Building a community of like-minded data specialists

Challenge

Leveraging an existing partnership with O’Reilly Media Inc., Starburst wanted to build phase 1 of the book club campaign around Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale— the most authoritative guide on Data Mesh authored by its founder Zhamak Dehghani. Physical and digital versions of the book would be delivered to prospects and existing customers, who would subsequently be invited to join a series of webinars and an exclusive club community page on LinkedIn. This page would allow members to communicate directly with Starburst Data Mesh experts, receive information about exclusive webinars and events and more. Starburst came to us to help build out a visual identity for the book club and supporting content for promotional activities. All this needed to be completed in a matter of weeks.

Solution

Following initial discovery sessions, we created a visual identity for the campaign that could stand on its own while still feeling consistent with the Starburst brand. We quickly designed a campaign ‘mascot’ (an as yet unnamed astronaut) and distinct club logo. This received a lot of very positive feedback and gave us a strong foundation to build upon for future phases of the book club.

On the content side of things, we developed a promotional strategy and messaging framework to support the campaign, taking into account the different customer segments being targeted. We then comprised multiple email sequences to target different sections of our target audience, first to introduce the book club and later to promote upcoming webinars to registered members. We also created content for targeted landing pages, social media promotion and the ‘holiday packs’ sent to specific prospects and containing physical copies of the book. Throughout the entire process we remained in close and regular contact with our stakeholders, collaborating, sharing feedback and iterating at speed.