Cloud Connect: LA NET Event Success!

Thank you to all who came to our very first event!  We really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedules to spend the afternoon with us, and we enjoyed your company.

Learnings

We learned a lot from this event and will document some of what we learned here.

Preparation

There was so much to prepare!!  We had many internal meetings and discussions about what we should do, what we should bring, etc.  We think the planning paid off as we practised our talks and planned who was in charge of things like camera, AV, food etc.  We believe this helped a lot!

Biggest Realisation

We have a great network of partners, customers, and friends who were all very complimentary about working with us.  We knew our relationships were good, but hearing everyone talk about their excellent experiences working with us was eye-opening!  Thank you to those who gave us glowing feedback on the day; we had no idea!

Agenda

We had three talks: an intro to cloud cost and security, a break, and a talk on Azure Fabric and Purview.  We can use Fabric to speed up Data Analytics projects and bring the data to life using AI and asking questions in natural language.   Jay talked about the components of Azure Fabric, including costs, licensing, and data governance.  LA NET works closely with Ingram Micro on projects like Azure Fabric, so contact us if you want to know more.

Here, we see Jay Akram, a Cloud Solution Architect for our friends and main sponsor, Ingram Micro.

Then we finished with a talk on our Digital Marketing journey, and Adam Prosser from https://activeinternetmarketing.co.uk gave a very interesting talk on SEO, how our websites rank on Google, and the work that goes into increasing your rankings.  There were lots of questions and tips from Adam, such as:-

• Domain Authority
• Creating valuable and helpful content
• Not relying on AI to create content
• Using EEAT to help with your SEO
  • Experience
  • Expertise
  • Authoritativeness
  • Trustworthiness

You can also learn about this and more over on their blog here: https://activeinternetmarketing.co.uk/the-importance-of-e-e-a-t-for-your-business-and-its-potential-success-on-your-seo/

We all learned a lot from Adam. You can reach out to Adam using the URL above. Or find him on LinkedIn HERE.

We looked at our journey from building a business through pure referrals and repeat business to where we are now.  We have been putting proper marketing efforts into place by hiring a fractional marketing company and a telesales company and putting in suitable systems to put on events like these. All of these are things we have been advised to do and should do to help grow the business.  Time will tell; it is a long game…

Key Learnings

Camera and Lighting / Environment

We had a go at photographing and filming ourselves!  This was mainly because we enjoyed it and enjoyed learning.  While the results were okay, they would have been much better if we had a professional and more budget to hire someone.  The room had lots of lights as it was pretty dark. This did NOT help with the photos.   We will look for a brighter space next time.

Attendance

We knew there would be drop-outs, and of course there was.  We had 26 attendees registered with 21 people on the day, so we are told this is not a bad result!  We kept in touch with the registrants using our CRM system to send out reminders and notifications, which may have helped.   Hopefully, it did.

Preparedness

It pays to prepare for an event like this. Even though it was relatively small, we did not want to wing it and do our best. We recommend not underestimating the preparation time and ensuring you practice and have materials ready.  We created new banners, an A4 flyer, presentations and more.

To The Next One!

We hope to come back bigger and better next year with your support. We could not have done it without our sponsors, customers, partners and all attendees who have supported us.  So, we say a massive THANK YOU and stay tuned for the next event.