When live events came to a halt in 2020, it left businesses like N-SIDE that rely on in-person conferences at a loss.

N-SIDE is a deeptech company that empowers organizations in the life sciences and energy sectors to make better decisions and optimize the use of critical resources. N-SIDE’s highly-focused Energy division helps system operators, power exchanges, and market participants make better, faster, and safer decisions about power markets and the management of energy grids.

Due to the complex nature of the energy sector and small number of potential buyers, the Energy division relied on in-person events as a primary source of lead generation.

When COVID hit, the N-SIDE team needed to rapidly replace its in-person industry conferences with online events — but they couldn’t do it alone.

N-SIDE came to Salted Stone to identify the best opportunities for promoting these online events and reach new potential leads within an extremely niche audience.

The challenge

N-SIDE’s Energy division decided a series of webinars would be the best way to attract new potential prospects in lieu of live events.

But because the division operates in an extremely specific industry, it would be difficult to promote the webinars to interested audiences. In addition, the topics would be complex and difficult to synthesize into the bite-sized content for advertising and promotion.

One webinar was focused on redefining approaches to flexibility management models, while the other was centered on how AI can help energy market participants find newer, more innovative forecasting solutions in increasingly volatile times.

To begin the strategic program, Salted Stone team members Kaley Deneen, Lead Strategist/Account Director; Meghan Rosales and Fabian Ramirez from the Media Team; and Ben Sack and Kirby Squires from the Editorial Team, created a set of goals for N-SIDE:

• Primary goal: Increase energy leads in Europe, tracking KPIs like number of webinar registrants and post-webinar downloads
• Secondary goal: Continue growing brand awareness for N-SIDE in Europe, measuring KPIs including ad impressions/engagements/clicks and organic SEO traffic

Salted Stone's approach

To boost the efficacy of N-SIDE’s webinars, Salted Stone helped the company execute two LinkedIn campaigns to increase registrations. We also leveraged webinar content to develop SEO-focused blog posts that increase the ROI of the content.

“Many marketers and executives have the view that LinkedIn is an expensive platform, and it does have generally high CPMs compared to some other paid media channels. However, with the right targeting and the right messaging, it can be a highly effective tool for reaching niche audiences, and can ensure that budgets are being funneled toward more valuable impressions and engagements.”

– Kaley Deneen, Lead Strategist and Account Director at Salted Stone

We provided the following solutions as part of this campaign:

Paid media

Salted Stone launched LinkedIn consideration and conversion campaigns to help drive webinar attendance. We provided media strategy, messaging strategy and ad copy, campaign execution, monitoring, and optimization of two four-week campaigns.

This webinar’s four-week campaign earned click-through rates more than 3x the platform average.

This webinar’s four-week campaign earned click-through rates more than 3x the platform average.

Campaign analytics and reporting

Salted Stone used an array of tools to capture the results of our strategic program.

Through LinkedIn Advertising and HubSpot Ads Software, we were able to deliver a full report on each webinar campaign featuring performance highlights and granular details on KPIs like:

• Leads
• Impressions
• Click-through rates
• Cost per click
• Conversion rates
• Total engagements
• Spend

Using the Hubspot reporting dashboard, we were able to track the following KPIs for the webinar landing pages and post-webinar blog posts, segmented by sources like LinkedIn, organic search, direct traffic, and email.

• Page views
• Form submissions
• New contacts
• Time on page
• Bounce rates

“Salted Stone took on the tall task of understanding an incredibly complex industry and supporting us while we figured out how to change the direction of our business strategy. The team synthesized niche and technical information to deliver a campaign that showed an understanding of the value of events in our industry, and attracted new leads from our target audience.”

– Rui Yu, Marketing Manager, N-SIDE Energy

Inbound content

To extend the value of each webinar beyond the initial event, Salted Stone crafted SEO-optimized blog posts with links to each webinar replay. These blog posts are being used for organic lead generation, as well as ongoing promotion via email and the website.

Through interviews with subject matter experts and background work on N-SIDE’s buyer personas and customer journeys, Salted Stone’s Editorial Team was able to synthesize the highly complex information presented in each webinar into easy-to-read articles.

Read our webinar recap blog posts:

• 3 real-world models for TSO-DSO coordination in flexibility management
• Electricity price volatility: How to trust AI-based forecasts

The results

Through our partnership, Salted Stone was able to help N-SIDE achieve the goals we set at the start the strategic program: Generate new energy leads in Europe, and grow brand awareness for the N-SIDE Energy division in European markets. 

Here’s a look at the results we achieved across both webinar campaigns:

Rui Yu, Marketing Manager for N-SIDE Energy, found the results of Salted Stone’s strategic program exceeded expectations, as the campaigns introduced N-SIDE to new leads and increased brand awareness within its target audience in Europe.

“Salted Stone took on the tall task of understanding an incredibly complex industry and supporting us while we figured out how to change the direction of our business strategy,” Yu said. “The team synthesized niche and technical information to deliver a campaign that showed an understanding of the value of events in our industry, and attracted new leads from our target audience.”

Kaley Deneen, Lead Strategist and Account Director at Salted Stone EMEA, was particularly proud of the success of the LinkedIn campaign.

“Many marketers and executives have the view that LinkedIn is an expensive platform, and it does have generally high CPMs compared to some other paid media channels,” she said. “However, with the right targeting and the right messaging, it can be a highly effective tool for reaching niche audiences and can ensure that budgets are being funneled toward more valuable impressions and engagements.”

Looking ahead

Salted Stone and N-SIDE are continuing their partnership into the second half of 2022 and beyond.

With the groundwork laid for N-SIDE’s webinar campaigns, each subsequent campaign becomes faster and simpler to execute. And thanks to the ongoing monitoring and reporting conducted by Salted Stone’s Media Team, we expect campaigns to continue becoming more efficient over time.

Pleased with the success so far, N-SIDE is already planning more webinar campaigns, and is even expanding the approach to their Life Sciences business.