The WonderLeon Awards
Scaling Stories: iAdvize
What do we do? We’re a Conversational Marketing Platform. Connect your customers or prospects with experts who are passionate about your brand and are available 24/7!
The Story
June 2018, iAdvize’s UK team organised their first “Conversation” Breakfast. The event gathered leading brands and pioneers across the Conversational Marketing space to discuss how the online customer experience can become truly authentic.
The aim of this event was to build brand awareness in the UK by positioning iAdvize as leading the conversation on the disruptive topic of Conversational Marketing and develop relationships with key accounts.
Members of the UK team and colleagues based in the Nantes HQ, joined forces to ensure the success of this event. Positive feedback from attendees and speakers, successful meetings during the event
and team enthusiasm all illustrate this.
In addition, the format of this event, designed to meet UK market needs, convinced iAdvize CEO, Julien Hervouët that events in other countries should follow this example. Indeed, during the event, experts of the ibbü* community spoke and shared their experience. This persuaded everyone that experts need to be present at all iAdvize business events, as their authentic voice is extremely powerful. Since this event in London, experts are omnipresent at iAdvize events.
*ibbü is the first pool of on-demand savvy enthusiasts, paid to share their advice with online peers. ibbu.com/en/
The Little Stories Behind the Scaling Story
We knew that it was fundamental in the UK market to get high quality speakers on board. We built on our existing network and were delighted to have speakers from Facebook, WeChat, Vodafone, Cult Beauty and retail media, Internet Retailing.
In addition to thought leadership from these speakers, we decided to invite experts from the ibbü community. ibbü is the first community of expert enthusiasts who share their tips with other online consumers and get paid to do so. For this event, we had an expert from Oui.sncf and IKKS.
They gave real insight into how ibbü transforms the customer experience by connecting peers and providing people with the authentic advice they’re really looking for.
Overall, we were delighted to have 40 attendees, excellent feedback from the audience and speakers. Which also lead to the decision that experts should always be present at our events as they carry the ibbü mission in the most authentic way.
Key learnings & Anecdotes
- Disruptive content. In an event saturated market, you have to find ways to catch people’s attention. You need to stick out at every stage: topic, branding, follow up. With regards to the content, the feedback from the experts was clearly the highlight of the day.
- Anticipate a 50% drop out rate. Indeed, securing attendees in the UK is a big challenge. We’ve participated in similar events since as delegates or speakers and we were surprised to find out that everyone faces this challenge. Anticipating that the dropout rate was going to be high was key and definitely one of the main learnings.
- Follow-up. The event is only the beginning. The crucial thing is what do you do next? Close, personalised follow up is key to really opening those doors to meaningful conversations.
- Leverage local teams’ agility: with strong growth, HQ needs to implement processes and can sometimes lose agility; local teams, being smaller and facing new challenges, help us innovate continuously. We see our foreign offices as sort of “labs”, whether in the US, the UK, Germany or Spain.
The Team at the Heart of UK Conversation
The UK team was 100% committed to making the event a success. Sales & marketing joined forces and members from the marketing team in HQ also played a key role in supporting the event, specifically David Planchot, inbound marketer and Marine Perrette, event manager.
Fran Langham, Head of Marketing UK managed the whole project, securing the key elements for the event (venue, speakers, attendees…) and was supported by Marie Sagarzazu, Country Manager for the UK.
