you more about it.

Planning the initiative

The first step was understanding if the project fits into our editorial calendar. If you want to kickstart a new and robust project like this, you should evaluate not only if you have the slots in your calendar but also the time, resources, and workforce needed to run the project successfully.

In our case, we did not have any impediments so we decided to move forward, having one session every month.

The next step was developing the narrative and branding for the project. We decided that the narrative around Marketing Backstage is to show our general audience how our experts get things done, which can be achieved by giving them a step-by-step demonstration. 

We counted on our designers to define the brand identity according to this narrative, so we were able to develop the presentation template, broadcast page, and other promotional materials aligned with the brand.

It then comes time to think of a theme and a speaker. 

Regarding the theme, we tend to follow our editorial calendar to keep good consistency, but it can also be made according to the season or any trend that pops up. When defining the speaker, we invite someone who works actively on the topic to be discussed. 

Some examples were when we had a session about marketing planning with Rock Content’s co-founder Vitor Peçanha at the beginning of the year or about AI in Content Marketing, with our VP of Marketing Giuseppe Caltabiano.

With all these steps well defined, it’s now time to work on promotion!

Spreading the word

After having the theme and speaker defined, the next step is to create the landing page, where we will get the subscriptions, write and set up the email marketing communications, create a LinkedIn event, brief the social media agency about the event, and schedule popups and notifications. 

It may sound simple, but all these actions require attention and many operational tasks.

An important step regarding the creative part is that AI may be used to gather insights and ideas, however, all the copies must go through revision and proofreading by a real person.

This is a process that we defined in order to deliver content with high quality and with fewer chances for grammatical errors or typos.

Read also: How the Rock Content team uses AI

By the way, if you want to have access to a freelancer marketplace to get content created, translated, or any other support from on-demand content marketing professionals, I strongly recommend you to try WriterAccess. You can click here to get a 14-day trial and test the platform for free.

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The time between the launch and the broadcast day is usually from 3 to 4 weeks. This is the time that we run the communication through all the channels according to our publishing calendar and a good period to diversify the approach to increase the number of registrants. 

Gone live, but that’s not all…

Marketing Backstage has been a good opportunity to highlight our professionals, expand our brand exposure, and also, increase the chance of making new businesses. Showing how we get things done, talking about trending topics, and counting on the results of internal experts in valuable content with the resources that we have in-house.

While the registrants engage with our brand, they are exposed to our products and services and have the opportunity to get to know us better during the live broadcast. 

So far we have generated around one thousand leads with this initiative. These contacts can be nurtured with rich materials, tools, and solutions to help them enhance their marketing strategies. 

After the live broadcast, the webinars are available to be watched on demand, so we keep converting people even after it airs. 

We also collect the most interesting parts or most asked questions from the public and share them as social media videos, so we keep the wheel spinning with more people getting access to this valuable information, making them aware of this campaign, and becoming more likely to attend the next ones.