How to Plan & Build Engagement Studio Programs for Events

Hello everyone. Welcome to our webinar today on how to plan and build engagement studio programs for events. We're seeing a good few folks dropping in already, so if you're just joining, welcome, come in, take a seat. Haha. We will be starting very soon, maybe two minutes, three minutes past the hour. Because we've got 180, maybe 190 registrants and some joining from all over the world. Very interesting to know where you're joining from. Feel free to drop it in the chat. We'd love to hear from you. Do let us know if you have any issues accessing screen or screen share or you can't hear myself or Triana. Triana, you're okay. You can hear us okay.

I can hear you fine. I can see that someone is saying they can't hear you. Yeah, but, but I can.

We've got cool. Kai heard us. At least he's joining from Massachusetts. Welcome Kai. Welcome Monique from Virginia. My brothers lives just outside of Leesburg. Lovely part of the world. Hey Tamsen, we've got Roslyn from Cardiff. Welcome. Cecilia's in from Massachusetts as well. Welcome. We're really looking forward to getting going on the content. We've built this out over the last month or so, but it's kind of been an idea that's been gestating at Markdown for quite some time to make sure that we're talking a lot more about what we know and helping folks like you join in to learn today to kind of build up your knowledge of the account engagement system, the marketing cloud system in general and everything under the kind of salesforce or marketing banner. Hey John, so you're down from Virginia as well? Yeah, Leesburg is a nice town. Loudoun county is someplace I want to get to at some point in time. Yeah, look, we should kick off. Welcome everybody. Let's call this the official start for hedge plan and build an engagement studio program for events. We have a great session prepped and will be delivered by our senior lead consultant, Triana Jarman. I'm your host. My name is Owen. I lead the sales team. The marketing team and the business development team at Markloud. Used to work at Salesforce. Very familiar with the ecosystem. Love working with Markle and our customers and hopefully some folks who are in the room might be current customers or future customers or even past customers. We'd love to hear from you all. So just keep dropping your comments into the chat, keep letting us know where you're coming from and keep the questions coming in throughout. We have A principle we kind of live by here where you're not really that much time away from solving a lot of your problems, particularly when you think of Salesforce as a big, massive platform. Lots of interesting things to do. The tendency for us to get lost in time as a constraint is pretty clear. We'd like to think for more than just. We're just about skills away. So if we can help in today's session as well as that, with a giveaway and or a treat for everybody who stays for the whole hour and absorbs all the content, we'll hope to bridge that gap for you in terms of skills, what you can do with account engagement for your team or for yourself if you're using it in any capacity. With that, Triana, I'll give you the mic and we can get going.

Great. Thank you, Owen. And hello again, everybody. I'm really excited to be presenting to you all and thank you all for taking your time to join us today. We're going to be going through how to plan and build engagement studio programs for events. Before I get into the content, I will just do a very brief introduction of myself. My name is Triana Jarman. I am one of the senior lead consultants here at Markloud. My background is very much a B2B marketing one. It's where I started my career before transitioning into consulting, which I've been doing since 2018. I have been a marketing champion since 2021. I love cats, really all animals, but I do have a soft spot for cats. I love my son even more, though, and I enjoy running, baking and using gifts, so you might see a few of them dotted out throughout this presentation. So we're planning an event. We are going to be hosting a webinar to say specifically, and we want to leverage account engagement to drive drive registrations to keep people engaged before and also after our webinar. So we're going to need a couple of things to make sure we have everything set up before we say push play on anything. First is that we need an engagement studio plan. You know, what exactly do we want to have happen? We're going to need a CRM campaign. It is very much the crux of kind of pulling everything together between Account Engagement and Salesforce. We will need account engagement assets created and then we will be building engagement studios in our case. And of course, we want to be able to demonstrate that our marketing activity is, you know, resulting in a positive kind of results for the business. So we're going to have some reports as well. So I will be talking through kind of each of these. My intention is that initially I will just be doing kind of some slides and explaining a few things in that regard. And then we will be doing a slight live ish demo towards the end. So. And if you have questions, please drop them into the chat as we go throughout. I don't know that I'll necessarily answer them throughout the presentation, but we'll certainly try to get to them, at least at the end. So for planning our Engagement Studio, we want to make sure that we first of all know what our objective and measure of success is. So in this case we are trying to drive event registrations, but also attendance, which is incredibly important. So making sure that whatever you know, this should be probably the objective for, I would say most webinars. But if you also have extra measures of success that you're trying to do for within your kind of campaign, make sure you capture that somewhere so that this way you always have that in the back of your mind as you're kind of setting everything up and making sure that you're able to kind of prove those things, those measurements once you get to the end of things. Data is so important when it comes to running an engagement Studio program. I've seen quite a few either slightly fail or maybe even not be able to get off the ground when intended just because the data wasn't there in the system. It hadn't been kind of thought of before. So write down who your target audience is for your event and where is that data coming from? Is it all living in Engagement Studio or you're going to be pulling it in from other systems as well? And how is that all going to get there? And also make sure that you have appropriate data points for segmentation. So if you're trying to hone in on a very specific audience, do you have data to kind of be able to do that and does it exist in the system and against enough records? And also think about who shouldn't be in your nurture. If you are trying to exclude certain people, how are you going to do that? Again, data points, how do you identify those people in account engagement to be able to put them into a suppression list. Data is incredibly huge to make sure you're targeting the right people. And then in regards to content and actions, think about how many emails that you're going to need for kind of your event promotion, but then also your sort of event warm up we'll call it. And with events in particular, we are a little bit bound by time, right? Because our event is going to be taking place on a certain date. And so, depending on how far in advance we are planning our engagement studio, we might have a month to be able to send emails. So we could do, you know, at least probably four emails running up to that. If we're a little bit strapped for time and we're only two weeks out, then you're only going to be able to send, you know, maybe just a handful of emails before, without seeming a bit too spammy. So, again, figure when you think you're actually going to be able to kind of go live with things and plan out, then how many emails that you're going to be able to put in before the event starts and think about what should happen when a prospect is engaging with the content. Now, again, in event scenario and with a webinar, firstly, we're just trying to get people to register, right? We really shouldn't be sharing a lot of other content in those emails. It should all be really nice, big, obvious CTAs, register, register, register. And when people do that, we will have a landing page and a form handler which is, you know, adding people to lists, to CRM campaigns and doing kind of that sort of thing. So you have a form handler which is handling, you know, those sort of actions. Is there anything else that's needed? Do you need to be assigning a task to sales at all? Do you, the sales need to know that people maybe are signing up, or do you want to do any other things with people as they're doing those sort of engagements? And then also thinking about the email cadence, which again, kind of relates really back actually to the number of emails. So if you're able to, you know, if you have either four weeks in advance, two weeks in advance, what is going to be a sensible amount of emails and length of time in between so that you're not going to seem a bit too spammy with what you're sending. And I meant to say this actually before I started on all of that, but it's fine. The image that you can see here on the screen is an example of kind of drawing out what your engagement studio is going to look like. And I strongly recommend that you do this whether you want to do it digitally. This was done in a program called LucidChart that we use at Markloud. You could do it on pen and paper, you could probably even do it in a PowerPoint slide. Whatever you can do. But get those ideas, all of these answers to these questions we've just gone through, get them down on Paper, because this will help you sort of visualize exactly what this user journey is going to be, where people are coming from, the fact that they fill in a form and what's going to happen there. Okay, the form is doing this. So I don't need Engagement Studio to add people to a campaign, perhaps, or I don't need them to be assigned because again, my form is doing that. Or maybe you do need Engagement Studio to do that. Right? It all depends on exactly how your setup is going to look. So getting things down on paper really allows you to create a blueprint effectively of not only the Engagement Studio that you're building, but also all of the other things that you're going to need that surround it. So I'm a real strong advocate of getting out a bit of pen and paper or digital pen and paper and getting those ideas down. And just, just a few quick tips when it comes to kind of the planning side of things. As I mentioned, sketching out your ideas, thinking about how you can use any existing content. So this would probably be more relevant to when you're getting to kind of the warm up of the webinar. You know, if you have any existing content that you can use which is relevant to the topic that you're doing, you can share content. In that case, you don't always have to be creating fresh content. Score increases are also not always required in Engagement Studio. So for example, when we're going to be driving people to register for the event and they do that, we don't necessarily need Engagement Studio to be doing any score increases because our baseline scoring and Account Engagement will already be handling that. Unless if you have a reason that you want to add more, you know, a higher score for somebody who does that. So just, just bear in mind that anything that you add in Engagement Studio from a score increase perspective, if it's for things that already happen as part of the base, the basic scoring in Account Engagement, it will be added on top of it. And again, I've said it before, think about the data and what you have available for segmentation. There is a copy feature which I will hopefully be able to show when we get into the kind of semi live demo of Account Engagement where you can copy steps that are quite repetitive. So this way you can build out, you know, a program pretty quickly and I'll show what that looks like. There's also a test feature so that you can see how the steps are actually going to execute. I think sometimes the hard thing about Account Engagement is you put out all your steps and you have, you know, five day wait periods, ten day wait periods. But it sometimes is hard to actually imagine what does that look like for a person who is traveling through. How long would it actually take them to get from beginning to end? So the test feature allows you to kind of play around with different scenarios so you can really see what happens at each step and then you can make adjustments if something doesn't look right. Don't forget existing customers. Seems obvious, but it sometimes happens. We're so focused on trying to drive maybe new business sometimes that we forget actually that we have, you know, in a pre existing database that we, you know, should be marketing these things to. So don't forget your existing customers. And in particular for events and especially with a webinar, know what functions your webinar platform can manage and you know, is going to manage. So a lot of them will do their own autoresponder email. Some of them will even have their own form and you might be beholden to actually using that instead of an account engagement form. They'll send, you know, kind of reminder emails maybe a few days before, an hour before. So just have an understanding of what that platform can do and then where does kind of account engagement functionality fit in as well. So this way you're not duplicating any efforts there and just a little nod to in person events. Make sure that you have an ability to capture attendees with a webinar. A lot of the platforms will have an automatic way of letting you know, like, hey, you know, these are the people who, you know, actually kind of logged onto the platform and, and stuck around till the end. So that's very automatic. If you're doing an in person event, we of course need to have, you know, you're scanning badges, you're having them maybe submit a form upon entry, something like that. But just make sure you can capture those attendees and get them into the system. Okay, so step one was planning everything out. We drew out what our engagement studio is going to be and kind of all the things sort of surrounding it. So now we know exactly all the things we need to set up. And the first thing we need to set up before we even get into account engagement items is our CRM campaign. So with this there are just a few things I want to call out that you might want to consider. And the first is whether a campaign hierarchy is required, whether you're using that in your system. And if you are, then you just need to be aware of how your campaign, your CRM campaign will kind of fit in appropriately within that hierarchy. You also need to make sure you're considering that your prospects are going to actually be in the CRM for being added to the campaign. And what I mean by this is if you happen to have your account engagement org set up where there is perhaps scoring criteria or any other kind of I suppose criteria that people have to meet before you have an automation that would assign them and push them into Salesforce is someone who signs up for your webinar, are they going to meet that criteria or will they fall short and in which case they wouldn't get added to the CRM and they can't be added to the campaign straight away. So bear that in mind if you need to do a, you know, kind of a side to say automation to just make sure these people do go straight in and perhaps bypass any other process you have in place that might be required. Or if everyone is kind of going through to Salesforce then it shouldn't be a problem. The other thing to make sure you're being aware of are campaign member statuses. These are customizable and I would strongly recommend doing that for to say all your campaigns and especially with one for an event or just to say a webinar, we can use things such as they've been invited, they have registered, they've attended and you can even get really detailed about not attended and if they're even on demand type of to say leads or prospects as well. So it's a really nice way to be able to almost measure the journey that somebody has taken from that kind of first invited all the way to actually attended.

We've posted a poll in the poll section. Hopefully you've all saw it pop up on the screen. If not, just check the interface in front of you for me. Down bottom right. I think it's the same. Do you have a campaign hierarchy? Yes, no or yes, but not using. Really interesting to know what the mix in the room is. Plenty of customers in Salesforce land use campaign hierarchy, but to limited extent or with friction sometimes some people are just not aware that it's there. So tell us what you've got and we can frame some of the recommendations and or the suggestions later to some of those answers.

Cool, right? While everybody's answering the poll. So the next step we would do once we've created our CRM campaign is now we can get into building out all the account engagement assets. So there is a little bit of a sensible order of doing this and I'm not going to say that if you don't do it this way. It's dreadful and your campaign won't work. I'm sure it will, but it just does make sense if you do it in a certain way. So firstly create some folders and account engagement because then all the other stuff that you will have to create, emails, forms, your engagement, studio, everything else, it always asks you to put it into a folder. And I really hope people are trying to not use the. What is it called? The uncategorized folder, because that's where then everything ends up living and it's uncategorized and my A type personality just can't handle that. So I hope you have a folder structure and that you would have some folders set up already so that you can add all of the things that you will need for your campaign. Then you want to build up some lists. The lists are actually going to be important because they will be used for other things as we go along. So start with lists. After that, build your autoresponder email next. If you're going to use account engagement and a form to kind of send that, if your webinar platform is doing that, then to an extent you don't need to do this. Then you would start going on to the registration, landing page and form. And again, I'm making an assumption here that we're using account engagement for everything and that may not be the case. If you're having to use the webinar platform, then obviously you would skip this step. Or maybe you're using your own website with an embedded par form. Form handler. Right. There's a few different ways this could go, but in any case, just make sure you're kind of doing this next because our form will have completion actions such as sending an autoresponder email, adding people to a list and adding to a campaign. And those would be things that we've already set up. If we've kind of gone through the order of this tick list. So it just makes it feel a bit nicer when you're doing that. Then we will move on to building out the emails for the actual kind of engagement Studio programs. In our case, we are going to have two. So there's one where it's all about promoting the webinar to the internal database. So you'll have X amount of emails there depending on how much you've decided, you think you can get out in time before the event. And then you'll have emails that are kind of the event warm up. So those are types where it's like, hey, meet the speaker this is a reminder of the topic. So knowing what you're going to talk about in each of those emails, which again, you can already start mapping out in that drawing we did a few steps before. So it just makes it a little bit easier to already be like, right, I need this many emails. This is what the content will be. There we go. And then once you've done that, you can then start building the engagement studios. It is literally the last thing that you do. There are also other things that you might be using as part of your campaign. So you could be having custom redirects. You might be using these for any social media advertising that you're doing to promote your webinar and you want some custom redirects, which is great. And hopefully generally we're all using some UTMs in our URLs to help give us a bit more insight as to where people are coming from. So if you are going to be using those, it's actually beneficial to create those as soon as possible, especially before certainly building out emails because you'll want to be using those in emails and things like custom redirects on social platforms. You also have the option of using dynamic content and this could be in emails. If for some reason, again, the way you've structured your, your engagement studio and maybe your audience type maybe there, if you have kind of a bit of a mix audience and you know a certain topic of the webinar is going to be more of interest to this type of person compared to this type of person, then you might want to dynamic content to just use different hooks. Who knows? Again, there's so many wonderful things that you can do in account engagement to really either make the journey more personable, depending on your audience, make sure you're remembering to upload files. I mean, it'll come, you'll come to a head with this anyway as you're building things like maybe your email or even your landing page and you're like, oh, I need that hero image. I want to, you know, have that speaker headshot. So get, get those into the system and are there any other automations needed? So you might need to rely on an automation rule to help do any extra things that you want as part of your program. So just kind of again, because we mapped everything out, hopefully it will be very obvious what you need and what it should be doing and the actions for the sales team. Again, this would hopefully come out as well with when you've mapped everything out, if you need to be creating, you know, kind of actions within the Engagement studio for kind of like assigning tasks or anything else that alert the sales team to activity that is going on. Make sure that you're remembering to include those. Cool. So before I get to the next next part, I do just want to make a nice little nod to UTMs because they are a favorite of mine. I've done talks on this before. And so if you are looking for more in depth information about UTMs, we point later to you, to some of the content on our website and other previous actually to say webinars and talks that I've done on this. But as a very brief nod for those of you who are using UTMs, you're aware that this is adding that extra layer of insight into campaign activity of where people are coming from. And so if you are using those, make sure you're listing out all of your campaign URLs and then building out the appropriate UTM parameters for each. I find a spreadsheet is very handy for this to just keep things organized. And remember, we're not just thinking about account engagement here. I mean that's what I know we're talking about, but let's be holistic. We're going to be promoting this webinar on, you know, LinkedIn. Maybe we're going to be running some paid Google Ads. So think of all of those things and make sure, you know, we're making the URLs for our event landing page to cover, you know, everywhere that we're promoting our event to. And equally we have to make sure that we've got those appropriate conversion points to actually capture the UTM parameters. It's not just enough to have them sitting in the URL and of set A, you know, it's only going to maybe beneficial. Otherwise if you are pointing people to your own website and you have Google Analytics running and you could see it in Google Analytics. But to really leverage UTM parameters in kind of a very detailed way between par dot and said pardot, between Account engagement and Salesforce, then we can actually be capturing those values on those records, appending them to campaign member records so that we can really see at that campaign level where people came from for our campaign. But you need to have that conversion point which ideally is a form, an account engagement form, a form handler. Otherwise you are maybe looking at extra kind of, I would say set up to try to get any UTM parameters into the system correctly test that your campaign members are tracking UTMs. So again, if you've got that end to end setup of someone being a prospect and having UTMs and that following through, that following through to them, their campaign member record. Just test it out before you go to really make sure it is all working properly. And a very brief thing here, because I've seen it a few times before and I'm not a huge fan, is to not use completion actions on your forms or form handlers to apply UTMs. That's not how they work. UTMs need to be showing kind of like fluidly where people have come from to get to that page. And unless if you know that your page is only being promoted through one channel, it's very hard to kind of be hard coding, so to speak, your utms in. So I would really avoid doing that. And the last thing I'll say is that if you aren't using UTMs, it's okay, you know, you're not a bad person. You can be using child specific campaigns instead to track, you know, where people are coming from. It requires a little bit of extra setup, but it's perfectly feasible to do and a lot of people do it as well.

We have little poll going. Are you capturing UTMs? And can attribute them for each campaign Touch point. Surprisingly, if I'm honest, the winning or the leading question so far is UTM who as in probably not using UTMs. We've got 35% currently capturing UTMs but not consistently and almost 20% or only 20% saying yes, we're solid. So. So get your answers in. Let us know how au fait you are with utms. And again we can layer in some of the UTM parameter work into the demo if it can be highlighted more frequently and or we can emphasize the value to make a case for you to start using them. That would be something we can offer today as well. Back to you, Triana.

Yeah, no problem. Yes, we'll definitely share some of the other UTM content we have for those of you who are in the UTM who category, which is fine. So we are now at the stage we've set up all of our account engagement assets. We're ready now to build out our engagement studios. So as I mentioned before, in our kind of scenario here, we want two engagement studios. The first one is to be promoting the webinar and where the goal there is to drive registrations. And then our second engagement studio is going to be warming up registrants. So people who have registered, we just want to make sure that they're not registered and left alone twiddling their thumbs up, possibly forgetting about our event. We want to make sure that they are still engaged and still just getting those kind of softly, softly little reminders like, oh yes, I've got an event coming up that I need to attend. We can also use that warm up registration engagement Studio to do some post event steps as well. In theory you could make a third engagement studio if you really wanted to. But in this scenario, the way I'll be showing it is we can just use that one to cover both ends of the spectrum. And I'll also be showing just a few fun features that we would maybe want to use in our engagement studio is our wait times for sending emails and also sending emails on a specific date, which will definitely be more relevant in the case of hosting an event. I just have a few extra tips and these ones actually apply more for when you're actually building Engagement Studio. Just always bear in mind that with the adding and removing of prospects is that, you know, you have support suppression list to be able to kind of move people off and they could also be added back in depending on how you use that. So when you're building out your program and you know, if you know there's people you definitely don't want in ever, that can be, you know, a static suppression list if you need people to potentially move in and out. Not sure why, but then you would be using a dynamic suppression list because a dynamic list, as hopefully most of us know, that matches prospects based on criteria and automatically either adds them to the list or takes them off. And so if you're using a dynamic list as a suppression list, keep in mind that they will only be suppressed from the program when they're on that list. As soon as they don't match that criteria for that dynamic list, they will come off of that suppression list and they will start running through your program. So just keep that in mind. These programs have a limit of 300 steps. I can't possibly imagine a webinar that needs 300 steps for kind of promotion. If it does, I mean, that's amazing. I'd love to see that. But yes, there's a limit to the number of steps you can have, but I don't think anyone here will probably be in trouble of reaching that. When you pause the nurture to make amends, don't leave it paused for too long because this actually affects wait times when you push play again. So if you're kind of in the morning, you're like, oh, I need to change something and you pause the program, but you don't actually restart the program till end of the day or Even, you know, even a few hours away, that has an impact of when people will continue moving through the program. So if you know you've got changes to make, try to kind of do them as, you know, pause, make the change, set, play again. So it's literally just a few minutes of you having to have made changes and be mindful of form versus landing page trigger. And again, this is very much for the scenario of if you are using an account engagement landing page and form together is that when you do the landing page is kind of like the parent. And that is where you go for looking at people who have submitted the form. Actually that data is no longer on the form. The data is held within to say the landing page in account engagement. And so when you're using triggers in your engagement studio to like listen for people doing something, you'll want to end up listening for the landing page instead of the form. Okay, so that was a lot of slides. Thank you for bearing with me on that. And I am going to now do a live ish demo. So there are some things where I've pretty much already set them up, but I do just want to try to take you through very quickly a few things. High level. I don't plan to really get into a lot of like this is exactly how we're going to build something, but I just want to kind of show where things are and if just a few little bits so. And hopefully everything is teed up and we don't have any blue wheels of.

Death to contend with before we kick off in earnest. Triana, I'll just say it's a good time for anybody to get any questions into the chat as you're watching what we're doing on the screen. While we may not be able to or have the facility today to really walk into the depths and the details, we could definitely talk to the problem you might address. So get your questions in. If you have a subject in an area that's on screen, chances are we can get a discussion going that if it's relevant and if it keeps us on track, fantastic. It'll just give you more value from the session.

Excellent. So I just really quickly wanted to show you lucidchart. So as I mentioned, this is what we use internally to kind of draw out things, whatever they might be and in which case certainly use it for planning out engagement studio. So I mean I'm just going to zoom out ever so slightly so you can kind of see at a high level. This is what I've done as an example for my event promotion. So I have people entering the program. There is an action here to add people to the CRM campaign With my custom status of invited, I've decided I can manage three emails before this event and then I'm also going to run a bit of a rule down at the bottom which is going to check whether people have clicked on the registration link but they haven't submitted the form. And depending on whether that's a yes no, I'm going to send a slightly different email then maybe with, you know, just kind of a different hook or you know, whatever it could be to try to maybe get the people who already showed interest. What can I do to actually get them to submit that form? So again by drawing all of these things out it gives me a really clear idea of what I should be setting up in the system. And same thing with to say the the warm up list. I've done the same thing where I've written out okay before the event happens I can fit in this many email and I'm also going to be running this type of action in Engagement Studio based on whether people have actually attended the webinar to then decide how I send a follow up email. So the drawing out really helps bring everything to life later on in a much easier way when we are in account engagement. As I said, first things first folders. So I have my product launch folder here and you can see I've just set up for all the things maybe I know that I want to use. I've set up folders even maybe for things I know I don't need.