SalesTechStar Interview with Nishchal Dua, Director of Marketing at Airmeet

Nishchal Dua, Director of Marketing at Airmeet shares his thoughts on some of the top trends marketers and sales teams of today need to tap into to drive better hybrid event experiences and ROI:

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Hi Nishchal, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about your role at Airmeet?

I’m the Director of Marketing at Airmeet where I lead the Community, Events & Partnerships functions globally. 

I’ve been an entrepreneur, a self-taught marketer & a remote work evangelist for the better part of the last decade. 

I bootstrapped & exited my previous startup with a solid 6-figure revenue and that’s where I went deep into remote work as a practice. I traveled the world in search of interesting stories & communities that would help me grow the tribe of remote evangelists we were building. This eventually led to us launching the world’s largest virtual conference dedicated to remote work in 2016 & it has been our annual flagship event since then. 

I’m now heavily involved in scaling our Community-led-Growth model at Airmeet. 

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We’d love to hear your thoughts on the importance of building and growing a community online in today’s time and how marketers of today need to focus on this and how?

I have very openly talked about how communities are the only reasonable & long-standing moat in today’s world. If there’s 1 thing that startups or enterprises should focus on for reliable, consistent growth – it’s community. 

Organizations & products which are able to build a successful community, often transform into cults with a loyal following that cannot be bought, acquired or easily replicated by competitors. 

Communities are the best form of attack & defense because they are essentially a gathering of like-minded individuals with a shared passion and a common purpose/objective. This makes them the perfect growth channel. 

Successful examples of B2B orgs with cult-like communities are Notion, Superhuman, Doist, Buffer, Figma, Dribbble, Automattic, Salesforce & others. 

These companies have proven how community-led-growth (CLG) is a growth engine that brings together product, marketing, sales, partnerships & support functions into a holistic environment where customers can thrive. A CLG model puts the customer at the very heart of everything the organization does. Any organization that looks at these functions in isolation is leaving space open for a competitor to rally the market around their ideas, their vision & their community. 

What are some thoughts in mind for the events industry in the tech market you’d like to highlight, as businesses and economies limp back to pre-Covid days and that pace, how do you feel marketers should capitalize on this return? Some thoughts on the importance of striving for seamless online event experiences despite this?

The events industry has literally come back from the dead during the pandemic. The in-person conferences, trade-shows & exhibitions pre-covid lacked innovation & were slow to adopt the latest tech enhancements. Covid essentially helped the industry take a pause, re-evaluate the status quo & come back in full force with a renewed focus on digitization & hybrid technologies. 

In the last 18 months, events, conferences & webinars have become an essential part of every marketer’s toolkit because of the ripple effect an event has on any organization’s growth across channels. 

Our customers are spending more time indoors, a large chunk of the knowledge economy is working remotely and it is still a challenge for them to access high-quality, vetted content. Reduced social interactions also create a need to build better relationships online. These are the trends that marketers need to tap into. 

A thought-fully created hybrid event could effectively help a marketer in demand gen by bringing their ideal customer’s closer to the brand. It could help engage the existing pipeline of prospects & customers for better retention & expansion opportunities. A thought-leadership conference brings together industry experts & influencers to expand your brand authority & credibility. It also creates a ton of unique, insightful, first-hand content that would have otherwise been difficult to produce. This content will fuel your marketing efforts for a long time. I can’t think of a better marketing initiative that ties together content marketing, influencer marketing & demand generation in such an intuitive way. 

What do you feel today’s marketers and sales leaders can do differently to grow online prospect and customer engagement without drowning in all the digital noise? Some key takeaways and learnings from brands that have been doing this successfully the past year?

The best & the worst part about marketing is that it’s constantly changing. So while there are a few really good playbooks that can be implemented, there’s always going to be a certain degree of flux in the industry. 

Which is why my number 1 tip to myself & everyone else is to – listen! 

Listen to what your customers are saying, listen to what the influencers are talking about, keep an open mind about “what works” and be always ready to adapt. Any marketing or sales leader that doesn’t tune in to a couple of customer calls every month is already losing the race. Slack comes to mind when I think of a B2B brand that actually listens to its customers. Slack goes a step further to openly participate in the humorous (& sometimes scary) everyday relatable stories of Slack-overload from customers. They even talk about this in their internal employee handbook where they accept that unplugging from Slack & the FOMO that follows is a real challenge. 

The 2nd thing that marketing & sales folks can do differently is to trust the market & crowdsource. 

We’re often obsessed with “creating the best content” or “doing the right marketing” and that could really cloud our judgement especially once you grow to a stage where there are just too many stakeholders involved. 

Crowdsourcing is a painful but rewarding process. Let your customers & your community do the talking. Let them suggest & create unique content for you. Let them lead the way in how your brand interacts online. In fact, crowdsource your entire marketing & sales strategy. You’d be surprised at the inputs you’ll get once you develop a habit of simply “asking & listening to your community”. 

Buffer does this brilliantly and it works because they aggressively & transparently deliver on the ideas they crowdsource from their super-active community.

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What are some core event technologies and customer experience technologies that you see are changing the game for B2B marketers today? A few best practices for teams adopting these tools for the first time?

Event tech is undergoing a monumental change right now & the industry is expected to continue innovating aggressively for the near future given the sharp focus on creating immersive hybrid events that deliver an omni-channel experience. 

I’ll share 3 areas where event & attendee experience can be enhanced to a degree that helps sales & marketing professionals stand out from the crowd. 

First, focus on delivering a rich hybrid stage experience. 

A rich, immersive, hybrid stage essentially is able to pull in & push out dynamic content both online & in-person. It allows speakers, moderators & attendees to join or view wherever they are. At the same time, the digital stage can have rich, dynamic branding (depending on attendee profile, geography, interests). It can also go a few degrees beyond just video showcases to include responsive polls, on-stage Q&As, raise hands, live social feeds, attendee face-walls and enhanced news-cast style video feeds.

Second, ensure a meaningful & rewarding networking experience. Using advanced AI-driven match-making that brings event attendees together based on their interests, objectives, seniority & profiles to help build better relationships. This is where event technologies can help a large conference become a much more meaningful experience for the individual attendee. 

Finally, bringing more personalization & automation to the individual attendee’s experience is the key to drastically improving conversion rates, pipeline acceleration & revenue generation. Imagine if each of your virtual attendees can have a personalized experience & journey. Imagine if they all see unique sessions, booths, offer triggers, Q&As and timely sales & marketing prompts. 

Implementing these advanced event experiences through all-in-one platforms (like Airmeet!) ☺ can be the difference between “just-another-event” and a “wow-experience”. 

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s sales and marketing leaders need to more of or differently?

We’re increasingly seeing the market & customers become more informed, mature & genuine. 

And that’s exactly what they expect from our marketing & sales leaders today. 

My single most important advice for leaders would be to think from first principles & break the 4th wall. 

Forget what you know. It’s ok to not do what everyone else has been doing for a long time. Throw out the playbook and don’t sweat about the process. 

Thinking from first principles helps you re-imagine the problem from scratch & start from the most basic of questions. Doing this can help you look at your industry from a new lens & stand out from the crowd. 

And while you’re at it, break the 4th wall. Stop thinking about customers as an “audience” you want to secretly sell to from behind the curtains. 

Step out and openly talk to prospects about your everyday conversations. The prospects already know that our job is to market to them, so why not do it openly. Frank, candid, transparent conversations are a breath of fresh air & appreciated a lot more than you can imagine. 

If I feel I’m talking to a genuine human that I could be friends with, I’d be way more comfortable trusting them with my business.  

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