Creative Customer Experiences Helps Company Reach 103% of Growth Goals

In March 2020, as the head of marketing communications for an industrial manufacturer (also head of strategic marketing for two business units), I took an educational approach with a Virtual Lunch n' Learn campaign by offering our engineer customers and prospects a personalized meeting with our company's engineers to discuss any challenges or upcoming projects. For their time each attendee would receive a GrubHub gift card. I had the idea because many of our targets had down time due to lockdown and not having access to their facilities. So, let’s give them something to do that would be helpful; engineer-to-engineer time. Internally, I got buy-in from our engineering, sales, and product teams. I then created drip campaigns, landing pages and forms segmented by market, and launched the campaign to account based targets of top prospects and customers where we felt we could grow. Because of the lengthy forms and expectation that the "applicant" would need to work with us to not only create an agenda, but invite team members to this event, we set a goal of getting just one sign-up from our highly targeted audience. We got 15 sign-ups, and engineer-to-engineer time and potential projects with four of our largest prospects, including 20 engineers from Intel. This program helped the company reach 103% of our growth sales goal for Q2-2020, despite the pandemic affecting many of our business areas.