K In The Park is an annual marketing event organized by Kenshoo.
This event is not like your usual conferences – it’s more like a music festival with insightful talks, amazing people from the industry, top brands like Google serving nitrogen ice-cream, and mouth-watering food.
No wonder it won a B2B Marketing Award for the best event of 2018!
And we were glad we could help to make it happen.
The problem
In 2017, Kenshoo run K In The Park for the first time in Central London with a huge success.
in 2018, they wanted to make it even bigger. The only catch was that the event moved from Central London to more spacious but also a more remote location in Kingston. The aim was to attract more people, make more online noise, and close more deals during the event than the previous year.
We started the promotion 3 months ahead of the event to give ourselves enough time to generate excitement around various parts of it an generate enough registrations for potential customers.
We started with a small competition around the reveal of the location. This was to start engaging with the audience in a fun way and also show the location in its best light so when attendees see the location on the invite, they see more than that’s in Kingston but also understand the great experience it offers.
Events are about the speakers. Luckily, KITP had a very impressive line-up. Our job was to make people aware of it. We run a content series called “5 Questions With…” that interviewed speakers in a concise and relaxed way, giving insight into their experience, their presentation at KITP, and also their personality. We run these with images and videos Kenshoo created across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
KITP is not your usual marketing event. It has a very different relaxed vibe that makes networking more fun and enjoyable. We tried to get that across with a series of posts highlighting the best of 2017 event, talking about dress code (forget your suit and tie, think music festival attire), the food (mouth-watering Fabulous Barbecue), and the entertainment including great bands, and little stands serving nitrogen ice cream (hosted by Google) or best Pinterest Cocktails (hosted by Pinterest).
We also run a series of social media polls to let people decide what will be in their goodie bags.
Last but not least, we run a quick countdown a week before the event to engage with the attendees and make them excited about coming.
Shortly before the event, we pre-schedule posts around the main activities and talks across all channels, which freed up our time for live tweeting. These were mainly reminders of the talks starting, encouraging attendees to move to the tent to find a seat before it all starts. However, not all things happen on time when it comes to events so we made sure to keep an eye on the changing schedule as well.
Throughout the talks, we were live tweeting just the main points and quotes of the talks, not to overwhelm our followers with hundreds of tweets at once.
Instagram, and mainly Instagram Stories was were K In The Park came alive the most. The event itself was very visually interesting – we had colourful balloons, a coffee shop where we printed people’s pictures on the foam, amazing bands playing around the venue, plus, we were on an island on a beautiful summer day so there was a lot to take pictures of. We knew that attendees came to the event to learn and network, not to tweet or share their every experience online. Which is why we focused mainly on Instagram and run a competition for those who share a picture with #KITP on their Instagram account or in their Story. This simple mechanic, together with the look of the event helped us boost mentions online.
Once the doors of KITP closed, we still had a few things on our to-do list.
We shared the images and videos created during the event on our channels, encouraging people to tag their friends and colleagues if they spotted them.
As all the talks were filmed, we also published each speech one by one on our channels and created a YouTube Playlist, so even those who did not attend could get a taste of what KITP is about and learn a new thing or two.
And then, of course, we recapped the whole activity into a report with learnings and recommendations for the next KITP.
If you fancy seeing what KITP looked like in 2018, check out this album