Marketing-Hosted Dinners

Ben:  
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Natalie. Natalie, welcome to the show.

Natalie Taylor:  
Thanks, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Ben:  
Same here, Natalie. I'm excited for the conversation. It's going to be a fun one. Before we dive in, though, Natalie, let's get to know you a little bit. A little bit about your career and background. What do you love about content marketing in general? We'd love to kind of get to know you before we start with the subject.

Natalie Taylor:  
Sure. So I have been a startup marketer or a solo marketer, sometimes both, for about the past 10 years. I consider myself sort of a marketing generalist but have sort of an emphasis on creative and content on that side of the house.

Before my current job, I had a brief stint at the largest company I'd ever worked for. It wasn't that big to most people, probably about 500 people. I learned during that period that I do not enjoy working for large companies. So, I'm currently in my favorite role I've ever been at, which is sort of the perfect combination of all of my skills, interests, and passions. I'm leading marketing at an early-stage startup called Capsule, an AI-powered video editing tool for enterprise teams.

We help them edit videos and solve the challenges they face specifically, like being able to edit videos 10 times faster and easier, keeping everyone on the team on brand, and making collaboration seamless across the whole organization.

What’s Working in 2024 for Marketers

Ben:  
I love it. I love it. I love that phrase, content is marketing. That's actually my LinkedIn background, like that banner. I have that quote right there, and I love that 100%. So I'm super excited. Your background is so relevant to the discussion as well, with being the head of marketing and really working on every element of the business. You get to see a lot of what's going on in all the different marketing channels and what's going on out in the industry. You get to experiment and try things at a really rapid pace at that stage of business, which is really cool.

So, what we're going to dive into today is what is and isn't working in 2024 for marketers. Obviously, everyone has their own experience, and this can be different for everyone. But Natalie, based on your experience, I'd love to kick this off and ask what is working well for you? And what should people maybe consider throwing into their marketing mix in 2024?

Capsule’s Early Stage and Marketing Strategies

Natalie Taylor:  
Yeah, I will start with the caveat, just some context of where our company is at, because I think that's always important to understand when you're hearing someone else talking about what's working for them. It's good to have the context.

Capsule is an early-stage startup. We're a very small team. I'm a marketing team of one. It's really just me and our CEO. We are just sort of leaving, I would say, the product-market fit stage. Capsule is currently in public beta and has been in public beta for about eight months. We've spent a lot of time these past eight months talking to a ton of customers and prospects. That's the number one thing we've spent our time on—so that we're building exactly what they need, and we're getting the messaging just right.

We’re shipping very quickly, both features and campaigns, to see what's really working. Also, at this stage, we are doing a lot of things that don't scale. I think that's really important at a startup—to not think about the process initially and how is this gonna scale? How can we possibly do this feasibly? We're really taking an approach of what is going to be the most effective, the most impactful to reach the people, to get the right message to the right people, even if it's going to take three months of my time to do that right.

Intimate In-Person Dinners as a Key Strategy

Natalie Taylor:  
So, one of those things that does not currently scale but has been the most effective channel for us has been these very targeted, intimate, in-person dinners in a few major cities. We've identified an ICP, a very clear pain point with that ICP, and know that Capsule solves it better than anything else on the market.

We want to reach as many of those people as possible. These are often heads of creative, heads of video, heads of brand at B2B SaaS enterprise companies with at least 500 or so employees. There's often a high concentration of them in cities like San Francisco, New York, Boston. So, we've hosted these in-person dinners and gotten these groups of people together to connect with each other.

We often have two to three customers present at each of those dinners and really focus it around some topics and pain points that they are all facing. I think there's a lack of... I think people post-pandemic are still really craving in-person connection and networking and building relationships with peers and hearing what other people are doing and what's working.

Fine-Tuning the Approach and Results

Natalie Taylor:  
Because we've identified this very specific group of people, they’re excited to get together. They're excited to talk about AI and video and how other teams are approaching it. We are facilitating that. One thing we learned at the first dinner, I think we actually didn't sell hard enough. On the Capsule side, our attendees are me, our head of sales, and our CEO. The rest are prospects, maybe a couple of customers, maybe a couple of just kind of friendlies.

The first time we did not sell hard enough. At the consecutive dinners, we tightened the little sales pitch at the beginning, just so people have some context of who we are. They leave that dinner knowing the problem that we solve for them. We do these intros, go around the room, I start and say, “Okay, tell me your name, where you work, what you do there, and then what is a big bet you're making around video this year?” Bonus points if it's related to AI. That kind of breaks the ice and gets everyone talking.

Later, people can connect with each other and talk about shared challenges. The great part is that our customers will stand up and talk about how they're working with Capsule and how this is a big bet they're making. Even in that exercise, we continue to get validation that the pain point and the message were consistent across all of these ICPs.

Creating Motion Around Marketing-Hosted Dinners

Natalie Taylor:  
We have really started to turn it into a whole marketing motion. We have an outreach strategy in terms of messaging, reaching people, and getting warm intros. We’ve figured out the structure and messaging of the dinner that makes those really smooth and effective. We also have a follow-up motion, where I take a lot of pictures of the dinner and upload them into a Dropbox folder.

I have an email with everyone's LinkedIn profiles linked and a link to those photos in the folder. I say, feel free to connect with people, feel free to use these photos and tag us on social media if you want, and we’ll follow up with any next steps on the sales side. The next day, we get people posting about us on LinkedIn. The dinners themselves have taken on a marketing life of their own, where we've instilled a little bit of FOMO and gotten people to attend the next one because we can say, here's who was at the last one.

People will comment and say, please let me know if you do one of these in my city. We're just kind of keeping a running track of all of those. So, that's the motion that we've developed. Again, it's a lot of work. I'm basically running the whole thing. It's a lot of work to coordinate all of those things, but it has so far been our most effective channel for generating highly qualified opportunities. The conversion rate from those dinners into intro calls, demo calls, and opportunities is insane. We know that it keeps working, so we're going to keep doing that. Now we're trying to identify the biggest bottlenecks in this process. How can we use AI to speed some of this up? How can we find other ways to take these more laborious parts and streamline them a bit?

Scaling the Strategy and Piggybacking Events

Ben:  
Love it. That is such a cool idea. I have a million questions about it and how it works. Number one, just to reiterate something you said, the doing things that don’t scale and then figuring out how to scale them. I love this mentality, and it rings true with your startup experience. This is a very startup mentality, but it's so much better to figure out what works and then figure out if you can scale it versus finding something that scales but may not work. Who cares if you can scale something that doesn't work at all? I love the mentality.

Are you piggybacking these elements, these dinners off of trade shows and conventions? Or are these really independent, where you just fly into town, schedule the dinner, and it's kind of all independent? Or do you typically coincide with something else?

Natalie Taylor:  
Yeah, currently it’s all independent. We just pick the major cities where we know we have a lot of prospects or customers and start there. We will start to piggyback on some events and do some private dinners where a lot of our target customers are going to conferences or events. But we know that this is working so far. Once we can systematize this one a bit, we'll start expanding to other types of them.

We want to expand to other sizes of events. This very sales-focused dinner is working really well, but we definitely want to expand to more of a brand awareness play where we host a happy hour or things like that and see how that works. Our hypothesis is that these sales dinners are very intimate, and I think that's a big part of why they're successful on the sales side—because we build very intentional, thoughtful relationships with these buyers. But what's the ROI or what's the impact if we scale it up and it's a little less intimate, but we're reaching more people? How does that pan out? So that's the next evolution once we get a few more reps in and can hopefully hire someone to manage some of this too.

Getting People to Attend Marketing-Hosted Dinners

Ben:  
That would be nice. That’s awesome. So, when you're looking at it, you talked about introductions and things like that. What's some advice about how to actually get people to attend these events and get them excited to actually go there? It sounds like you build some momentum, but how did you build the momentum in the first place?

Natalie Taylor:  
Yeah, it's an art, I will say, finding the balance of instilling a little bit of FOMO. Especially if they've never heard of you, they don't know anyone else who's gone to one of these events. You need to build a little bit of FOMO and make them feel like they will miss out if they're not going to go to this. When we send cold emails or even just intros for other people to pass along, we've kind of got a nice formula for that. It's very brief. It's like, "Capsule's hosting our fourth VIP dinner around AI and B2B video. Previous attendees have included heads of creative or video from HubSpot, Brex, Figma, and Webflow. We have a few spots left. Would you be interested in attending?"

You have to create a little bit of urgency and FOMO to help people understand, like, this is important to me. This is worth my time. So, it is an art. It takes a little bit of trial and error to understand what messages will land. The other tip is I keep my subject line very short, and I would send it to a friend. So it's usually like "Dinner at [restaurant name]," and that's it. It's something that you would send to your friend when making plans to go to dinner at this specific restaurant, instead of like, "Would you be interested in this VIP dinner?" or something that feels like you're being sold to or is not as intriguing.

The Sweet Spot for Dinner Attendance

Ben:  
I love that. What, in your opinion, is the sweet spot when it comes to the number of people at these dinners where you feel like you get some of that momentum and people are excited, but they're still small and intimate? Rough numbers and what you would recommend.

Natalie Taylor:  
Yeah, what's worked for us is we've had 16 total people at the dinner, including three people from Capsule—me, our head of sales, and our CEO. Then, you know, 13 peers, essentially. That's been a good balance where we feel like we have coverage, and one of us has been able to talk—everyone has been talked to, connected to someone at Capsule, and had an opportunity to chat and connect.

After the dinner, all three of us post-game and talk about immediate next steps. "Okay, you talked to this person about all of these things, so you should send the follow-up email. I'll do this one," kind of thing. So we all feel like we can cover it without feeling like we have to... I don't know, it feels natural enough that we don't have to make a super, super dedicated plan of, "Okay, you talk to these five people, I talk to these five people."

There are definitely people at the dinner that we want our CEO to spend some time with or our head of sales to spend some time with. I want to talk to a couple of marketers selfishly to learn from them and connect with them. So, that's how we approach it.

Ben:  
Very cool. We could dive into this for days. Again, I have millions of questions. I think this is cool, but to keep these podcast episodes short, sweet, and to the point, the idea here is this is another channel for people to explore. This is an opportunity to really look into this and figure out, maybe we should try it. Although the scalability to do it in mass may be difficult, it doesn't matter the stage of your business. If you're even later stage, this is a great opportunity to just connect with prospects and learn about what they're struggling with. The insights sound incredible.

So, I think there are so many layers to what you're talking about. I think this is really insightful. Natalie, thanks for sharing. This is a great insight, great tip, great channel and avenue. And I'm sure there are plenty of listeners that are going to have lots of questions. If they want to connect and reach out to you, how and where can they find you?

Natalie Taylor:  
Yeah, I am on LinkedIn. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn. I will say I'm much more likely to accept a connection request if you send a message and add some context. But I'm very active on LinkedIn and happy to connect there.

Ben:  
Love it, love it. Well, Natalie, again, thanks for the time today.

Natalie Taylor:  
Thank you.

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