The beatles Love @ Corporate legal operations Consortium (CLOC) 2019
Campaign At-A-Glance
Company: FTI Consulting - Technology
My role: Campaign lead - I owned the end-to-end planning and execution of the campaign, including the campaign messaging, content creation for all assets, project and budget management, and onsite support.
Solution/Product: Legal operations solutions
Industry: Legal
Objective: To nurture relationships with prospects
Target audience: Corporate counsel who had not worked with us in the last 3 years in legal operations at Fortune 500 companies & existing clients
Cross-functional teams: Solution marketing, marketing operations, event marketing, communications, consultants, inside sales, business development, graphic design
Challenges: To creatively strategize the show presence with a small team, no speaking spot at the conference and unresponsive targets
Results: 85% event show rate; exceed the goal of business meetings by 20%; new business opportunities and relationships developed
campaign Context and challenges
FTI Consulting has a strong brand name in the legal industry and CLOC was a perfect chance to meet the targets from all around the country. However, we weren’t able to secure a speaking opportunity at the conference, which could’ve been used as an opportunity to promote thought leadership and drive business meetings. Additionally, the targets typically got 3-7 event invitations from competing vendors. The high-value targets were normally unresponsive to any invites. Our challenge was to come up with a creative experience to get the prospects at Fortune 500 corporations to meet with us at the conference.
Create an Exclusive experience
“What you are will show in what you do.”
We wanted the prospects to experience what it would look like if they worked with us - having excellent end-to-end customer experience. We also wanted to have an experience where our guests could simply have fun and enjoy each other’s company. From the previous client feedback and data, legal counsel appreciated exclusive, quality learning and networking opportunities. We came up with a theme - Beatles LOVE, which incorporated the idea of spreading the love. It’s two-part experience, a wine tasting event at Lago, where they could enjoy the astonishing fountains, followed by a Cirque du Soleil show- The Beatles LOVE. This allowed the prospects to have quality networking time and have fun at the same time.
Think outside the box
Gift to the confirmed attendees.
The Beatles “Let It Be” music box
In the past, we had done direct mail campaigns to drive demand to the same conference. We found out that around 50% of the targets never received our packages or simply weren’t interested at all. This year, instead of spending thousands of dollars on a direct mail campaign with low ROI, we decided to send out a small gift (the Beatles music box) to all confirmed guests with a hand-written note as a confirmation to their RSVP’s (see pictures below).
This small gesture hugely contributed to our high show rate (85%). When the attendees found out that they couldn’t attend, they’d let us know immediately because they knew we took their commitments very seriously and couldn’t just “let it be”.
Identify Engagement touch points
Graphic created by Emily Gothmann
Aiming to meet with high-value targets, we deployed ABM strategies and worked very closely with the sales team on identifying the targets and engagement touch points.
For those who weren’t able to join the event, didn’t show up or didn’t further the conversation with us, we followed up with a webinar invite (see graphic above). The goal was to keep the relationship warm and keep us top of mind through offering something valuable.
What about the booth?
Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC)
While companies normally want to get as many new leads as possible from a trade show, we strategized differently this time. Since we were not able to speak at the conference, we went with a lower level sponsorship and didn’t have a huge presence to save cost for the private event. We used the booth as a space for business meetings with our prospects and clients instead.
Campaign results - Successful Pipeline acceleration
We accelerated the sales pipeline greatly through this campaign. The event show rate was 85% and we exceeded the goal of business meetings set up by 20%. Many of the attendees were impressed by the whole campaign, from the invitation, gift to the actual experience. It successfully enabled the sales team to foster relationships with the prospects in an organic way. It also opened the door to a handful of Fortune 50 corporations. We were even able to get leads who never responded to our emails in the last two years to join us at the event. It was very rewarding to see how we overcame all the challenges and turned it into a great campaign which translated to opportunities.