Client Conferences: The Essential Content Checklist for Attendee Engagement
Client conferences bring businesses and customers together to share insights, explore best practices, and form deeper partnerships between employees and clients. Whether it’s showcasing the latest product updates or highlighting standout client success stories, these events deliver actionable value for all parties. Client conferences also include user conferences- where the clients are actual users of your software, application or SaaS offering.
Below, we’ve organized content types that we’ve heard and seen utilized at client conferences. How does Big Paper Strategy keep our ear to the world of client events? We provide live illustration on site at conferences and meetings – and companies running client conferences often hire us.
1. New Product and Service Features, Obviously!
Share what’s new! While timing product release dates to client conferences can be tricky, it’s important to share what’s new with your customers. For service-based businesses, share what types of new projects you’ve taken on. Products or software? Show, tell, and communicate value!
Clever ways to announce new products at a client conference:
- Unveiling Upgrades: Attendees eagerly anticipate product enhancements that simplify tasks, improve speed, or introduce new capabilities. Share what is new, what is coming, and provide honest timelines in a straightforward, reveal. Make sure your presenter is excited!
- New Project Projection: Work on an exciting project for a client that extended your capabilities? Share that!
- Photo Proof: Whether smiles on the faces of software users, the owners of a new piece of equipment, or the quirky wardrobe of the executives that hired your consulting business, share photo proof of the value received from your work, or new release. Testimonials too? Of course, but keep them short and memorable.
- Comparing to the Past: A new feature or improvement wins hearts when you compare it to the time before its release.
2. Product Roadmap – Clarity for the Road Ahead
New is great, but what comes NEXT must be even better. So answer the question “Where are we going?!”
A published product roadmap showcases what your team is working on in order to make the future lives of your clients better. The promise of a future qualify of life improvement is a gift with which your clients can return to their offices and share with their direct reports, their executives, and can potentially add to their bottom line for future workflow.
Does your current business situation require you to be vague (fear of current sales cannibalization)? Do so with guaranteed upgrade paths or future discounts.
The wilderness is a scary place for a customer to follow you into- especially when you are hoping to align with their budgets and schedules. So be as clear as possible.
Unique ways to showcase a product roadmap at a user or client conference:
- Forward Planning: Clearly deliver a timeline. Talk about new features, new opportunities, and show any details you can- whether it be demos, screen shots, or specifications. Chat with your sales team to make sure any sharing does not cannibalize today’s sales.
- Customer Feedback Loop: User feedback is crucial for planning out the road ahead. Share exactly how this is done- honoring your clients. Taking input from somewhere else? Share that too!
- Personify your next offering: Add a bit of fun by labeling an employee VERSION X. Load this employee up with all of the information for your next product release- even business cards, hashtag name tags, a signed hat, be creative! He or she can float around the conference, be friendly with your clients, and share as much or as little as you direct.
- Future Consequences: But if new feature does Y, do we need to worry about Z anymore? What are the consequences of your new efforts? What does it mean for your industry? Will your AI add-on forever eliminate job positions? Do you eliminate partners? What goes away? Share your future in a live brainstorming panel discussion.
- Visual Roadmap: A live illustrator turns timelines and bullet lists into engaging visuals that keep energy high and encourage questions.
3. Basic and Advanced Training Sessions
Your clients may be new or soon to be new, or they could reach back with you with decades through history. Offer opportunities for both the novice and the well experienced to learn something new.
Creative ways to perform training at a client conference:
- Foundational Knowledge: New or less-experienced users need clear, step-by-step guidance to get up to speed. Bring your patient employees for this task.
- Deep-Dive Techniques: For power users, sessions highlight nuanced functionalities, optimization tips, or even third party connections and opportunities.
- Insane Use cases: How far can your product go? Share the details of your most complex projects, installations, or builds.
- Interactive Learning: Hands-on tutorials – if digital use the biggest screens you can rent, if in-person demonstrations make sure you have plenty of spectator room. Trial your tutorials with real people before you bring them to your clients.
- Answers Booth: Take a page from Lucy in Peanuts and offer an ANSWERS FROM EXPERTS booth. Charge a fake nickel. (Maybe your vendors hand them out)
- Illustrated References: An artist can visually map out processes and systems giving newbies a go-to guide for continued learning. Such illustrations can allow clients to point to and identify pain points – clarifying for all involved.
4. Feedback Sessions – Listen to the Voice of the Customer
Clients attend user conferences to learn. Yet the only thing they pack their brain with before boarding a plane is… feedback and a WANTED list. It is essential that a client conference provides numerous methods of and opportunities for feedback -both in sessions, and through direct opportunities in contact with your staff. Facilitating those opportunities is important.
Fruitful methods to get feedback at client conferences:
- Want List Deposit Box: Clearly showcase a DEPOSIT BOX for product, service, or feature requests. Find this too impersonal? Dedicate specific people.
- Feedback Session and Voting: Using feedback previously obtained, your attendees can vote for your priorities. Use physical voting: “Those that prioritize update A move to the front of the room, those that prefer option B go to the back, and option C stay in the middle”. Alternatively use yeay/neay hand raising, technology, or vote by sticker on paper sheets/ illustrated panels.
- Feedback Roundtables: Seat your developers, engineers, leadership and customer service teams at your customer tables. Have them lead your table with a series of open-ended questions to win real feedback, and, just as importantly, show caring.
- C-Suite Hot Seat: Go overboard with a chair design and game show theme! Sit your top leadership in a session to answer a series of questions. Allow him or her lifelines to ask questions of his staff to get the right answers.
- Open Seat Panel: Set up a discussion panel with four chairs. Fill 2 or 3 with staff members, and offer the remaining one or two for a rotating group of attendees. Be aware that some attendees can capitalize on the attention, so find a way for the audience to choose the next participant, or plan the rotating panel seat to be filled with veteran customers whom you know to be concise.
Peer to Peer Opportunities and Roundtables
Where else in the world will your clients with niche jobs find each other? Nowhere but your client conference! Big Paper Strategy hears this very often, and often hears that “this is a place where everyone ‘gets me’”. The home or corporate office can be a lonely place for one who is specialized. You, dear event planner, are providing the rare opportunity for belonging.
Unique methods to get clients to engage with each other:
- Peer-to-Peer Roundtables: Foster communication by leading tables through a fixed set of questions, which they discuss.
- Q&A Dialog: One of my favorite methods to simplify Q&A at the end of ANY session- Have each table discuss the session topics and come up with one question to pose to the speakers. Tell the tables that the question must be succinct!
- Solution Swap Roundtable– Have attendees write down their biggest challenge, then randomly exchange within a group, or across tables and brainstorm solutions.
- Staff Chair: Tell your staff to put on their brave faces and take a chair at attendee tables. Their facilitation not only counts as a feedback opportunity, but allows for a level of facilitation of their choosing.
- Organize a mentor meetup: Pair industry veterans with newcomers for networking.
- Provide a creativity zone: A space with sketchpads, markers, and free-thinking prompts for shared brainstorming.
6. Industry News & Compliance Concerns
Your company is not the only important thing to your client base. Speak to the challenges and concerns that are affecting everyone in your industry.
Showcase Industry Updates during your Client Conference in these ways:
- Regulatory Updates: Conferences provide a platform to share shifting laws, standards, or best practices that affect users. Bring in a speaker from a government agency that has something to say.
- Legal Challenges: Lawyers have their pulse on concerns of an industry. Invite a legal team to make a presentation about current concerns. Usually they will bite at the chance!
- Marketplace Trends: Offer paid or free spots from your partnering vendors to share an update that they feel is relevant.
- Simplified Overviews: Live illustration distills complicated policies or data into accessible visuals that attendees can follow more easily.
7. Spotlighting Customer Success with Speaking Slots
Your customers DO want to honk their own horns (It’s still not all about you)! Leave room in your schedule for your clients to share their success stories. Customers love being able to brag that THEY SPOKE at an event, or that THEIR project was heralded as a success by third parties. Nothing says LinkedIn content quite like a speaking engagement!
Creative ways to get your attendees to share their success stories at a client conference:
- Inspirational Showcase: Allow clients to share their large-scale achievement with measurable outcomes.
- Find the Root of Winning in Case Studies – Create and share a fishbone chart that shows the root cause of success for a particular project involving your product or service.
- Record an episode of your podcast live at your user conference.
- Metrics and Milestones: Speakers present the before-and-after scenario, detailing key improvements or ROI.
- You simply cannot make heroes out of too many clients!
Awards, Ceremonies, Credentials and More
Celebrating your clients can be based on merit, luck, or on skill unrelated to your product line or their purchase. Providing gifts to your clients can be tricky, but see what works and is allowable by law.
Here are unique ways to celebrate your clients:
- Partner with a credentialing organization and sponsor award winners with class time or testing fee coverage.
- Award unique stories, personal stories, and celebrate obstacles overcome.
- Award your fastest implementer of the last year.
- Award for the best provider of feedback “The squeaky wheel award goes to:”
- Award your oldest customer and share their story (you can only do this once, usually!)
- Award your youngest customer representative and learn their story and youthful perception.
- Award prizes for the best dancer at an after-hours event.
8. Professional & Personal Development
Make your clients feel good about you, and good about themselves by offering inspirational, creative, and career advancing content at your client conference!
- Consider an inspirational speaker: Topics on wellness, resilience, and wellbeing are popular. Or, go for career-building tips! While there are many aggregate sites to find a speaker, espeakers.com is one option (not an affiliate link, no connection).
- Hire an economist: If your industry ebbs and flows with the economy- hearing from an economist would be greatly appreciated by your clients.
- Known Speakers: Industry experts, coaches, or authors provide deep insights that attendees can apply to everyday life- look inside of your industry.
- Creative Note-Taking: Graphic recording engages participants, helping them retain critical ideas on work-life balance and professional skill sets- especially for inspirational speakers.
9. Meeting a Paired Vendor in the Same Space
You have partners, invite them to meet your clients! Leverage those relationships and offer access to your client base by selling vendor tables or time to present and/or meet your clients. This can not only generate revenue to help pay for your event, but shows that your organization is a connector, a solution seeker, and a full-industry hub.
- Trade Show area: Sell your partners opportunities to get in front of your clients. “Booths are available!”
- Co-Presentations: Joint demos reveal the synergy between two platforms, making a compelling case for combined use.
After Hours Fun at a Client or User conference
While I can’t suggest which restaurant you should book, the cruise ship you should rent, or the bowling alley with a concert hall attached, I do suggest methods of inclusion. While friendships can blossom, client conferences can often be seas of individuals on islands, without a lot of connections. Here are some ways to establish connections that continue at dinner:
- Empower your employees to make connections and bring individuals together. This may be through drink ticket distribution, table hosting, or loading each employee with an ice breaker they are comfortable with. Plan for extroversion!
- Bring components of your sessions forward from your daytime events into your night time- this could be live illustrations from educational sessions, feedback walls with voting and post its, product samples, or a running prototype.
- Secretly separate individuals into specific groupings (colored tickets, ID numbers or gift received) and ask them to find each other in order to win a small prize.
6 Other Unique Ideas to Boost Your Client Conference
- Social Media Engagement: Encourage hashtags and photo posts of session illustrations (if you hired Big Paper Strategy!) . This spreads event highlights to external audiences in real time.
- Charity or Philanthropic Activities: Organize donation drives, service projects, or have your clients vote on a non-profit organization to which your company will deliver a donation.
- Gamification or Contests: Spark friendly competition with scavenger hunts or trivia. Visually track leaderboards to keep energy high. I have seen organizations use the GooseChase.com app to run multimedia scavenger hunts.
Did we mention hiring a live illustrator?
It is important for your clients to be able to reflect on the value of their own precious time spent at your conference. Live illustration on site takes your sequential event and returns it as a cohesive story to be viewed as an art walk. Expect clients to say “This, THIS is what I learned, and THIS is why I came”. Illustrations are the vehicle for your content value to move forward.
- Immediate Engagement: Vibrant visuals keep attendees focused, encouraging discussion and active participation.
- Better Retention: Visual summaries help participants recall detailed or complex information long after the conference.
- Commemorative Value: Illustrated boards act as keepsakes, reinforcing the knowledge and connections formed during the event.
- Community Recognition: Seeing their questions or insights rendered in a shared mural validates attendee contributions.
Conclusion
From product launches and in-depth training to customer successes and professional growth sessions, client conferences bring together crucial topics under one roof. By blending these core elements with additional features like charity initiatives, feedback moments and connecting moments, you create an environment where learning and networking flourish.
Incorporating live illustration throughout not only energizes sessions, but also celebrates the key voices and moments that define your event. When attendees leave with vivid visual mementos of both formal sessions and hallway conversations, they walk away feeling genuinely connected to your brand and to one another.