Disney, Marvel, Netflix. The world is obsessed with series. If it’s valuable, snackable, and fun to watch, you can bet your audience will be there.

The same is true for your events.

As with every great series, an ongoing event series can empower your audience to get to know you, nurturing a positive relationship season after season.

In this article, we’ll share the latest best practices for building a successful event series, plus six examples from real brands winning with serialized content.

Curious what other best practices you might be missing? Watch all four episodes of our Series Masterclass on-demand and get firsthand insights to drive your success.

Event series examples

1. Tiny Tutorials by 1Password
2. HR Unplugged by BambooHR
3. Netskope’s live demo series
4. Handshake’s Career Spark Awards
5. GTM AI by Qualified
6. Donuts & Demand by Goldcast

These days, reaching people is like finding a needle in a haystack. Sales cycles are longer, there are more decision-makers involved, and with a cookie-less future just around the corner, it's about to get even more challenging.

In other words, relationships are taking center stage like never before. And those relationships begin long before your first contact with a potential customer. You need a strategy to engage your prospects before they’re shopping to buy.

“If you look at where the entire consumer industry has headed over the past 10 years, it’s been this evolution towards building bingeworthy content and getting someone to subscribe to and consume content as part of their weekly, monthly, or daily routine,” says Ian Faison, CEO & Founder at video and podcasting services company Caspian Studios.

Ian and his team produce around 65 video series, primarily for B2B audiences. You could say he wrote the book on serialized content. No, really. It’s called The Serialized Content Framework (and it’s free 😉).

In the next section, we’ll dive into exactly how that framework can be used to build a powerful event series that drives demand and revenue. But first, let’s take a closer look at some of the key advantages a great event series can deliver:

• Build an audience through valuable content delivered consistently
• Nurture relationships by providing regular opportunities to connect
• Fuel your multi-channel content strategy by repurposing your event content
• Tap into the built-in distribution to keep your audience numbers high
• Drive 'brand gen' to target accounts for a measurable impact on pipeline

"It's built in distribution which is genius. If you have a webinar series, [you can go] if you like this discussion, join us for the next one a month from now, two weeks from now, next week, whatever it is," says Arthur Castillo, Head of Dark Social & Evangelism at Chili Piper.

For an event series that supports your overarching revenue strategy and encourages people to attend time and time again, you need to know which ingredients matter.

So, what makes a great event series? Here are five fundamental elements of a successful series.

Your audience doesn’t care about your brand. They want to know what their peers are getting up to.

“If it's just Ian screaming out into the void, it's not going to be as effective as if I bring on a bunch of CMOs and marketing leaders,” explained Ian in part one of our recent four-part Series Masterclass. Ian helped the team at Qualified create their Pipeline Visionaries series, featuring high-profile marketing and demand generation leaders.

Attendees want information, but they also want to have a good time.

Pipeline Visionaries also includes an “uncuttable budget item” segment that’s extremely popular with attendees. With the right schtick, you can easily repurpose these moments of levity into engaging content for other channels. “We make micro content from the uncuttable budget item section where we'll do super cut episodes,” said Ian.

In addition to getting your content on channels like LinkedIn, Apple podcasts, YouTube, and more, a successful event series can scale across formats—including long- and short-form video, audio, and written pieces.

“It should be all those things,” said Ian. “Some people like to listen to a podcast when they walk their dog. Some like to watch the YouTube video while they're working. Some just like to read it on their phone.”

Read your event series title and tagline out loud. If you can’t tell exactly who it’s for within five seconds, it’s time to reassess your theme.

“This is by far and away, the biggest thing that people screw up. They just don't pick the persona that is most valuable to them or the persona that they want to target,” explained Ian.

WIth a consistent, repeatable format, your event will build on itself.

“That consistency breeds familiarity. At a certain time, you see this company all the time. And that's what you want. You want to build a series where people know exactly what they're expecting and get it every single time,” said Ian.

The term “serialized content” can feel like just another marketing buzzword. But many brands are proving that this is one marketing trend that’s definitely worth the hype.

To get it right, there are a few important strategies to pick out as you work to refine your concept. Here are the key areas to pay attention to:

• Series names and descriptions
• Email messaging and cadence
• Imagery, branding and videos
• Landing page layouts and registration strategies
• Social media campaigns
• Content repurposing opportunities

Great. With these core elements in mind, let’s dive into six real examples of event series in action.

Goal: Expand and onboard customers

Theme: Bite-sized tutorials for common scenarios teams face

Customer onboarding isn’t easy. And with more and more users demanding self-serve experiences, Nicola Plate, B2B Marketing Campaigns Manager, and the rest of the team at 1Password were looking for new ways to provide a stellar onboarding experience for smaller accounts.

In partnership with the customer support team, they created the Tiny Tutorials webinar series to do exactly that. The five-part series helps users learn how to get the most out of 1Password, featuring a lineup of their customer support team members as speakers.

“We wanted to make sure it was repeatable, scalable, and something that could really drive value,” explained Nicola.

Here are a few of the things that make the Tiny Tutorials series unique:

• Succinct and easy-to-understand series name
• Clear list of what’s covered in each event
• Option to “Check out the rest of the Tiny Tutorials series” at the bottom of each event’s registration page

Goal: Brand awareness

Theme: Real talk on the challenges facing HR

HR Unplugged is a live, interactive event where Anita Grantham, Head of HR at BambooHR, tackles some of the stickiest topics in the corporate world.

And in a competitive field like HR tech, it’s been a great way to build a dedicated following. Each episode features their ICP’s peers in HR leadership, highlighting actionable tips and insights on anything from how to effectively use PTO to improving company culture.

Here are some of our favorite elements of HR Unplugged:

• Powerful imagery and branding that says exactly who it’s for
• Concise ‘Save Your Seat’ emails that also promote annual one-off events
• Seamless repurposing from event to podcast
• Expansive content hub with all on-demand episodes

Goal: Product awareness

Theme: Get hands-on with the Netskope platform

Netskope hosted a series of eight live demos as part of their larger Experience Netskope program. And you gotta see their super slick event description:

Join our Netskope subject matter experts to get up close and personal with our premium solutions that solve for security that’s ready for anything. Ask questions, get answers.

In an effort to educate prospects and customers, demos covered topics like advanced threat protection with the Netskope platform, Netskope's industry leading data loss prevention, and more.

What we like:

• Value-led event description
• Supports a larger program, but also stands on its own
• All past episodes are easily watchable on demand

Goal: Customer retention

Theme: Recognize top customers using Handshake data

Handshake is an employer branding and recruitment platform that helps connect companies with the best early talent for their open roles. Their three-part webinar series, the Career Spark Awards, celebrated the top career centers in three categories:

• Reporting and analytics
• Employer engagement
• Student engagement

During each event in the series, a selection of Handshake’s 2023 award winners shared their insights into the latest best practices based on expert firsthand experiences. We love their simple, customer-focused tagline: Celebrating career centers powering the future of work.

Here are some of our favorite things about this event series:

• Clearly defined themes for each event in series
• Peer-led with insights directly from award winners
• Included speakers in social media promos to expand reach
• Repurposed content into blog post to amplify engagement

Goal: Thought leadership

Theme: Integrating AI into your GTM tech stack

Check out the tagline on this one: The future go-to-market tech stack.

If that’s not inspiring, we don’t know what is. With so much hype around AI, the marketing team at Qualified knew they could add real value to the conversation. Led by CMO, Maura Rivera, the team created the GTM AI event series spotlighting real companies using AI to modernize their GTM motion.

Each event in the series highlighted a specific use case, for example, predicting lead and deal cycles, using AI-powered video emails, and automating prospecting. Speakers provide a behind-the-scenes demo showing Qualified’s attendees exactly how it’s done.

“With our virtual event series and in person event series, we have so much content. I almost don't know what to do with it all,” laughed Maura. It’s a champagne problem to be sure. 🥂

Here’s what we love about the GTM AI series:

• Stunning imagery on the event landing page and emails
• Clear use cases for every session
• High profile speakers for instant credibility

Goal: Brand awareness

Theme: Modern marketing and demand gen strategies that are actually effective

Last but not least, we’ve got to shout out to our own Donuts & Demand series.

With a deliciously on-brand tagline, “Nothing’s as Sweet as Filling Your Pipeline”, each episode features fresh ideas demand gen leaders are actually using to drive real results.

It's fun, informative, and collaborative. And best of all it’s made by demand gen marketers for demand gen marketers.

Some of our favorite aspects of Donuts & Demand include:

• A small get-to-know the host section on the event registration page
• Searchable on-demand content hub
• Countdown clock to the next episode
• Super fun branding and messaging (who doesn’t like donuts?)

As a modern marketer, you’ve to give the people what they want. And in 2024, that’s repeatable, consumable, actionable content.

The right event series ticks all those boxes and more, helping you build the right relationships in your market while creating a high-octane content engine to fuel your multichannel success.

At Goldcast, we know firsthand just how powerful a great event series can be—if you have the tools and strategy to back it up.

To build an event series worth watching, don’t miss our Series Masterclass. Binge all episodes on-demand and get ready to watch your event series soar.