Rose Rocket Maintains Personal Connections through Virtual Booth

From thinking about our own customers to looking out for our customer’s customers, we constantly obsess over every person’s experience with Rose Rocket. This is because we believe in the importance of customer experience and building genuine relationships within our industry – both digitally, and in-person. We approach our customers with this mentality, we sell with this mentality, and we serve with this mentality in mind. Most of all, we know this happens over a thousand small interactions, rather than a single big one. 

As a technology company, we’ve spent many years developing our digital strategy, and this year, we were focused on honing in on our events and in-person channels. There is power and magic in in-person interactions, which is why we believe that conferences like the TMSA are a great place to meet and connect with industry thought leaders.

Approaching 2020, we were prepared to invest in building these connections through our events strategy, and our team was excited to experience some of the industry’s most anticipated conferences and events. 

As you may have predicted, this came to halt as the remote reality of Covid-19 began affecting travel and large gatherings, among more important sacrifices. With the uncertain circumstances at hand, the team was forced to pivot our strategies and adapt to a digital-first mentality. 

But how do you create a genuine connection, digitally?

Our Approach:

When you think of the conference attendee experience, what comes to mind? It could be going somewhere new, making connections, trying cool products, or getting free swag. 

Our team sat down to think about each of these elements, and how as a vendor, we can recreate part of this experience online. The result is our very own Rose Rocket Virtual Booth Experience.

The Virtual Booth brings this attendee experience online, where visitors can meet our team members, demo our product, and redeem free swag as they would at a conference. The goal of the campaign is to facilitate a one-on-one experience for visitors to interact with Rose Rocket, in lieu of meeting our team at industry events in person.

How did we do it?

The Virtual Booth is hosted on a landing page, and we personally invited people to “visit” our booth directly through email campaigns. In the Booth, attendees can hear from our Sales and Solutions team members, see a demo of our next generation TMS, and redeem free Rose Rocket swag sent directly to them. These touchpoints help guide the Virtual Booth experience, and connect to our website for additional resources. 

In order to execute the Virtual Booth in a short amount of time, our internal team banded together quickly to allocate development, design, and marketing resources accordingly. To build the Virtual Booth landing page, we used a small team of internal and external resources to develop, design, and implement the page as part of our website, as well as a videographer to shoot and edit sales videos. Our last filming was completed the Friday prior to our city going into a going into lockdown. It was a tight turnaround for our team, but everyone was invested, and we quickly got it done.

Our audience was segmented around key industry conferences in our events strategy. The purpose of this was to replicate a booth experience for our visitors, so we measured the campaign by the number of demos booked, swag redeemed, and page visits to track overall engagement within our target audience. 

Our Lessons Learned and Takeaway Tips

To understand the true impact of any marketing campaign, it's important to reflect on the wins and lessons learned during the process. When we refer to a customer experience being a thousand small touchpoints rather than one big one, we mean it. Through the campaign, we were able to generate new conversations, reignite old ones, and most of all, give our audience something interesting to escape to, if only for a few minutes.

Pivoting Rose Rocket’s 2020 events strategy allowed our team to experiment with new channels and build ways to connect in suddenly virtual reality. Here are some lessons we learned along the way and take-away tips we hope you will find useful:

• Let go of old plans. As marketers and sales professionals, we love a good strategy and a good plan. When the status quo changed, the first thing we did as a company was graciously let go of the plans that couldn’t be fulfilled in our newly changing world. When you can react quickly to the new trends in the industry and adapt your marketing initiatives, you can continue to stay relevant. 
• Know your target audience.Focus on building something that works well for them. For us, using a landing page gave Virtual Booth attendees the flexibility to visit at their own convenience with the ability to revisit at any time. 
• Showcase your team.Your employees are the real people that your customers interact with, and they are amazing. Put them in the spotlightusing video, chat, or other interactive formats. In the absence of meeting in person, this helps humanize your brand and build trust with visitors.
• Mind your resources by narrowing your audience. 

Get creative.

In the uncertain times of a global pandemic, authentic connection is more important now than ever. The Virtual Booth presented the opportunity for our team to adapt, learn new tools, and facilitate human connections in a remote reality. As we shift to see more events going digital-first, we hope Rose Rocket’s Virtual Booth 

About Rose Rocket 
Rose Rocket is an extensible transportation management software (TMS) that helps manage the unique needs of today’s transportation companies. We help carriers and 3PLs to become more customer-centric in order to differentiate and future-proof their business.

Our open architecture is flexible to work with complex tech stacks of any size, making it easy to connect all the software that runs your business- from QuickBooks to MacroPoint and more. With Rose Rocket, companies can improve communications with systems, customers, and the people who move freight. 

Founded in 2015, Rose Rocket is a venture-backed alumni company of Y Combinator and proudly headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Learn more at roserocket.com.