Episode 28: Seventeen Events in 1 Year!
Welcome to the next episode of The CMA Soulmate Newsletter where 690 marketers get better at building Customer Marketing programs and strengthening relationships with customers in less than 5 minutes.
2022 is almost over! I’m doing a ton of final reporting on all the programs I have worked on this past year, and WHOA there is an overarching theme… virtual events!
Side note - I’m so pumped to announce that I am throwing our first in-person customer conference in Las Vegas specifically for my 600 advocates on Jan 11th. I’m so excited and will do an episode on how to plan a conference in 45 days 🤣 😳
I knew back at the beginning of 2022 that I wanted to increase influenced revenue from events for prospects, customers & advocates but I didn’t know how impactful they would be both on new business revenue and customer adoption/expansion.
This year, I executed 17 events which consisted of a virtual CAB, User Groups, an Award Show, Group Reference Events, and Product Launch webinars. For a one woman team, I couldn’t be more impressed with myself. 🤣
It has never been more clear in my 7 years in Customer Marketing that events move all the needles.
What makes virtual event planning different is how you research your audience, which virtual event type you choose, where you choose to host it, and what virtual event technology you partner with to run it all from start to finish.
Let’s break this into my 3 event types by audience:
Prospect Events w/ the goal of deal acceleration, increase win rate, and influenced closed revenue.
Customer & Prospect Events w/ the goal of adoption & expansion as well as net new MQLs and influenced closed won revenue.
Advocacy Events with the goal of VIP treatment, exclusivity, increase customer sentiment and retention.
Let’s break it down and go from the bottom up!
At Sendoso, we launch new features quarterly so I do a virtual event with the goal of making them feel special and educated. That’s it. Those are my goals.
Product Launch Events
Another 2021 goal of mine was to create hype around our Product Launches. I do this by throwing “Launch Parties” 🤣
What are they:
A 2 part event
First 30 minutes: Keep Advocates in the know of the latest launch. Inspire and share new ideas on platform usage. The kicker here is that the advocates get to know what is coming out before our own employees. They love that!
Last 30 minutes: Is an activity! I go back and forth each quarter with Happy hour or wine tastings parties or Cold brew tasting parties.
Customer benefits for these parties include:
Rolling out the red carpet for Advocates by giving them a first look into the newest launch features
Beta Testing access
Staying top of mind
Education
Hearing from other customers on successful use cases
Working for a gifting platform AND in Customer Advocacy, I like to send a registration gift that goes along with the theme. Here is a picture of the mini wine bottles and the cold brew box
Like a mentioned, my goals are really to make them very special and in the know but sure you can measure things.
Metrics include:
Registration numbers
Attendee numbers (always trying to prove that the gift is increasing attendance)
# of beta testers
Case Study from Customer Speaker
Influence on open upsell opp
Expansion into other departments (if a new feature is one that benefits other departments)
The Product team really likes these events because they get to see the questions our power users ask prior to launching to the public. It lets us know what extra support articles we should create.
This is great for the product team to stay close to the customers outside of a Customer Advisory Board.
User Groups
As Customer Marketers, one of our many initiatives is to increase stickiness and adoption of our platform. At Sendoso, we have different use cases as well as several integrations. There is never a shortage of topics to host a User Group. Now these may not be a massive audience but they are impactful and you are able to squeeze the value out of the recordings.
What are they?
Monthly, sometimes bi-monthly I put on User groups They connect customers to learn, share strategies and best practices. These events are becoming a central part of business’ customer relationship strategies.
Benefits for the customer
Give Yourself a Technical Edge
Peer-to-peer training and discussion groups offered by user groups are an effective way to learn and enhance your technology skills
Build Connections with Your Peers
By far the biggest benefit of participating in a user group that covers your particular technology is the ability to interact with peers
Gain New Knowledge
User groups typically offer constant opportunities to learn something new.
Because these “user groups'' can be so broad, it's important to determine what you want out of them. Think of things like:
Is the goal of your user group to build stronger bonds with customers by hosting monthly/quarterly in-person/virtual meetings?
Are you trying to keep customers more informed about your products and services?
Is your company looking to your user group to aggregate the voice of your customer and provide ongoing market data
Are you trying to deepen product knowledge and create stickiness?
More importantly, it’s about what the customer needs. DUH! Well hey, sometimes we all need to be reminded. My customers crave info on how to integrate with other platforms to automate and scale their programs. So the topics I choose range from specific use cases to the different integrations we have.
If you are unsure about what topics to center these events around, I’d start by interviewing your customers on:
How do you use our products/services?
Are there features/services you use all the time? How?
Tell me about a challenge you’re experiencing as a customer
What kinds of problems would connecting with other users help you solve?
What technology tools are you using to get these jobs done now?
What’s the final result you’re trying to achieve?
As I mentioned, because User Groups have a smaller audience the results will be smaller in revenue but may have a big impact on adoption and touch renewal opportunities.
Some Metrics include:
Increase in customer sentiment
Increase in product usage 3 months post (Use Tableau)
Adoption of different integrations
Increased engagement in platform (Use Pendo or Amplitude)
Influenced closed won renewal
Primary Campaign Source of Upsells
Expansion referrals
Net new advocates
**Lessons Learned** A mistake I made all last year was that I only sent the recording to folks who joined or missed the event.
I was missing so many opportunities to plug into other departments. Now I
Pass the recordings over to my education team
Use it in my advocacy nurture streams
Pop it into Highspot so all of our customer facing teams can send to customers and it’s trackable.
Since implementing this, I can see the customers who consume it from either of those channels and see if any upsells, new integrations, professional services packages come from it. In addition, I now have new program output metrics to report on at the end of the year.
For many companies, user groups have been a big part of building a stand-out customer experience. So if you haven’t started these small yet mighty events, I’d get on them.
Prospect Events:
As someone who has only ever executed customer events, I was a bit shy to extend my programs to include prospects. But if these times have taught us anything it’s to stay close to revenue.
Group Reference Event
I was on a mission to do true Advocate Marketing in 2022. I wanted to layer on another program where advocates sell directly to prospects at scale.
What are they?
A quarterly event that leverages 2 advocates to speak to prospects with the goal of accelerating Q4 deals. They share their history before using your platform, why they purchased, their experience and results. The secret sauce here is making them feel exclusive while opening it up to 50 accounts.
Here is the episode where I go into full detail!
Customer & Prospect Event
As I mentioned, I was nervous to invite prospects to my customer award show. By why? It’s the best case scenario for prospects to join a customer event. It a massive love fest!
Customer Award Show
I’ll start with why award programs are so brilliant. Personally I love:
How deep of a connection you build with award winners
You get the majority of your case studies banged out at once and so many other assets (videos, blogs, social posts)
Revenue numbers!
Here are some objectives that you would present to your exec team:
Establish your company as a leading industry benchmark
Increase awareness of use cases to the masses
Deepen engagement to support upsell opportunities as well as future advocates
Build a resource of customers to be leveraged for other efforts (case studies, videos, events)
Net new MQLs and accelerate deals
Here is the full episode on Award Programs.
Hope this has given you some great ideas for 2023 planning with your boss.
Oh one more thing, with any customer event you will most likely send the recording to folks who made it or didn’t make it. To the folks that did make it, I’d recommend asking for a review in the P.S.
*TIP*- Adding a P.S. to the end of any automated email humanizes the message and if you are offering an eGift all the better to make a great surprise & delight moment.
Love your CMA Soulmate,
Leslie
P.S. I will do an episode in a few weeks on allllll the 2022 totals and results of my programs and CMA department. So excited to see my YOY growth and % to goal. 🎉
More Digital Resources
Catch up on previous newsletters here.
Follow me on Linkedin for edu-taining content on CMA tactics
Check out my video course Measuring the ROI of Customer Marketing & Advocacy if you want to showcase the ROI of your programs. Enjoy your 20% off
I took my metrics sheet out of the course as an extra offering. Customer Marketing & Advocacy Metrics Spreadsheet is available now if you aren’t ready to purchase my course.