#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
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Hi - I'm working on a program to capture customer location so we can invite them to local events. Our customers are globally distributed. My question is - what "location" do I ask for? I do not want to ask for their home address. I want to know what city they are near. Should we ask for zipcode? That would only work in the US and I'm not sure how we would use it. Do I just ask what major metropolitan area they live near? Does that make sense globally? If you collect location, how do you word it? Thank you!
Does your CRM track the headquarters of your customers?
Yes - but most people do not live there.
I don't know what tools it would take to do this, but what about something along the lines of what global billing systems do? I'm thinking of the progressive forms that ask for country first, and then based on the country ask for state/province, and then city. I'm sure there are existing databases out there that have mapped all of the corresponding country/state/city data. Maybe even something you could borrow from your billing tool (minus the actual payment info)?
I've also run into this a lot, especially now that so many people are not based anywhere near the company address in the CRM, so I'm really curious to see what others have come up with
If you have a gifting platform like sendoso, reachdesk, or postal, you could capture their information (address) and have only their cities/provinces/states pushed back to your CRM through the integration.
Broadly, I've used the CRM/headquarter data to create targeted forms. For example, customers located in EMEA get a different form than AMER. So you aren't asking them "where in the world are you located," but rather "where in this region." And then, as Rachel has just said, use a form similar to a gifting platform and request an address. As a workflow, I've always sent something first, which people are always keen to hand raise for. Then captured the data on the contact record, then used that data to invite to specific events/activities. For those who do not share their shipping information/bite at the freebie, I use the headquarter information to assign them to a local event.
(I've done this both with and without a sending/gifting platform)
Separately, Common Room (a community engagement tool) shares the city locations of your community members or advocates.
In theory, you could use Common Room and connect your community, if you have one, and social media channels to it and see where your customer/engaged people are without asking them and invite them via a location-based personalized note from that list vs asking and then inviting people to local events.
We use a combination of Common Room and our gifting platform (for more precise location)
Yes, you can connect Common Room with LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. to better understand who is engaging with you and where, as well as other attributes (e.g., location, etc.). Also, they track job changes. This would be on their team plan.
If you connected business platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Salesforce/HubSpot, etc.), then you can unlock a whole new layer of data/insights too. That’d be their enterprise plan.
I’m a member of their referral program, so if you want the hookup (translation = discount) let me know or drop my name with their team and they’ll know what to do.
All Joel said! We have it connected to LinkedIn, Twitter and Khoros- and we are in the progress to integrate it with our CRM.
We also get alerts directly on Slack so we can keep track of our active advocates on social.
Also, we have also sourced a few great customer stories this way :)
I like "major metro area".