VISUAL NATION
Next up on the Unimarketa leader board is their Visual Nation EXPO, a 3-day live-in seminar with high-profile workshops, industry leader presentations and sideline networking galore for the very cool creative professional niche called ‘Lifestyle Photographer’ in the greater Chicago area in August.
When this project came into development, Adrian Brambila had only recently joined in partnership with Dan and Mike, and the digital marketing specialist flew into action to prioritize retargeting Visual Nation for the right people, based on data gleaned from social media connections and interactions.
“There’s a category of people in need of professional education in their craft, just not at night school. They want colleagues to bounce ideas off of, learn techniques from and equipment selection with, and then share their best business practices and learn better ones,” said Adrian.
Brambila said he knew inside-out the business logic that would appeal to folks with a lot of heart, a lot of hustle, and a big enough love for their passion to make the self-investment.
“The truth is, if you’re a photographer in this category or a videographer, you’re likely a one-musician band, and might find there’s only so many fibers in your brain available for career building,” Adrian said.
Mike Schmalz said the hard nut for Adrian to crack first was that the shared email list for potential invitees from event partners was anchored in price concrete, and that, without a definitive statistical examination of stated reliabilities in the audiences being rented, there was no way to take on a major industry partner with 90 days lead time.
“‘120, 180 days, sure’, the big camera companies said. ‘Give us a road map of attendees in progress and we’ll go on this adventure together. Otherwise good luck, sounds like a great idea’,” Mike said.
Mike perceived this singular opportunity as an immediate challenge to aim for low overhead and high attendance. To do it in order to get a sponsor in next time for a year-long run up, with tons more leads of inquiry to run down even more data analytics and get two thousand pre-booked seminar day tickets in six months of prep.
“Two-fold opportunity, actually,” said Mike. “Test the market and bootstrap the project.”
A NEW EVENT
Digital Marketing clients don’t quite know they need digital marketing until it’s made painfully clear that currently online at this very moment there are more customers using more and more digital devices than ever before to search for more and more local goods and services.
What digital marketing clients do know quite well, however, is that successful SEO and SEM marketing tips are deceptively simple to admire, but devilishly squishy to predict when it comes to pinning down any one particular method that works for any one specific digital marketing project.
Not because it isn’t possible. Rather because it just isn’t done like that, and the old ways of describing the marketing goals of a business that sells things have to be recalibrated as pure sales goals with a customized marketing path, lightly automated for scale, but otherwise individually handcrafted by a digital marketer for each and every product and platform.
The muscle power Unimarketa unleashed on the Visual Nation EXPO, August 11-14, Oak Brook Hills Resort and Conference Center, Chicago, Illinois was quick to jettison the benign email lists and their unwieldy secrecy.
Simply put, email is a backstop, a place that traps foul balls and wild pitches but in general does its job best by simply standing behind the communications flow of a digitally fluent human being and allowing an inundated individual to look fearlessly forward.
Instead Brambila targetted specific regional entrepreneurs with key words in their online social media profiles who were already at least partly bought-in to the concept of a 3-day work retreat with seminars, tech demos and key influencer presentations because they followed the listed speakers digitally already.
“We had 12 named speakers doing workshops, online reservation and sign-up, and in total listed ten seminars over six sessions. Fashion Lighting, Editing. Night Shoots. Online Marketing Sales Funnel. Storyteller. Big-Boy Shoot on a Dime-Store Budget. A few more in place, but with limited attendance to keep it intimate and easy,” said Dan.
TARGETED AUDIENCES
So how did Unimarketa find more than 500 motivated Lifestyle Photographers in under three months? Adrian said the key was to “nurture them with retargets.”
“How do you get someone to join up to an event? First we highlighted wedding photographers on Facebook from among those who ‘liked’ the page of the annual Wedding and Portrait Photography International trade show, our partner for Visual Nation.”
WPPI Director Jason Groupp runs the annual Las Vegas event, which attracts more than 15,000 professionals from 46 countries annually, and features more than 180 speakers and 330 exhibitors. He also emceed Visual Nation and curated each day’s seminar programming and discussion panels.
“Jason knew which speakers to invite, what audiences wanted to learn and who was going to fit the bill, and that gave us more data points to target our audiences. We then asked each named speaker to let us put a line of JavaScript code in their website that would then help us to segregate those audiences into prospects and fans,” Adrian said.
With Groupp and WPPI on board as production partners, Unimarketa could then refine their targeting to a dozen speakers and a dozen micro audiences, effectively separating prospective attendees who merely interacted with the subjects from those most likely to seek professional educational opportunities.
“These folks were then again split into two more categories: ‘Hot’ audiences that work in the industry and actively engage with the named speakers online, and ‘cold’ traffic that self-identifies as a Lifestyle Photographer and lives within a one-hour drive of the venue,” Adrian said.
Knowing this, Unimarketa could now create search values and parameters for ad placement on social media platforms that would go immediately to where they would be seen and acknowledged by the audiences. Paid ads would get to the right people.
“The most important thing was not to waste money on chasing blind prospects with little chance of conversion,” Adrian said.
“To nurture them with retargets we produced and implemented more than one type of ad.”
BEST NEWCOMER
Indeed, in the 90 days run-up to the event, Visual Expo digital marketing efforts soon worked their way into the social media timelines of tens of thousands of known digital leads, with creative content that highlighted speakers at the upcoming August event and its convenient location.
Likewise, social media campaigns based on interactions with Groupp’s group of named speakers’ own accounts, including WPPI, began to home in on and target the most likely candidates for conversion.
In just a short stretch, Unimarketa carefully retargeted select audiences with no fewer than 90 designed pieces of content that gently reminded and funnelled visitors towards event registration and payment, featuring at times the unique headshots of the invited speakers as a pique for the curious. Far and away, it was Groupp’s photo that attracted the most attention.
Jason Groupp is a well known face, and WPPI followers not only know who he is, but they trust his influence enough to pay attention when he appears in their timelines.
“After the event kicked off we heard from dozens of attendees that in the run-up they were literally being followed around the internet by Jason Groupp, because our platform ads were successfully targeting the right people. As an anecdote for our effectiveness that kind of feedback is pure gold,” said Adrian.
“We based our logic on actions, things people did online to signify their affinity. Our partners were impressed with our digital marketing because it was fast and accurate. We were more effective than expected,” said Adrian.
Mike looks at the 90-day prep schedule to find guests and provide a top-level professional experience for a creative niche industry as the kind of bold statement a marketing business with a point of view can exclaim in all caps.
“In a short turnaround we came up with an event that sold out more than 2,000 day tickets for main speaker and workshop events. We put 539 overnights in a 12-story conference center and hotel complex on a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday slot in mid-August with a world class docket of presenters, and the Chicago weekly alt paper gave us ‘Best Newcomer Event’ at the end of the year,” Mike said.
COFFEE TALK
For Unimarketa, this opportunity to offer instruction and guidance to professionals in the creative industry was also a chance to help unearth the corners of a giant sunken toolbox that many Visual Nation attendees had no idea was both full of hidden treasure and also right under their feet.
To be fair, these people are busy. Independent lifestyle photographers are independent because they don’t have a giant studio or agency covering their day to day employment in anticipation of abundant photography work.
In the mornings before seminars, Adrian hosted informal break-out ‘business-building’ sessions for the digital side of a Lifestyle Photographer’s portfolio, and coached attendees with SEO and SEM strategies to explore and follow.
“This is what they don’t know they need,” Adrian said.
Independent lifestyle photographers tend to have huge, beautiful self-shot photos on the internet in their giant website galleries, because everybody who can get to their photography will see exactly what their work looks like.
“A Lifestyle Photographer with a great-looking website can lose business if that site isn’t loading fast enough, or if it isn’t optimized for mobile. Slow loading times because of extra large photo files, with unforced SEO and SEM errors, can keep potential clients away in a tight search market, and the photographers won’t even know that they have a problem,” Adrian said.
To solve this, Adrian hosted Digital Marketing workshops every day, with video summaries posted in an invite-only Facebook group for Visual Nation guests. Those who sat in on the free-form afternoons found useful SEO and SEM strategy advice and open-ended Q&A sessions.
Those who clicked on the morning wrap up videos took away clear descriptions of how to build a business with Digital Marketing.
“The rudimentary hiccups that a Lifestyle Photographer encounters in the Digital Marketing sphere are mostly fixable with a little coaching. That said, having professional people in a room together to network not only provides opportunities to connect with each other, but also to share strategies that bridge the gap,” Adrian said.
CREATIVE BANDWIDTH
The way Adrian tells it, the shortage of real-world career and business assistance for the Lifestyle Photographer is real, and it is a shortage that exists across the creative industry space.
“Everybody whose front door at work is their website needs a hand up. The creative niche industries that provide local services to local clients who go searching for them can grow by leaps and bounds when they set their Digital Marketing goals for success,” Adrian said.
Likewise, the planning that goes into an all-inclusive seminar event like Visual Expo itself benefits from more interaction with prospective visitors over a longer lead time. Something Mike Schmalz says is borne out by the positive proof given in Chicago.
“Visual Nation solidified what we had always felt was a bandwidth issue for creatives in this market. That there was too little on offer, or it was too expensive to attend, or it clashed with other calendar commitments. Our purpose was to go after the people and businesses that would stand to gain most from a regional event, and we proved it definitively,” Mike said.
Indeed, the Visual Nation Expo achieved its own goals beyond expectation, bringing in more than 500 ticketed individuals and 2,000 seminar attendees. For three days in August the Oak Brook Hills Resort and Conference Center was filled with happy, motivated and enterprising guests who stayed in the hotel, ate and drank in its restaurants and bars, and paid attention to what was being said.
“With more lead time we can target even more leads, and find even more wedding photographers looking to gain a competitive edge. With a year to build it, we can narrow down larger pools, do more due-diligence on more speakers, and bring in more people,” Adrian said.
“There is an immense need for this kind of event, and people come to be fully engaged, motivated to ask thoughtful questions and ready to take the advice. With a year to market and build the hype, the next Visual Expo event is going through the roof.”