Vol 1 · Local Business ft. Influencer Tasting Events
Role: Marketing Strategist, Experience Designer
Time: March – November, 2019
Background & Problem
When I was working at Wali, a SaaS startup providing customer intelligence and digital marketing service, one big challenge for us was to boost the number of end-users and earn trust from business owners with limited budgets.
At that stage, Wali had already gained 200,000 registered users and onboarded 100 local businesses in the Greater Seattle area. However, Wali was still lacking in recognition and reputation due to its short launch, which multiplied the difficulties for the sales team during outreach. The marketing team also needed new initiatives to gain more organic reach and new audience.
Solution
To solve the marketing and sales problems, there were 2 vital targets to reach. Wali had to gain more:
- Exemplary client cases as testimonials
- Local and “Wali Model” businesses would have a positive impact among peers, being live showcases to both end-users and potential clients.
- Influential seed users to spread the word on social media
- Collaborating with seed users would amplify Wali’s marketing efforts, and their organic reach could be directed to Wali’s own channels, increasing impression.
And… how about “kill two birds with one stone”? What if Wali hosts a series of tasting events, inviting the influencers to those model businesses, featuring their food/beverage, and Wali app/service.
Moreover, most local small businesses are tight on marketing budgets. A medium-scale influencers tasting event would create a social buzz among the foodie community.
Execution Details
I worked with sales and marketing team members and selected up to 10 “Wali Model” businesses from the existing client pool. Some have chain stores in the area, and most of them serve quality food/beverage. More importantly, Wali has built up trustworthy customer relationships with them. What they needed to do was deciding on a tasting menu, and prepare for the food.
The collaboration with influencers was a bit more complex. Given that it’s a whole new event, and some influencers had no knowledge of Wali, creating a decent and nice event experience would be very crucial.
I designed a complete set of marketing assets covering every process of the event, from event announcement, invitation:
To event reminder, tasting menu trailer:
To after event thank you card:
Result Snapshot
of one single event
(Thank you for visiting my website. I will update Vol.2 soon.)
