Applitools is an AI-powered end-to-end software testing platform that integrates with modern test frameworks to validate the look, feel, and user experience to enable visually perfect digital apps and sites. With extremely strong validation from their customers, they wanted to expand that love to a larger community of QA engineers, developers, and designers who could keep their word of mouth flywheel spinning.
With that in mind, their event strategy shifted from solely product focused webinars to including recurring thought-leadership webinars and networking events to strengthen the community without sacrificing the one element they stand for—visually perfect brand experiences.
Event-led Growth strategy
Patrice Johnson is Applitools’ Director of Demand Generation and Events. She focuses her time on using the power of events to tell her brand’s story, connect like-minded professionals, and generate leads and go-to-market strategies. Her team runs a minimum of two webinars per month, sometimes upward of four. But she knows that simply hosting webinars is not enough if you want to make a real impact.
“It’s all about experience. That is the key thing,” Patrice explains. And there’s no team that has cracked the experience puzzle better than the Demand Generation team at Applitools. They’ve orchestrated a webinar strategy where a single webinar has the quality and amplification that can guarantee 4000 registrations and half the attendance.
Re-inventing Webinars
You come across one webinar invite for every three promotional emails. If Applitools had to stand out with their webinar, they had to re-invent their strategy. They decided to focus on three major parameters and chose Airmeet as the platform to bring that vision to life:
- Delivering value for time
- Making engagement less forced and awkward
- Crafting visual perfect experiences
Delivering value for time
No matter the type of content you create today, you’re always fighting for your audience’s time and attention. You’re competing with email, Slack, cat videos on Youtube, and simply time one could be spending outdoors. “That is what’s really changed for us over the past few years—shifting from just being an open tab that’s playing in the background. You want to get their attention and engage with them.”
Gamification can play a huge role in ensuring you’re not just another open tab on someone’s screen. They’ve used Airmeet’s engagement suite to keep their attendees glued to the webinars. “We’ve used Kahoot, we’ve put in some Slido polls, and the leaderboard is always fun,” says Patrice.
Making engagement less forced and awkward
Having varied networking options within the platform is crucial to humanizing the brand and its experiences. “We’ve actually layered different networking spaces into our agenda by first using the fluid space to provide more networking opportunities. As more people extended conversations, we would direct them to booths focused on topics of interest,” Patrice explains. In a recent webinar, Applitools even had their BDRs coexist in the fluid space with over 350 potential customers to get a sense of what people were interested in.
“It can get a little awkward because they aren’t quite sure what’s going on here, but we found ways to engage and educate the attendees better. We thought, let’s put up a little video intro that can be programmed into the flow of the event too.”
Crafting visual perfect experiences
Applitools’ tagline is ‘visually perfect,’ and they’re all about enabling the creation of visually perfect digital experiences. So, of course, they had to rep that in anything that they did. “I remember attending an event on Airmeet and thinking, oh my gosh, this is visually perfect,” Patrice says.
Patrice and her team were able to achieve visual perfection using Airmeet’s branding and customizable features. “It was easy to create things inside the Airmeet platform to create some visually stimulating designs. They’re very clean and functional, and things are lined up properly. Airmeet makes branding as functional and visually perfect as we can have it.”
Use event data to your advantage
Collecting data is table stakes—it’s what you do with that data that matters. Patrice and her team first start by pulling reports to see the engagement score, conversation opportunities, downloaded content, and more once the event is over. They pass the report along to the BDR and GTM teams as soon as possible because not only are event intent signals extremely important, they’re also time-bound.
“We see how long attendees were on, what their comments were in the chat, and any questions or comments that we see that are relevant to our business,” says Patrice. “Then all of that goes into a sequence for our BDR team. We send them over that information, and timing is key.”
They score everyone who registers for the event, and everyone who MQLs gets a follow-up from the BDR team—even if the registrant didn’t show up for the event. “We want to get every single lead or MQL to score highly and become a solid prospect for us to move further into the pipeline.” And their tracked data shows them not only enriched leads but also which event types are the most effective, so they can pivot their approach when needed.
“You are putting all that effort into bringing these attendees there, so you want to get their attention,” says Patrice. “You want your sales team to be able to capture them. You want to engage with them.”
Book a demo today to explore Airmeet’s dynamic platform and add a must-have tool to your marketing strategy.
