Dino Kuckovic, Director of Community & Events at Falcon.io, stopped by this week to discuss his events strategy working at the social media SaaS platform. He shared with us how he organically built a community from scratch, how he makes community a company-wide focus with marketing and sales, and how he keeps his event attendees coming back for more.
Dino Kuckovic, Director of Community & Events at Falcon.io, stopped by this week to discuss his events strategy working at the social media SaaS platform. He shared with us how he organically built a community from scratch, how he makes community a company-wide focus with marketing and sales, and how he keeps his event attendees coming back for more.
Who is this episode great for?
In-person event managers, community leaders, sales and marketing teams
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Dino has had great success creating a framework for generating leads from C2C events. He makes it a priority to work hand in hand with the sales and marketing teams at Falcon.io to get a better understanding of what they are looking for so he can build these strategies directly into his events. Dino is very particular about tying his events back to business generating factors. He stresses the importance of building relationships and really listening to customer feedback so event attendees feel that their needs are being met which in turn leads to sales.
Speaker 1: (00:03)
In 2010, I co founded a company called startup grind with one goal, inspiring, educating and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet today. Startup grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members along the way. I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time, customer to customer marketing, C to C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wish we'd had. When we start building our community. A decade ago, each episode, we talked to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Anderson. And this is the CDC podcast. I'm excited to have our next guest Dino Kobe, who is the director of community and events at Falcon IO at Falcon IO. He oversees the company's entire annual event strategy. On today's episode, we'll cover how Dina organically build a community from scratch, how he makes community accompany wide focus with marketing and sales and how he keeps his event attendees coming in
Speaker 2: (01:08)
Back for more, take a listen. Dino, can you describe what Falcon IO is and what you do in your role? There,
Speaker 3: (01:15)
Falcon is a social media management platform for every kind of marketer. And I say that because it's a very robust unified software with publishing, engaging measurement, social listening audience. The list goes on advertising benchmarking capabilities with basically a layer of governance sprinkled on top. That's the short version, by the way,
Speaker 2: (01:39)
You're the director of community events. This is one of my favorite titles in the whole world, because it means that the organization at a minimum understands or values community. It may mean much more than maybe they really, really get it, but I know at a minimum, they, they somewhat understand it. So I'd love to know what your approach has been to make community events, a top priority, uh, inside the company. How have you done that?
Speaker 3: (02:02)
Ultimately, I try and let the numbers speak for me, which, uh, perhaps you'll know in this podcast, a isn't an easy task. Cause I do like to talk and talk and talk. My mama did always say if there's one thing you can do damn, do you know it is talk ultimately, um, I know what my differentiating factor is, and it took me some time, but seeing the customer and prospect interest level rise after events, webinars, after another event, after a meetup, after a trade show, et cetera, and ask for more of those very same assets and perhaps even regionalized or personalized to their use case, vertical, whatever you'd like was all I needed to get sales and customer experience to perk up and follow our lead. And I try to connect them to our business schools, to our content pieces, spread it like wildfire. So this type of proactive approach to get, you know, let's say just the roadshow featured and up to top performing trench piece really does me the additional exposure.
Speaker 3: (03:00)
And it's the piece that sales CX, everybody shares. So it's top of mind constantly. So I try to make it come full circle and really don't not let them get bored of me and uh, read my name and all my team's endeavors left and right, and events are about networking. And by simply showing those departments, sales and CX, just a single out two of them, how many quality conversations they can have face to face also gets me the buy in because I can show them, Hey, listen, these are the prospects that you wouldn't have to spend. God knows how many hours are in the day to try and get a hold of, but I can actually lower them in, in, in quotes, uh, with just a topic that they're dealing with on a daily basis. And last but not least what comes to mind ROI, that's such a difficult one, but actually by being selective where I sponsor, what type of events I sponsor or where I organize meetups has gotten me a lot of the money I spend actually back. And then some, so I don't just say yes to all events and want to be everywhere. I'm super selective. So that was the short answer, I guess.
Speaker 2: (04:03)
Yeah. I'd love to just dive deeper into that because I think this is something that a lot of community people really struggle with and it sounds like you have a really great grasp on it. When you say you're sort of getting the ROI back on the things you're sponsoring and doing is that through acquisition and pipeline creation, is that through tracking back to retention, what metrics are really important to you as the person who wants to get more of this program funded? I mean,
Speaker 3: (04:29)
A little bit of all of the above, quite frankly, I little money goes a long way and I really try to stretch it out as much as I can. I'm super cautious about like nitty gritty things like what's swagged white border and what are the quantities to not be wasteful today's society, super wasteful. So I try to go way into the budget management of a single event and what I need, what I don't need to, you know, how can I tie this back to retention? What are the key metrics that I'm looking at? I know like one of the things that we wanted to discuss is like, what company goals do I tie my events to and how did they help me accomplish that? Well, quite frankly, lead generation is one of those big ones. So I try to do as much as I can to tie myself to business generating factors and, uh, quite frankly like listening to prospects and customers. And when they ask questions, like, what is the best content calendar you guys have out there? Well, here I am with my little jazz hands flashing out that it is the, that is my tool. And we just learned about a, talked about it at one of my events, uh, started off with a very simple community discussion and conversation ended up in a demo request.
Speaker 2: (05:39)
I think the other thing that's interesting about what you said at the beginning was around content and generating PR generating, buzz, generating things that the sales team and the success team can talk about and send to their prospects. I mean, that's, I'd love to understand how you think about that and organize that it, it feels like a hugely underused tool inside of the community toolkit. Like I'll just keep doing these events and doing the style, just keep doing stuff, doing stuff, but like actually like getting the full value out of an event or out of a piece of content in the way that you described can have just massive impact, not just in your team, but in many of the other teams.
Speaker 3: (06:18)
Yeah, definitely. Well, number one, I really try to be all ears and be in the trenches with the sales team, with the success team, because I care deeply about what marketers are also telling them. And by actually checking a lot of their boxes when it comes to their quarterly goals, like, I don't know this quarter, we're going after the higher education vertical next quarter. Let's just focus on travel. Now in times of Corona, not all verticals are budging. What are the ones that are still buying, selling social platforms, podcasts, providers, et cetera. Um, so I really tried to actually give the audience and by audience, I don't just mean the externalized audience, but also my internal colleagues in this case, the Falcon hears what they want. And actually that actually helps me in that whole, um, uh, well sharing of, of an event. I just posted, uh, promoting that webinar. It actually goes a long way. I know it's something that people struggle out there with the, how do we actually get and mobilize the internal armies. But if your content calendar really matches the company and department goals, it should be a no brainer.
Speaker 2: (07:22)
Can I just ask a logistical thing? How do you, how did you create that calendar? Where do you host it? What tools do you use to manage it?
Speaker 3: (07:29)
Well, for our own content purposes, we use our very own tool. So like the published module that has a really beautiful content calendar, she can look at from a weekly, monthly, whatever your benchmark is gold, but honestly, for my own event, planning purposes, I, um, I go as simple as keynote or, or just an Excel, but what I externalize to the teams is a confluence dashboard that we've created where pretty much I create a new entry for upcoming events or upcoming webinars stuff. We've actually connected to Slack. So whenever I create this blog post entry, it also triggers a notification and I've kind of primed them or trimmed them to interpret my name posting with a new event. Uh, so they kind of go back kind of like Facebook Loris us to get, to hit that notification tab. Whenever we see that little red one or two pop up after posting something or whatever,
Speaker 2: (08:25)
You've run a bunch of great sort of cross platform marketing campaigns to get attendees. Could you tell us about one that you're proud of and the results that came from that?
Speaker 3: (08:34)
Uh, yeah, and actually it's, it's a recent one at that. Um, so we were due to attend social media. We can New York city, which on account of Kobe had to go virtual, like many other things. And the first half of 2020. So they basically merged social media. We can New York and LA events into what they called social media one. And this was by far the largest cross platform, cross department. And quite frankly, even cross country campaign for us, which from an organizational lead generation and awareness point of view was highly successful. And that's the one I want to talk about. So we follow the, you know, the same playbook. I have a template that I literally asked my team to follow. When we're hosting a meetup, go down this Avenue, when we're hosting a trade show, go down this Avenue, et cetera. And each event is fairly unique and we, we follow this template and a benchmark, and ultimately this one became much larger than initially calculated because first off I was forced to rethink my tire presence at the street show, cause it was supposed to be traditionally physical.
Speaker 3: (09:37)
Now it's all of a sudden virtual and then also asking the team to shift gear and go full in with an hour virtual campaign. And so it was this resulted in the team, really pushing the benchmark and the threshold to deliver quality work from the assets that needed to be created to now deal with this new virtual endeavor to cross time zone collaboration, how to now network with an audience that are not in front of us anymore. And because it went virtual, we actually were able to expand and reach an audience that was significantly larger. I believe we surpassed our, um, success benchmark by 60%. That was the last calculation I did. And that's because the MDR send the SDR teams were, are actually still super busy to process. The, I believe last time I took a look were like 15, 1600 leads, which honestly in my world is huge.
Speaker 3: (10:29)
Like I'm, I'm no Facebook who goes to a dmexco and, and has thousands and thousands of visitors per minute. So the fact that we were able to surpass the roof with something like that by just going virtual is awesome. So it ended not too long ago. So I hope you listen back to this podcast. I close a couple more deals to smirk at my own comments now, but I would say that was a really nice test and challenge and we were pulling out our hair. So when we first learned that we had to shift gear and the events calendar that I put together back in December needed to literally be ripped up and rethought, but this is a wonderful example of what worked.
Speaker 2: (11:06)
It sounds like you have a really positive relationship with the sales team. And I wonder what tips you'd have to sort of working with them, getting an ally on that team to sort of understand what you're trying to do and, and be a really good partner for you and senior praise cause look, sales sales, they'll get whatever they need to be successful. Community is rarely thought of in the same way. And so like, how are you sort of tightly integrating with the sales team and people on that team to ultimately grow your program to be, yeah,
Speaker 3: (11:40)
You're more impactful. It goes back to how we structured our quarterly and yearly plannings and at what time they happen. So we make sure that all the crucial commercial department actually overlap when they go into content and goal setting and company rule following mode. And that is like obviously on, on yearly level twice a year on quarterly level, we do little Sanks. So I really try to make sure that actually before I go to the individual syncs as teams, that I've put out my feelers and reached out to the key sales leaders and the customer experience leaders to hear what are some of the challenges that they're having with, with their customers, with their prospects, what are some of the check boxes that they can't can't really help out with to see if there's a blog post I can suggest, is there an event I could attempt to, if we have a cluster of customers or audience that are perhaps super happy or super disgruntled, wherever they are on the spectrum, how can I actually get there?
Speaker 3: (12:38)
So ultimately by being their ally and showing them that I'm not just a marketing fluffy blah, blah kind of guy, who's just going to say yes to providing a case study or attend an event in APAC because that's where we need to ramp up a little bit. But then ultimately also show them that, I mean, business also showing them the numbers, like I'm a firm believer that like a webinar program or a community program needs to have three different pillars, personality, charisma, memorability, and education. And if you have that, the audience will keep coming back for more in turn, they'll ask those very same internal stakeholders. Hey, what was that webinar? I couldn't sign up. Ooh. I had a technical difficulty signing up by the way. Awesome problem to have are showing interest. So by actually seeing that we'll come full circle, you're inadvertently also showing the value of your very own webinar community program to that step skeptical sales bricks, and as well run through, as we close here, those highlights again, what, what were they?
Speaker 3: (13:37)
So personality and charisma of your staff of your hosts, if you will, memorability like a wonderful webinar is, is great. It's but what is the languishing factor? There are so many out there and then finally education at the end of the day, we do want to learn something we want to grow. So without that, you're not going to get anything, but also honestly, best of educational webinars are a flat line. Nobody's going to return to that. As we wrap up, I'd love to hear about a community that you love and tell us why you love it. And we should be a part of it. Honestly, it's one that's by definition. I'm not even part of, but I'm in this particular Facebook group it's called higher ed social shout out to them. It's a home made home grown, organically developed higher education group for marketers, pretty much the classic Facebook group.
Speaker 3: (14:30)
You ask a question, you request tips and suggestions in times of crisis and they are so engaged gage. Then it's honestly opening up my eyes and this world that is so attention span, deficit driven, how much time individuals who have never met, never, um, you know, maybe we'll never meet, spend one another. And I think it's a lesson learned for a lot of us marketers that we need to be involved in these Facebook groups or wherever you are, LinkedIn groups, et cetera. So higher ed social Facebook group, check them out. I think it's a really cool way also by the way, to do something with very minimal resources
Speaker 1: (15:07)
Because it doesn't cost you much to start a community through Facebook. For instance,
Speaker 4: (15:11)
[inaudible]
Speaker 1: (15:12)
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevy labs.com/pod that's B E V Y L a B s.com/pod.