As our 2022 Chicago Automation Fair was approaching the high importance of driving excitement and attendance for the event was a clear focal point. With virtual and hybrid events in our recent past, the importance to drum up as much excitement as possible for our Chicago Automation Fair was of high emphasis. To rise to this challenge, we got started early and amped up the creativity to carry out our messaging like never before. Our strategy was designed to accelerate brand awareness and drive attendance to reignite our powerful attendee audience of Chicago.
The show featured the launch of +50 new products, +120 learning opportunities, an interactive expo hall packed with new innovations from Rockwell Autoation and our PartnerNetwork, as well as many other offerings for the industrial automation audience.
With previous event insights coupled with known social media trends, we developed our social media strategy centered around the use of video to amplify the Automation Fair experience well beyond our traditional audience. Our video-cenrtic approach to telling our many stories from the show floor was a strategic play to reach and engage our attending audience and beyond. The objective to extend the event messaging was met with various creative styles of video, sparking engagement and multiplying the visibility of our priority content.
As we anticipated our Chicago Automation Fair, we analyzed the past few years of social media performance along with the current social trends to inform the development of our strategy. We saw growing interest in our video content and, forecasting that would continue, we developed a strategy using a variety of video styles to visually connect with our highest quality audience for the event.
Our global social media team developed a successful hype video – quick, high energy - to kickoff event registration for Automation Fair, resulting in +1K engagements and ~400 reposts on LinkedIn. Mirroring the same excitement of the kickoff video, industry-specific videos were developed to entice industry professionals. We doubled down by sponsoring them to their unique industry audiences on LinkedIn to meet our potential attendees in their professional social setting. These hype videos delivered the first massive wave of video viewership totaling 564K views.
Our new products are arguably some of the most exciting updates shared at the event, and to avert the risk of our product launches getting lost in the noise, we developed hype videos to showcase our 50+ new products being launched at the event. These videos were played over 62K times with over 50K total views.
With +120 session offerings, the global social team rallied presenters to submit short videos of themselves inviting our social media community to register for their sessions. While those presenter videos began posting, we began a pre-event livestream video series, where again we tapped on our presenters, experts and leadership to highlight the excitement to look forward to at Automation Fair.
Onsite, with ~20K attendees at the event, we were met with the challenge of engaging our in-person attendee audience while extending the messaging beyond the event to generate interest for those unable to attend. We planned 22 thought-leadership livestream videos for LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. We worked ahead to lock in viewership with livestream promotions and a playlist of the videos on our website that we linked to in promotion, and could be accessed via QR code at the event.
To cover the event in a new way, our stories and Twitter coverage needed to be engaging and delivered in a structured way. Plans were made to do mini video tours using Instagram and Facebook stories as well as Twitter threads. These bite-sized videos featuring our event and technology exhibits helped our event coverage come to life.
With this global event, we were faced with the challenge of appealing to audiences around the world on social. We accomplished this by sharing local-language story content, featuring attendees and Rockwell experts on their favorite event takeaways in Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and German - with English subtitles. This contributed to our 78K story views throughout the event.
Lastly, with the rising popularity of Instagram Reels, we tapped into that trend throughout our Automation Fair event coverage with daily recap videos as an engaging way to conclude each day on our social channels.
The overarching objective was to extend the event messaging beyond the show floor and into the feeds of our total following – across all platforms. We developed goals to support our objectives of the event, which included a 30% increase in clicks, engagements and impressions and a 50% increase in video views. Our strategy was the impetus that fostered the amazing results of our social media show coverage. With a solid strategy in place, we were able to act fast on new opportunities and maximize our social media coverage. Our aim was to increase our clicks, engagements and impressions, and we exceeded those goals by driving ~30K clicks to our event webpage (+55% Y/Y), 2.2M impressions (+52% Y/Y), and 52K engagements (+37% Y/Y).
The biggest goal we had set out to achieve was to share more video content to engage our audience. In doing that we set a challenging goal of increasing last year's video views by 50%. With this big scary goal in mind, we capitalized on every video opportunity we could leading up to and throughout the event. We’re very proud to share that we completed the event with 1.2M video views (+1088% Y/Y). We are thrilled to have developed a smart social media strategy to deliver on the overarching event objectives and contribute with such a powerful impact.
