Revitalizing Event Strategy by Changing the Conversation | Edlio

I was fortunate to join Edlio as the VP of Marketing at the same time a new CRO joined the company. It was the first time in my career a marketing and a sales leader came in at the same time. We formed a collaborative partnership from the start, which was crucial as we began to look at each aspect of the sales and marketing functions.

We came in toward the end of a fiscal year, and immediately needed to plan for the next year. Events were one of the areas we tackled first. The organization had already committed to several events for the following year, but it was clear a strategy change was needed, as the ROI for events had been minimal to that point.  

The first quarter of the year held many of the events that had been committed to before I started with the company. We used those to learn what was working and what wasn’t. We added a couple of events that were more focused on awareness building, and we started road testing some of the new messaging and core narrative that I had been building, as well as introducing some thought leadership. We continued to learn what was resonating.

Our big event of the year was NSPRA, the National School Public Relations Association annual conference. This takes place over the summer, right at the beginning of Q3. It was an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves to school and district leaders from across the country.

But the work started well ahead of that. My goal was to build momentum toward the end of the previous school year that would carry us through the summer and into the back-to-school season. So we started teasing some exciting new additions to our K-12 communications platform, and pointed toward NSPRA as the place we would be showing off these new additions.

Rather than just send sales or marketing to the event, we also brought members of our product team and our client success team, so the entire customer journey was represented at the event. Our product team came equipped with demos of our new additions. 

But we know that all vendors have demos at their booths, and that alone is not a compelling reason for people to come by a booth. 

Enter the “Conversation Wall.” 

I was inspired by those videos of public places where there is a phone or a fishbowl is set up, and people are asked to share something like a challenge they are dealing with, or something they wanted to share that they didn’t have someone to share with.

So we designed the backdrop of our booth as the “Conversation Wall,” and we asked event attendees to share a win from the past school year, or a prediction for the upcoming year. People filled out cards that we attached to the wall, and over the course of the event, the wall really started to fill up. But more than that, our booth became a place where people came and joined the conversation. We set up the space to be open, instead of standing behind a table. There were often multiple conversations going on at once—our product team would be demoing a new feature in one corner, while an existing customer might be catching up with our Client Success team, and someone else was posting their win on the Conversation Wall.

This event was a turning point for us. It really was a reintroduction, and it really felt like we took a big step forward in establishing ourselves as a group that people will look forward to connecting with in the future.

From a business standpoint, the conversations we had at NSPRA did create momentum that has already resulted in new business at the start of the current school year.