Better Digital Marketing is a community of B2B marketers, who are constantly looking to learn, evolve professionally, and deliver sustainable marketing campaigns/actions that contribute to business growth.
Since the beginning, we envisioned building a community, and not just another group.
Our number one goal is to foster networking, communication, and help people with the same goals connect and share their knowledge. To get to actually know each other a bit better.
Although we are still a young community, we’ve gathered over 200 members on LinkedIn, all hand-picked B2B marketing professionals (by the way, we are building their profiles and you can read interviews with these specialists here). We are so grateful for their presence here and for their involvement – we know we have so much to learn from each other!:)
Open communication, knowledge sharing and meaningful networking are at the core of our initiative. We realised that real time interactions among the members are important in strengthening the community, even though these take place online, so we have decided that it is important that talking directly, even though online, helps strengthen this community.
And this is how Coffee Break meetups came to be – a series of online meetups, dedicated to the members of the community, happening every 2 weeks. We approach different topics related to digital marketing and B2B growth, and invite people to share their perspectives. We’ve even cohosted these events with some of the members, to make the most of their expertise, and we are honored they accepted our invitation.
(Our very first meetup, where I forgot to take a screenshot, but luckily, Fergal Taquin did it)
Until now, we’ve talked about topics such as setting one’s priorities, launching and promoting a podcast or content writing and promotion and the feedback has always been very encouraging:
I really like the concept and format. It’s been nice to start out with a few people and talk across industries & experienced. – Nikoline Herzog
The reason I joined the meet-up is I like the things we discuss, I like the intellect and the experience of people in our meet-up. While B2C is fun for people not a lot of people want to discuss B2B marketing strategies in a group but that’s what makes this meet-up special. – Khushboo Azad
As organizers, maybe the most important lesson we’ve learnt is probably that of patience. A strong community grows slowly, but this is also due to the fact that we want to make things right.
(Here, we had Rhys Wesley as a cohost and we talked about writing content for B2B, building a promo strategy and repurposing that content)
People still want to connect and talk “in person” (online for us, given that most of our members are from various countries in Europe). COVID-19 has definitely overcrowded the online environment so we were afraid that people are already tired of digital events.
I joined because I saw the topic coming by and thought it would be interesting. I like the format because I am kind of getting tired of webinars – people talking at me and I can submit questions. It’s nice to talk to other marketing adults 😉 – Kristine Clark
We were happy to see that we were wrong and that if you are structured, patient and genuinely looking to add value, people respond.
Sometimes, it went well, sometimes we realized there are things to improve. We are testing and figuring the best topics the community is interested in (by organizing polls, i.e.), the best timing or the best formats.
These meetups last approx 45 minutes and usually happen on Friday morning. We know how important people’s time is and we also want to avoid Zoom fatigue, so we keep it short and happy.
(Mony Chhim shared his knowledge on podcasts. By the way, you can listen to his episodes in French here).
The art of hosting is indeed an art and it becomes even harder when everything happens online and you cannot “read” a person’s non-verbal communication. On the other hand, these meetups were never thought of as being too formal.
We aim to build a community based on trust, in which members feel safe to ask for advice or a second opinion when they need to.
At the same time, we want to keep things casual and relaxed – true connection happens on a personal level, with people with relatable situations, and we’ve discovered that most of us have many personal things in common (our hobbies, i.e., that we shared in one meetup).
Meetups happen every 2 weeks and are open to everyone in the LinkedIn community and it is just one of the activities we involve our members in. If you are a B2B marketer, we would love to get to know you and learn more about you, so join us here!
