How we hacked BMA15 with a sharpie

Of course you’ve heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Do you know the related fact that the human brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text! This amazing simple truth might be the reason that content marketers are relying more and more on visual ways to capture people’s attention and convey big ideas faster.

Knowing the power of images, we recently set out to create a distinctive event experience to engage one of the most critical and hard-to-reach audiences, North American B2B marketers. Our concept was part visual content marketing, part event hacking and all about the social media amplification. And the end results of this hybrid assault were mind-blowing. Here’s an overview:

The event: The Business Marketing Association’s annual conference in Chicago. It’s a gathering of 1000+ key prospects for our modern marketing offering.

The hack: Quarry was a basic room-key sponsor of the event (so we got to custom brand the hotel room swipe cards for attendees.) But we wanted more.

Leveraging that sponsorship, we sold event organizers on the idea of bringing in a “Graphic Recorder,” Kelly Kingman of Kingman Ink, to capture the top talks live from stage side, effectively creating an infographic of each talk in real time. These KeynoteInks™—our name for the giant 4ft-x-4ft hand-drawn illustrations—summarized 15 of the most inspiring presentations (you can see them all here), including those of Jonah Berger, Joe Pulizzi, Tim Washer, Laura Ramos, Scott Brinker, Andrew Davis (see timelapse video - Andrew is a force!) and more.

Once Kelly completed each KeynoteInk, event organizers displayed them in a high-traffic area in the lobby. This created a takeover effect for the Quarry brand, giving us disproportionately high exposure (240 square feet of exposure in fact!) among attendees relative to other sponsors—a huge win for our brand.

But the real win came with the social amplification that followed. Attendees flocked around the KeynoteInks to take photos, posting them to Twitter & LinkedIn using the hashtag #KeynoteInks and sharing the Quarry brand along with it. Even the speakers themselves joined in, proudly sharing images of their Keynote Inks with their large audience of social media followers who are, you guessed it, primarily B2B marketers.

Quarry also created a Keynote Inks landing page where we posted high-res images of the KeynoteInks within an hour of each talk. The landing page enabled easy social sharing of each KeynoteInk image to various social channels. Page visitors (both attendees of the conference and those who didn’t attend) could also subscribe to receive a high-res compilation of all 15 KeynoteInks in PDF format following the conference.

KeynoteInks turned out to be some of the most shareable, buzz-worthy content to come out of BMA15.

Hashtracking estimates that the hundreds of tweets that used #KeynoteInks reached over 490,000 Twitter users. And the impact for Quarry was significant—we received the equivalent of 3 months’ worth of social media mentions in 3 days. @Quarry attracted over 100 new (and very high quality) followers plus more than 100 subscribers to our email list. Downloads of the BMA15 Keynote Inks compilation continues today.

It’s kind of become our thing. We’ve started replicating the experience at other B2B-focused events including the CEB Sales & Marketing Summit, soon at Content2Conversion 2016, and of course, the next BMA16!

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Richard is the resident Demand Generation advocate at Quarry, MarketingProfs B2B Agency of the Year Winner (2013) and Top 10 U.S. #B2BMarketing brand influencer (2015). He’s passionate about helping clients succeed in adopting and mastering new marketing technologies and techniques to deliver better buyer experiences. He’s been a champion of marketing automation since the beginning (Level 1 Eloqua certified in 2008), writes frequently on modern marketing and is an experienced conference presenter. You can continue the conversation with Richard on Twitter at @RHsays.

This post was adapted from an article originally published here: https://www.quarry.com/work-stories/quarry-how-we-hacked-bma15-with-a-sharpie