PROJECT LINKS:
MY ROLE: Senior Marketing Manager, Dragonboat.io
OBJECTIVE: To create invaluable content for one of our primary buyer personas, Chief Product Officers (CPO), and seed a new community for them while building up Dragonboat as a thought leader in the space and forming ties with some of the most influential CPOs.
METHOD: To achieve our objective, we created a 12-week summer webinar series for and by Chief Product Officers.
Dragonboat’s CEO, Becky Flint, is very well connected within the product management space, so we worked with her to find 12 Chief Product Officers interested in sharing their experiences about various aspects of being a CPO. We suggested a mix of topics for the speakers, such as building your product org structure and working with the board. We thought about how to develop webinar abstracts that would be interesting to both veteran and first-time CPOs.
In just three weeks, we obtained 12 yeses from speakers, confirmed their respective topics and dates, worked with our web designer to launch a signup page, created promotional materials across email, social media, and our website, and configured all the technical logistics from a marketing operations standpoint.
And our lineup held no punches…
We managed to host incredible speakers like Melissa Perri (aka the Beyoncé of product management), Ryan Polk (multi-time CPO and Operating Partner at Insight Partners), and Wyatt Jenkins (International DJ turned SVP of Product at Procore, ex-Optimizely and Patreon).
As a Series A startup, we opted to promote the series via organic channels, mainly on Linkedin, and leveraged our speakers’ connections to generate word of mouth.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
As the lead of this project, I worked with the CMO and CEO from the brainstorm phase to finish, ensuring a smooth event launch and a great experience for everyone who attended these webinars.
Prelaunch:
- Invited CPOs to speak and managed them throughout the entire process.
- Wrote the copy for the event landing page and oversaw its design and development in WordPress, working with our web developer in Portugal.
- Oversaw the marketing operations component of the project to ensure that all of the webinars were created in Zoom plus all the nuts and bolts in Hubspot. This way, when someone registered for the event, they would receive reminder emails, calendar invites, etc.
- Developed a standard powerpoint deck with our graphic designer for the series with a solid call to action.
- Created promotional images and blurbs for each speaker to share on their social media as well as oversaw the creation of Dragonboat’s corporate social media posts.
- Worked with the marketing coordinator to send out invitation emails to our investors, industry thought leaders, customers, and leads.
Post launch:
- Checked in with speakers before their webinars and ensured their presentations were ready to go.
- Hosted the webinars, working off a script I wrote, introducing the speakers and facilitating live Q&A sessions.
- Worked with the marketing coordinator to send follow up emails and upload webinar recordings to Youtube.
- Obtained a transcript of each webinar from Rev.com.
- Created an editorial calendar of blog posts to write based on the different sessions and collaborated with a freelance content writer to execute them.
- Developed an outline for an ebook to launch in the future for CPOs, largely driven by the content from the series.
RESULTS:
The newest role to the C-suite, there are not yet many companies that are creating content or building community for this important buyer persona in tech.
Dragonboat was able to begin a long-term strategy to become the champion of the modern, outcome-focused CPO!
At the same time, we seeded a new, intimate community for Chief Product Officers. We brought together the speakers in our series to network and learn from one another as well as all of the product professionals who registered to watch the webinars. They were invited to join our outcome-focused product management Slack community and join specific, private channels for CPOs.
Some of the main benefits from the project so far:
- Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor a large CPO conference, we essentially created our own, pulling it off with in-house resources and no extra ad spend, capturing over 1,000 new leads.
- We created value for CPOs by providing them a space to connect with others, engage in a live forum, and trade tips.
- We created expert, top-notch content for our blog from the webinar transcripts, saving our team from spending countless hours writing new articles from scratch while leveraging quotes and ideas from these thought leaders.
- We’ll be able to produce an ebook with all of the insights from the webinar series that will further position Dragonboat as the modern CPO’s go-to for industry trends and best practices.
- The speakers included some customers and fans of Dragonboat who touted the benefits of our tool during their sessions, providing us new material from which we can create testimonials and case studies.
As a result of the success from the first 12 CPO Series webinars, Dragonboat decided to continue this marketing program, turning this summer series into a year-round webinar series and is still hosting monthly CPO webinars today and building its audience while driving demand for its SaaS tool.