5 Tips to Help Make Your Next Customer Event a Success
2. Take Advantage of Having Your Customers in the Room and Emphasize the Power of Networking
Customer events provide a rare opportunity for your current customers to connect with peers who are using similar solutions. For people who are part of a small team (or, many times, the only user of your solution), it can be very exciting to network with other customers and share best practices.
But how does encouraging your customers to network help you at the end of the day? While it might not seem obvious at first, creating opportunities for your customers to connect with their peers to share tips and ideas opens the door for them to be more active users of your product or service. That’s because as your customers talk to each other, they’ll discover new and exciting ways to leverage what you provide.
For example, you might have a customer who is experiencing a pain point that they might not know your solution can solve. However, a new friend they just met at the event has the perfect use case for your product or service that will help them resolve their problem. While this customer might have otherwise been inclined to search for a new vendor, this new discovery will remind them how great it is to be your customer.
3. Leverage Your Social Channels to Create Buzz Before, During, and After the Event
Customer events are a great opportunity to create community, but you don’t have to wait to get all your people in a room to get them talking and raving about your brand. Leveraging social media is a great way to get your attendees excited before the event, invite them to share special moments once they’re there, and keep the momentum going long after the big day is over.
To encourage customers to look forward to your event, you should develop a social media campaign sharing the event location, date, and any highlights you think will motivate your target audience to sign up. In these posts, include a link to a dedicated landing page where your customers can go to discover more details and register for the event.
Although it’s easy to create one or two posts to promote your event, seeing the same message over and over again can tire out your audience. To avoid getting unfollowed or blocked by your social media followers, diversify the content of your posts promoting the event and spread them out over time.
Creating a dedicated hashtag for your event is an excellent way to motivate attendees to share moments from throughout the day. You can further incentivize them to share content on their social media profiles by hosting a photo contest or automatically entering them into a raffle every time they post.
Finally, it’s just as important to follow up through social media as it is through email. After your event, make sure to write a post thanking customers who attended your event and tag them and/or their companies if possible. Not only will this allow you to increase engagement on your post, but it’s also a great way to keep the conversation going. You’ll also find that many customers will want to share what they enjoyed about your event. Having their feedback front and center is a great way to motivate those who didn’t attend to register for one of your events in the future.
You might be thinking that managing all the activities I just mentioned is more than you can handle. However, the right social media management tool, such as Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module, can help you automate most of these activities so you can stay on top of your social media game without having to spend all day in front of your computer.