Playbook

Find the best cities for your event strategy

Ensure your customers and advocates make an appearance.

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Teams:

Marketing, Community, Developer Relations

Sources:

HubSpot logoHubSpotSalesforce logoSalesforceSlack logoSlackLinkedIn logoLinkedInDiscord logoDiscordKhoros logoKhorosDiscourse logoDiscourse

Overview

Identifying a location for your next in-person event is more complex than it should be.

If you’re like most, selecting what city to hold an event is far too manual. The process often goes like this—export a list of customers or target accounts from your CRM, count up the number of accounts in the same region, put that on a map, and hope your data hygiene is accurate.

Want to include multiple dimensions, like a mix of large customers, active product users, and advocates? Good luck with that.

With Common Room, choosing your next event location doesn’t need to be so challenging. In this playbook, we’ll show you how to quickly identify where your next event should be using practically any data point you can think of.

What you’ll need

Common Room: What we’ll use aggregate community and customer data in one place and identify hot regions (Sign-up for free to follow along).
CRM or marketing automation access: We’ll need to connect to a source of customer data.
Community data access: We’ll overlay data from active users in our community with data from our CRM.

Step 1: Connect to relevant sources of data

For this playbook, we’ll use three core sources:

  1. Community chat platform or forum (think Slack, Discord, Discourse, Khoros)
  2. CRM or marketing automation platform (think Salesforce or HubSpot)
  3. Dark social channels (think GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit)
Note: Common Room has native integrations with all the above sources and many more. And setup takes just a few minutes. Check out our integrations here.

Because we’ll want to use data points from different funnel stages and digital channels, the more sources we connect, the better.

Let’s start with connecting to our community platform or support forum like Slack, Discord, Khoros, Discourse, etc. To do that, we can head over to the Settings menu and choose to connect Slack.

Connect to Slack
Note: To import data from Slack, you’ll need permissions to add applications to your Slack workspace.

Follow the prompts to complete the setup, and within a few minutes, data from your Slack community will populate in Common Room.

Not using Slack? The process to connect any community chat or support forum sources like Discord, Bevy, Discourse, etc., is the same.

Next, we’ll want to connect to the relevant social channels where our community is most active with our brand.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example (we could also do the same for Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other dark social channels).

We’ll follow the same process in Settings and connect to LinkedIn.

After clicking to connect, you’ll be asked to authenticate LinkedIn. We’ll need admin privileges to grab the URL and authenticate LinkedIn.

Authenticate LinkedIn to pull data into Common Room
Authenticate LinkedIn to pull data into Common Room
Note: To configure this integration, you must be an admin of your LinkedIn page. Specifically, you must have the “Super admin” or “Content admin” role; the “Curator” or “Analyst” roles do not have sufficient permissions.

And finally, for our last step, we’ll need to connect to a platform to ingest customer data.

You can do this via CRM integration (Salesforce or HubSpot), data warehouse / ETL (Snowflake, Census, Hightouch), Zapier, or API.

Connect to a source of business data
Connect to a source of business data

These integrations take a little more customization than the others. So you’ll have to get the help of a Common Room pro to get these enabled.

Note: When writing this playbook, we use HubSpot as our CRM, which we’ll use in the examples. However, the same general steps and rules apply to other business data sources like Salesforce or reverse ETL.

Step 2: Add tags to customers and community members

With our data sources connected, we’ll have a complete view of our community and customers all in one place.

We’ll want to use a Common Room tagging feature to filter and append tags to members like ChampionCustomerICP, etc.

Let’s say we want to identify regions where there is a lot of overlap between customers, advocates, and power users.

We can head over to the Members menu and apply a few filters. We’ll select HubSpot as our source. Then, we’ll add a filter on HubSpot Deal Stage.

Add a source-specific filter to member view
Add a source-specific filter to member view

After that, we can set the Deal Stage = Closed won, indicating a customer.

Set Deal Stage to reflect customer status
Set Deal Stage to reflect customer status

We can select all members from here using the select button just above our first member profile. And we can click the additional text to Select all, not just the 40 appearing in our preview.

Add tags to members in bulk
Add tags to members in bulk

Next, we can choose the Tag menu item and add a new Customer tag. This will add a label to members we can reference in reports, segments, workflows, and more.

Create a new tag
Create a new tag
Note: You can also create a Workflow to auto-tag members when they meet specified criteria—more on how to do that in our Workflow documentation.

We’ll want to run through similar processes to identify and tag Champions.

We can reset our filters. And start by adding a filter for at least 10 Impact points over the last six months.

Filter by Impact points
Filter by Impact points
Note: Impact points help you quickly understand which members drive the most significant impact within your community. Different member activities are weighted based on their significance within your community to calculate Impact points—more on how Impact points are scored here.

We can follow the steps above to select all members and add a tag for Champions. And if we wanted to use something more specific than Impact points, like replies on Slack or Pull Requests submitted on GitHub, we could do that too.

Filter by source-specific activity
Filter by source-specific activity

With our core audiences now tagged, we can head to the last step and identify where to hold our next in-person event.


Step 3: Run a location-based report to identify target cities

Head over to the Reporting menu. Here, we’ll see default reports on our community health, membership trends, and members by location (what we’ll use to find the top cities for in-person events).

Reporting overview default view
Reporting overview default view

For this use case, we only want to look at places where our Customers and Champions overlap. So we’ll apply filters using the tags we just created.

We can click the Member tags button and select tags for customers and champions.

Add Member tags to reporting views
Add Member tags to reporting views

Then, we’ll click Run query. This gets us down from about 20k members to 2k.

From here, we can simply scroll down to the Members by location area.

Members by regional concentration
Members by regional concentration

By default, this view shows large geographical regions. To drill down by city, we can click the Cities tab. And this will get us a view of the top cities where we have high customer and champion overlap.

Matched members by city
Matched members by city

Step 4: Invite members to your next in-person event

After identifying our target city, we can take the next step and invite members—all in Common Room!

We’ll get a list of members who meet our criteria by clicking on any purple dot on our map.

Member view generated from reporting filters
Member view generated from reporting filters

From here, we can click the Export button in the top right area and export a CSV to send an email invite to our members.

Export a list of members to CSV
Export a list of members to CSV

And because Common Room is connected to our Slack workspace, we can also create a workflow to message members in our Slack community.

Workflow to send a bulk message to a cohort of users
Workflow to send a bulk message to a cohort of users

Wrapping up

With Common Room, you can combine data from your community, product, and CRM for all sorts of use cases (like finding your next in-person event) and for all types of roles (marketing, sales, community, developer relations).

You can try running this playbook and more now. Sign up for a Common Room account here or get some hands-on help from one of our experts.

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