Everybody loves happy customers. They are your best brand advocates and your best sellers.

But before you start thinking about how to leverage happy customers, you have to think about what to do to make them happy, and that process starts way before signing a deal.

It starts with lead gen and what you do to engage with your audience.

The best way to do so is by meeting your audience right where they are with the right message, at the right time, by leveraging the right signals and the people they already trust.

During the Happy Customers Festival, Taylor Corrado, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at Wistia, Hannah Goldberg, Solutions Architect at HubSpot, Jared Fuller our Chief Nearbound and Partner Officer, Shauntie Barley, Marketing Manager at Arrows shared steps and tips to leverage signals to convert attendees into revenue.

Here’s the recap:

• The importance of having integrated data

• How to leverage partner signals

• How to leverage video signals

Let’s dive in.

The importance of having integrated data

The fact that trust is the new data doesn’t mean that data is not important at all.

Data helps us automate and create efficiencies. Data helps us find, track, and target customers.

But we’re now awash in data and your customers are exhausted by being served up algorithmically-determined content and crammed into impersonal funnels.

The excess of data is turning buying signals into noise.

Thanks to that, your customers are looking to trusted influencers and communities to help them make decisions and purchases.

So, if you want to surround your buyers with influence from those they already trust, you need to have access to integrated data into one platform.

When your data is divided among multiple sources of truth, you run the risk of something falling through the cracks.

Picture this:

You’re planning a co-marketing event. And you’re looking at your list of customers and prospects in your CRM. Probably your customers are going to open the email you sent them promoting the event, but what about your prospects?

Why on earth will they open an email from someone they don’t know? This makes your ability to reach them decrease over time.

Thanks why, you need integrated data. It gives you the context you need to identify who and what is surrounding your buyer. You may not be your buyers’ source of trust, but by having a 360° view of their behavior you can easily identify who should you partner with to gain your buyers’ trust.

If you build a co-marketing event with your buyers’ source of trust, they can invite their customers (who are your prospects), and you can invite your customers (who are your partner’s prospects).

When you have data that is (correctly) integrated into one platform, all you have to worry about is leveraging the data, building relationships, and nailing the messaging.

“The more data and the more points you can track in one place, the easier it will get to do marketing at scale.”—Taylor Corrado

With integrated data, identifying who your buyers trust becomes way easier. You have a 360° view of your customer journey—you don’t only have data about you but about your prospects’ relationships.

Integrated data will help you to:

• Build and optimize your customer’s journey

• Create more personalized and relevant marketing campaigns

• Deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right contact

• Identify those multiple touch points in your customer journey

• Meet your audience where they are connect with them not only on an individual level but also get to their pain points faster

• Understand what their interests are, what’s their focus

• Effectively and efficiently use your creative resources with the content your audience actually needs

• Identify the right target audience and the next steps you need to take to drive more leads

• Orchestrate your partner to help you market
  
  

“Every day, we’re kind of bombarded with information, we have our phones, we have Slack, we have LinkedIn, podcasts, it’s just a lot going on. If I don’t receive information at the time that is relevant to me, it’s gone. It’s in the inbox folder, or somewhere out in the cloud, and we’re never going to see it again because it wasn’t relevant.

But being able to have HubSpot, and being able to have centralized information in one place from Reveal and Wistia, you can trigger those automations. This will help you get customer signals and context to who your buyer is, who they trust, and what is the content they need.”—Hannah Goldberg

Integrated data in HubSpot can have plenty of use cases, but this time, we’re going to focus on two: how to leverage partner data to build a targeted list and how to leverage video signals for creating better post-event follow-ups.

Building a target invite list for your events

Sometimes, sending an event invite to your entire customer/buyer list might be a good idea, but most of the time, what you should do is segment that list to understand your audience and the reach that you have.

“Your reach is only going to be what appears in HubSpot, and if you don’t have integrated data, you and your partners are not going to have that context related to location, demographics, technographics, etc.

You can’t build a good audience list without integrated data. Integrated data can help you expand your reach.”—Jared Fuller

When you plan co-marketed events, integrated data from your partners can help you see the reach of your campaign.

And the best way to integrate your partner data into your CRM to boost your marketing efforts is by leveraging Reveal.

Having partner data can help you distinguish data from noise and leverage trust as a buying signal.

“With partner data, you’re reaching people you could never reach.”—Jared Fuller

Here’s how you can build targeted lists in Reveal:

2. Before you start applying filters in HubSpot, there are a couple of questions you need to think about:
   

   1. Who should you email to foster the greatest amount of trust?

   2. What is your key message about?

   3. Who does your target list trust?

3. Consider which is your partner’s ICP, and include variables like company size, vertical, territory, and job title.
   

3. Meet with your partner to identify if this event is more suitable for their open opps, prospects, customers, and vice versa (if this event is more suitable for your open opps, customers, prospects, etc).

4. Now that you know who’s your partner’s ICP, leverage Reveal data to narrow down your event’s target audience, use filters like:

   1. Your customers who are your partner’s open opportunities

   2. Your prospects who are your partner’s customers

   3. Shared prospects

   4. Shared customers

   5. Your partner’s customers who are your prospects

   6. Your partner’s customers who are your open opportunities

To make the most of your event, your partner has to do the same: inviting their customers who are your open opportunities and your prospects.

In this way both of you will leverage the trust each of you have and your customers will get much more value out of your co-marketed event.

5. You can also do this directly on Reveal. Open your 1:1 account mapping with your partner who is building the co-marketing event with you. Leverage filters to find the overlaps with your partner. Leverage filters like:
   

   1. Account status (you and your partner)

   2. Number of employees

   3. Industry

6. From Reveal you can export that list, and add a column after the company name so HubSpot can properly read it.
   

7. Copy columns B and C (without the header) and paste them in the HubSpot list filtering by Company domain. This will help you narrow down your list and make it more specific to your audience.
   

8. After you run the event, you have to empower your Sales team to follow up. The good thing is that you can work with partners to get intel, influence, and intros post-event directly from your CRM thanks to the HubSpot and Reveal integration.
   

Now, your AE can get the intel they need or even get a follow-up message validation from your partner. Your AE can just simply reach out to your partner and say:

“[company name] is one of your customers and is one of our prospects. [first name] attended our joint webinar, and I was planning to reach out with this message, do you mind taking a look, just want to know if it resonates with what they bought from you 3 months ago.”

Your AEs can easily access the deal influencers, key intel from your integration, get intel from your partner’s QBR with your prospect, action the influence play, or even ask for an intro.

“Buyers are prioritizing their networks of who they trust, the highest signal for creating and closing pipeline is to surround your buyers with the brands and voices that they believe in them and that are more like them.

This puts the customer at the center of the conversation. You might not be their source of trust, but it’s your job to be that connecting tissue that puts together your buyers and those who they already trust.”—Jared Fuller

“Having a foundation of stability and strong partnerships, and feeding up from that trust and image of your partner, is going to help your marketing campaign perform better.

Trust is not only data but also revenue.”—Hannah Goldberg

Reading and actioning intel to convert high-intent leads

You already have the target list you want to focus on, you know who your target audience trusts, and can learn how to choose a topic thanks to Reveal’s and Inverta’s Nearbound Marketing Blueprint.

This means it’s time to plan how to better follow up.

In other words, let’s decide on content for your follow-up message.

There are so many ways you can follow up after an event:

• Sending an email with the recap

• 1:1 emails from your Sales team

• Personalized video

But are you sure that the content you’re sharing in the follow-up message is relevant? Are you sending the right message, at the right time, through the right channel?

That’s exactly what Wistia helps you with—well that, and easing video content production.

So, here are the steps to identify the message for your event follow-ups:

Before the event: Make sure your landing page is (correctly) integrated with HubSpot so every time somebody registers for your event, that data is synced with your CRM.

Top tip: With Wistia’s event landing page, you can automatically create a list in HubSpot to store data after registration (you don’t need to manually create it and link it in HubSpot).

Post-event: All of your registrants were funneled to your HubSpot platform. Now that you’re event is finished, you can follow up with the people who actually attended.

First, you have to download your attendee list from Wistia and upload it to your HubSpot account. With this data, you can easily create a workflow that sends a follow-up email right after your event is done.

With Wistia's forthcoming product update, you'll be able to create different workflows based on the person’s attendee status.

1. Sending the previous email is just part of your process to complete your event experience. Now, it’s time to nurture those accounts in a way that AEs can reach out to your prospects, and your CS team can engage with your customers.
   

However, we all know that not all event attendees are considered hot leads, so you should combine different signals to define the warmth of your lead.

With Wistia, you can combine attendee signals, with video engagement signals. This means that you can filter by people who have watched a specific video on your website (by using Wistia’s media ID) or how long they watched the video.

You can also create lists according to the number of videos they’ve watched. Obviously, the more videos watch the more engaged they are with your brand.

This means that they are a warm lead and that your SDRs should reach out, and the context of the message should be focused on the event and how it relates to the videos they’ve watched.

2. Once you have identified those warm leads, you can share that list with your AEs, and thanks to the Wistia and HubSpot integration, they can even identify the timeline and heat map of the video—your SDRs can identify the different behaviors of each lead while watching the video.
   

Integrating different types of data into one place is key to getting a full picture of who are you talking to.

Extra co-marketing events tips

There's a golden rule: never market alone. Always market with those whom your buyers already trust.

Here are some essential tips to enhance your co-marketing events:

Identify relevant changes and state your POV

Start by pinpointing a significant and relevant change in the world. Present your point of view clearly. This not only sets the stage for your narrative but also establishes you as a thought leader in the industry.

Focus on people, not just products

Your narrative should center on the people you are helping, not just your product. If you need to mention your product, position it as an enabler in your customers’ journey, not the hero. This approach resonates more deeply with your audience, making your message more relatable and impactful.

Use stories to paint the picture

Share stories of how others have successfully navigated their challenges and reached their goals with your product and narrative. This paints a vivid picture of success and provides concrete examples of your product's impact.

Adapt to your partner’s capabilities

Not every company has a robust partner program or extensive resources. Be flexible and adjust your approach based on who you're working with. If an in-person event isn't feasible, consider partnering on a blog, webinar, or video series instead. Flexibility ensures that you can still collaborate effectively, regardless of resource constraints.

Leverage your partner’s channels

Maximize the reach of your co-marketing campaign by leveraging your partner’s channels and audiences. Provide them with ready-to-use promo kits that include email templates, social media posts, visuals, and other promotional materials. This makes it easy for your partners to support and amplify your campaign.

Targeting the right lead at the right time

The Happy Customers Festival, especially the Marketing in HubSpot’s session, emphasized the importance of customer signals, integrated data, and leveraging partner and video signals to achieve this goal.

The key takeaway is that a happy customer’s journey begins with lead generation, not after they signed a deal, so meeting your audience where they are with the right message at the right time is fundamental.

If you want to learn how to keep your customers happy from the first step of their journey, book a call with the Reveal team.