#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
Thread
Hi All - I’m new to Community and I’m a one-person team. I wanted to use events in our programming to help members connect and learn from each other. Besides AMAs and networking sessions, are there other events that you’ve used to increase engagement in your communities? Do you find that marketers value events with professional/skill-building content or thought leadership or should it be completely hospitality/fun experiences? We will poll our members too but wanted to get thoughts from this group. Thanks!
Welcome @Kelly Miller! I do think the focus or mix is highly dependent on the target audience. For practitioners, events like the ones @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) hosts here focused on specific challenges or execution are a great way to connect customers, get an added layer of support for them and also build valuable best practice content from the discussions!
Folks with some margin in their schedule who don’t necessarily get a lot of vendor love also love experiences. @Kiely (Monteiro) Hajjar has hosted some really creative customer experiences, such as escape rooms, candle making, etc. One of my favorite personal experiences was a virtual travel tour in Spain hosted by a local there.
For executive level audiences, the size, focus and content would differ greatly. Regular roundtable discussions around very specific industry level topics that speak to their business challenges is a great event to bring value to the attendees and build some awesome content. You can also insert thought-leaders into these discussion for another layer of value.
However, executives need fun too! I love infusing something exciting into an event, like a CAB, but it has to be done very intentionally and very well. Exceptional experiences that they can’t just get any time and don’t waste their time!
They must align to the outcomes community is supposed to impact at your company, imho.
If your community is product-specific, then maybe office hours and user groups are the best ones. If it’s a community of practice, then skill-based sessions might be of interest.
Feel free to ask any Qs, love talking about the intersection of events & community 🙌
Thanks @Liz Richardson I completely agree and it’s a little tricky because we have a more diverse audience than predicted - most are practitioners but there are also decision makers in our community, including our CAB. So we’re trying to cater to everyone right now and as we scale we may create programs that cater to each group individually. I love the idea of a virtual travel tour! I manage our CAB and we take a lot of inspiration from the activations at those meetings for our other marketing events.
@Joel Primack I agree, we’re focused on improving retention and connecting customers with each other to share best practices and upskill their knowledge of the product. We’ve seen interest in both professional development and more tactical sessions at our marketing conference so we’re using that as inspiration for the community.
That’s great you’re using the feedback to inform your conference content as inspo for the community programs/events.
Maybe it’s a mix of a fireside chat coupled with networking time for an event — 2 birds, 1 stone.