#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
Thread
We are gearing up for our upcoming in-person customer conference and are about to kick off a comprehensive communications strategy to promote it to our customers. I wanted to reach out to this amazing community for some inspiration. Have any of you created a communications plan for a large-scale customer event before? If so, I would greatly appreciate your expertise and insights. It would be incredibly helpful if you could share any sample plans or even just some tips and best practices that have worked well for you.
We’ve had a lot of people work on big events so I’ll tag them and we can learn who did a big comms strategy. @Irwin Hipsman @Shannon Howard @Kristine Kukich @Rachel Ward @Leslie Barrett @Daniel Palay @Ari Hoffman possibly @Amanda Meinert @Andrew Sevillia
Also @Sarah Koval!?
Ah! Wish I had access to old docs.
Comments below assuming customer-only conference.
A few things I would keep in mind:
• If you're offering any kind of special discount to customers, I would send that to them FIRST before any broad-scale communications. This keeps it feeling special.
• Would outline ALL PLANNED COMMS first and how those will work with the rest of the comms calendar. Too often, these get smushed in. Planning ahead makes it thoughtful.
• Would also include in that outline your narrative arc/messaging. That way, when you go to write, you're not thinking, "What do we say about this today?" but you're executing a thoughtful series of messaging.
• Incorporate into other existing comms where you can—email signatures for CSMs, include a slide in QBRs, add a blurb to your customer newsletter, etc. This eliminates the need for a number of solo emails.
• Still do send solo emails though. I've always seen email be the No. 1 driver of event registration, and usually a handful of dedicated emails. Some people will sign up early. Most will sign up later, right when you're starting to worry that the room will get full.
Hope these help, and know you'll get a lot of insight from the other folks tagged here!
Ohhhh, yes - I pushed HARD for a 3-stop roadshow last year. Love all of @Shannon Howard’s tips for marketing emails. We also leaned on these other strategies to get our customer facing teams involved:
• Create unique tracking links for each CSM and a leaderboard to track who is driving the most registrations, then launch some sort of SPIFF program, gift card incentive, etc
• Get exec leadership team buy-in to to rally customer facing teams and encourage the entire company to post on social (but esp. LT)
• Create email templates and talking points for internal teams to make it as easy as possible to spread the word, give weekly updates on who's in the lead in a public/recognition channel
And then for marketing emails (which we did utilize as well), I built out a calendar where our whole audience would get emailed when new speakers were announced, etc and then additional reminders were added for recipients who clicked and/or opened the emails
Hope this helps!
Super helpful - thank you for posting. I am planning an in person event in November! Melissa - let's connect!