Are your customers excited about your brand? With customer experience proven to reduce cost to serve, increase revenue, and drive employee satisfaction, the answer to this question can make or break your bottom line.

If you landed here, though, we’re probably preaching to the choir.

As a customer marketer, you’re always looking for new ways to engage your customers and make sure they stay loyal. Does your brand experience make your customers want to shop around? Or double down and recommend you to a colleague?

In this article, we’ll explore how the right digital events can help you achieve your biggest customer marketing goals, including specific ways to drive customer engagement with Goldcast.

With increased competition and growing pressure to do more with less, customer marketers have their work cut out for them.

According to research from the Customer Marketing Alliance (CMA), today’s customer marketer’s core responsibilities center on improving retention. They’re laser-focused on goals like:

• Renewals
• Contract expansions
• Product and feature adoption
• Acts of advocacy

With these goals in mind, respondents to the CMA survey cited the following activities as the biggest value drivers for the organization:

• Customer advocacy program (33%)
• Case studies (15%)
• Customer advisory boards (11%)
• Customer conferences and events (11%)

How can customer marketers prioritize these value drivers to accomplish their retention and expansion goals? It comes down to engaging with your customers in meaningful ways.

As brands continue to shift toward digital-first customer engagement, virtual and hybrid events are high on the list of priorities.

But exactly what types of events are on the table for customer marketers? Here are a few ideas, plus how to execute them flawlessly with Goldcast.

How can customer marketers prioritize these value drivers to accomplish their retention and expansion goals? It comes down to engaging with your customers in meaningful ways.

Customer marketing is all about creating experiences that go beyond user support to help transform customers into brand champions.

Some of our favorite types of digital customer events include:

1. User conferences: Boost retention by teaching your customers how to effectively use your product.
2. Product launch events: Drive adoption by showing how customers can use a new product (and why they need it).
3. Field events: Intimate experiences that deepen your relationships with customers. Think: networking events and case studies targeted at the account level.
4. Customer advisory boards: Build a two-way communication channel with your customers, increasing retention and informing your product roadmap.
5. User community events: Facilitate connections between your customers. Empower them to network, learn, and engage with your broader brand community.

Today’s B2B event attendees prefer digital events, with 81% saying they are more willing to sign up for hybrid and virtual events compared to in-person. It’s not rocket science. Digital events are often more convenient and affordable for your busy customers.

But not all digital events are created equal and when it comes to recreating the in-person experience online, your choice of platform can make or break your success.

Here are six things customer marketers love about running events with Goldcast.

Make no mistake — digital event production matters. Big time. Your customers are, well, other brands’ customers too. Their inboxes are overflowing with event invites. Getting them to register for your event is a win in itself.

Once they’re in, you’ve got to get them to stick around. For that, you’ll need strong event production that creates an immersive and memorable experience. Goldcast’s suite of video production tools gives you the power to do just that.

You don’t have to be a production pro to use features like:

• High-impact virtual backgrounds
• Overlays and lower-thirds
• Highlighting attendee questions and chats on stage
• Directing attendees with news-style ticker messaging
• Showcasing partners and sponsors

To pull off an event with incredible production, you want your production quality to feel just as organic as a Netflix stream. Great content delivered with stellar UI.

Branding is a vital part of your digital event. But it’s not just about white-labeling a platform with your company’s logo. There are a variety of ways event branding can elevate your customer events.

For starters, is it even your own branding you want for your event? Depending on the event goal, you might want to use a custom event brand, partner’s brand, customer’s brand, or even a co-branding situation.

With Goldcast’s event branding features, you can do any and all of the above, with fully customizable:

• Registration pages
• Event logo
• Stage backgrounds
• Favicons
• Fonts
• Call to actions
• Virtual backgrounds
• Buffer videos
• Name cards
• Sponsor logos
• Chat banners
• Emails
• And more

From the registration page to custom stage backgrounds and chat banners, the brand experience is in your hands completely.

When it comes to five-star user events, that level of control is something that marketers like Megan Guerra of Onspring don’t take for granted. "From an end-user experience, when you use Zoom, you're looking at Zoom. When you use Goldcast, you're looking at Onspring. It's a truly branded experience. It's completely immersive."

Getting your customers to attend a digital event is half the battle. But today’s attendees don’t want to sit and watch passively (if they did, they’d just watch the recording). Attending live is all about engagement.

But which engagement features are most important for customer marketers?

According to our research, Q&A panels (44%), breakout rooms (38%), and live chat (36%) top the list. Human beings are social creatures by nature. Your customers want to interact with event speakers and other attendees in real-time.

In a digital environment, it’s not always easy to facilitate that interaction. When you run your event on Goldcast, our engagement panel is your mission control. 🕹️

Right in front of you, you’ll have everything you need to manage:

• Chat
• Messages
• Polls
• Text Q&A
• Video Q&A
• Documents
• CTAs
• And more

With the ability to publish these interactive features directly to the main stage, it’s easy to bring your entire audience into the conversation.

Alright, you’ve launched your expertly branded, highly engaging customer event. How do you actually measure its success?

Modern event marketers know the importance of going beyond registration and attendance rates to dig deep into event analytics for the kind of need-meeting insights that can influence adoption and renewals.

In Goldcast, you can easily track every key event touchpoint:

• Attendance rate
• Attendee summary
• Average time spent at each event
• Resource clicks
• Traffic for each broadcast
• Poll responses
• Q&A interaction
• Demos requested
• Time spent in booths
• Video view times
• Chat messages
• Discussion group engagement

Because it’s not enough to get your customers tuned in. We’ll help you prove ROI by reporting on meaningful, account-level engagement that translates to real business results.

Access to on-demand content is a huge perk for 84% of digital event attendees. If you’re giving your customers exclusive learning opportunities, they’ll want to have ongoing access.

On-demand content allows your event to live on — both with your existing customers and a wider crowd who didn’t attend live but are interested now. You can also repurpose your on-demand event content in a variety of other ways, from blog posts to lead magnets to social content.

Just enable Goldcast’s on-demand event mode to seamlessly capture recordings. Want to keep some sessions exclusive? You can disable on-demand for specific sessions ahead of time to keep them real-time only.

Once your on-demand content is available, your customers can access it any time. And don’t worry — even for on-demand attendees, you’ll have access to a slew of engagement analytics.

“Okay…” you might be thinking. “It’s great to know who’s engaged, but how helpful is that info by the time I get the event report five days later?”

We get it. Lead response time is crucial. When a customer indicates high levels of engagement or interest in a new product, you need to act quickly.

With Goldcast, there’s no days-later report. Our deep integrations with all your favorite marketing tools make it easy to feed Audience Intent Metrics & Signals (AIMS) into your platform of choice so your team can act on them instantly – even while your event is still happening.

For example, our Slack + Salesforce integration immediately sends a Slack notification to your team whenever any of your existing customers sign up for an event. You can be notified anytime an attendee:

• Registers
• Attends an event
• Activates an activity trigger

With the Goldcast and HubSpot integration, you can even trigger custom workflows based on attendee interaction with an event.

Digital events are an effective (and fun!) way for customer marketers to drive engagement, renewals, and expansions. It’s all about creating an immersive experience that lives rent-free in your customers’ minds for months to come.

If you’re ready to get creative and engage your customers with virtual events, Goldcast has the cutting-edge features to help you stand out.