Building Your Brand Through Events with Mark Kilens

Mark Kilens is Chief Marketing Officer of Airmeet, a virtual and hybrid event platform. While it’s been a challenging couple of years, events of all kinds—virtual, hybrid, and live—are critical components of the content marketing landscape. Mark and I discussed all of this and more, this week on the On Brand podcast.

About Mark Kilens

As Chief Marketing Officer of virtual and hybrid event platform, Airmeet, Mark Kilens leads a global team of marketing professionals who are working to advance the event-led growth movement across the B2B events category. Kilens has 15 years of marketing leadership experience. His main goal is to help global businesses engage and grow their customer base through event-led growth practices. This consists of using immersive and integrated events across the entire customer journey to create a highly personalized digital experience.

Prior to joining Airmeet, he served as VP of Content and Community at Drift, and oversaw Drift Insider, a community of 50,000+ members. He also previously held the title of VP of Marketing at HubSpot and went on to build HubSpot Academy from the ground up, which led the company to surpass $600 Million USD in revenue.

Episode Highlights

“We need to expand our definition of events,” Mark began. “Events include webinars and online events as well.” Mark went on to talk about how podcasts are events as well.

Chicken or egg? In talking about the interrelationship between content and events, Mark posed a classic chicken-and-egg question: what should come first—the content or the event? Mark made a case for both. “It really depends on what you’re doing with your event.”

“If there’s one thing to do differently in your events …” I love this type of statement from a guest. Mark suggests that we need to spend as much time planning the event as we do producing and promoting it. This adds up to time well spent as you dig deeper on what your event is and who it’s for.

What brand has made Mark smile recently? “Patagonia—I just love the brand and the product,” Mark noted. “Plus they’re picking a side and that’s important in branding today.”

To learn more, you can connect with Mark on LinkedIn and Twitter.

As We Wrap …

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• On Brand is a part of the Marketing Podcast Network.

Until next week, I’ll see you on the Internet!

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