The TechSWINDON Summit is an annual event focused on emerging technologies and showcasing Swindon tech businesses to the world.

Aimed at business leaders, investors and influencers, it brings together first-class global speakers and founders who cover the impact and implications of new technologies on business, their people, their investment strategies and wider society.

With Swindon not known as a leading technology hotspot, the summit was designed to reshape the image of the town and attract future inward investment, whilst importantly boosting the profile of businesses currently in Swindon.

The TechsSWINDON Summit was made up of a steering board of major employers in the town, including Nationwide, IBM, SetSquared & Swindon Borough Council.

The TechSWINDON Summit aims to:

– Increase awareness among regional business leaders about opportunities and support on offer in Swindon

– Deliver increased understanding of emerging technologies and solution providers in Swindon who can help enable businesses.

– Highlight the strengths of the town and demonstrate how Swindon is an emerging challenger within the digital economy

– Increase awareness with business leaders, investors and global deal makers to promote inward investment opportunities into Swindon

Held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic – the digital-first event facilitated discussion and exhibition on some of the most innovative technology in the town and globally.

TechSWINDON approached HdE AGENCY with the objective develop a digital marketing campaign to hit a number of key objectives.

The TechSWINDON Summit required a strong, comprehensive marketing campaign and digital identity to promote and showcase all aspects of the event and to most importantly attract delegates to attend online events.

We quickly planned and executed a multi-channel marketing campaign which was broken down into two major parts – delegate acquisition and international promotion – to raise awareness and to encourage delegates to register.

Planning was significantly impacted due to the pandemic, however the groups ambition to showcase Swindon to the world remained paramount, we were set a target of securing 1,000 attendees in 4 weeks!

Not a problem… taking our learnings from other conference campaigns, we deployed our proven delegate acquisition strategy to aggressively target and convert prospects, at some serious pace!

To drive urgency, we developed a fast paced video asset which served as a major pillar to our strategy. Our expert video team produced two ‘hero’ video assets to position the event to our two audience groups.

The video was boosted with a high-impact paid social ad strategy. We then retargeted visitors to the website with programatic advertising and custom messaging based on their onsite behaviours to drive conversions.

This video asset, twinned with our ad strategy ultimately transformed the event messaging, and helped promote Swindon as a vibrant technology destination.

With a total of 951K video views, 844K ad impressions (61% international views) and 2,732 attendees to this year one event, we delivered a campaign that has helped secure Swindon in the minds of business leaders, founders, dealmakers and investors across the globe.