Leveraging the event content

Generating valuable content is dream of every marketer but how you use the content is more important. Following are the 5 ways of using content effectively…

1. Sell it - If attendees are willing to pay for the content live, there is no reason why you can’t find customers to consume that content online. The secret here is price and delivery. Companies tend to think the same content online is worth the same as it is live. It’s not. It is a completely different user experience, and the value one gets from the live event is very different than the online version. You should price it accordingly, then cut the price you think it’s worth in half…then in half again.

2. Give it away - This is the foundation of most freemium models out there. If the content has a short life span, give it away after the conference as a way to build your brand and sell prospects to the next event in the cycle. Tie it into registration for the next conference. Register for this year and get the full video from the last conference free.

3. Transcribe it - Text based content can provide you with additional distribution outlets. You can turn a 60 minute presentation into a white paper, a handout at an event, or a series of press releases.

4. Social media - With great speakers, you can cut up a 60 minute presentation into five to ten 3-5 minute clips. Build up your YouTube channel or get it up on your website. These short bursts of information are great content for most social media sites.

5. Promotion - What better way to sell the next edition of your event than with great content from the last event. Cut speakers and thoughts from different presentations into a great promotional clip. If you’ve got a camera crew onsite, they can collect plenty of B-Roll for you. Interviews, testimonials, etc.

Event Focus 2011

One Priority that Event Marketers Need to Focus on this Year:

1. Retention

Given the year the economy – and in turn the events industry – has been through, it is time for Event Marketing leaders to strategize and make an investments in developing and implementing strong attendee retention strategies. In many cases, event marketing has been in “churn mode” for too long – continually putting time, effort and investment into attendee acquisition activities without a plan in place to manage attendees post-event. Part of this is understandable – managing the frequency and volume of events from a marketing perspective is a daunting proposition. However, now is the time to develop, execute and – most importantly – stick with – a retention strategy to ensure long-term survival.

Why now? A couple of reasons:

1. Cost – although there is not a set metric in place, it is more expensive to acquire a prospect than it is to retain them – in other words, bringing a cold prospect through the entire AIDA cycle costs more than a person who is already beyond, at least, the Attention/Interest phases. (Tracking and testing the cost per attendee without any retention initiatives in place vs. how the initiatives impact the cost is also important – if nothing else, as an internal benchmark.)

2. Reputation – A retention program in place will re-focus your communication channels so that they map to the various audience segments you define. As you learn more about your attendees – their functionality, buying patterns, needs, etc. – and develop actions around this knowledge, it will lead to their receiving and (hopefully) registering for future events via the channel and timing they prefer – and will decrease push communications and, by extension, challenges around today's SPAM prevalent environment. Having a program in place will also, almost by definition, ensure a new focus placed on the customer/attendee - pre-event, onsite, and post event, cross-functionally various stakeholders should be working to ensure there is a renewed urgency on customer satisfaction (especially if the emphasis on Retention is coming driven top-down!) if the strategy is to encourage them to come back next year/for another event.

3. Most importantly, The Tools are There: Database modeling services have been with us for a while; however, over the past year Social Media had developed into something that can provide Event Marketers with a number of tools to effectively incorporate into a retention strategy. Facebook fan pages and groups, LinkedIn groups, Webinars, communities built with Ning, YouTube, Twitter, Slideshare, etc. are some of the portals that can be utilized to share information and knowledge and keep your contacts abreast of your content and activities. (Of course, traditional offline and email channels are part of the mix as well.)

How you do it is up to you – but the timing is right for you to plan and execute on this. And do plan for the long-term – results, by definition, will not be immediate, but will be worthwhile.

Create a positive attendee and exhibitor experience

Here are four thoughts, strategies and tactics you can – and should – be utilizing to leading up to an event help you ultimately, deliver a positive attendee and exhibitor experience:

1. Event Marketers need to be engaged in the earliest phases of the planning cycle. You need to be on board in understanding and contributing to content formulation to ensure it aligns to the target market you are responsible for recruiting. Content is King: if you are seeking to attract VP-level attendees but content and sessions are addressing tactical topics … the VP you are targeting will see this and will send his subordinates. Game over.

2. Best practice: Monitor. Make it a point to regularly review reports to ensure registrations are fitting the mold both in volume and demographics. Understand your registration patterns and continually analyze where registrations are coming from. If there is a list, internal segment, social media source or channel that is drawing too many or too few of the right/wrong attendee, be nimble enough to react.

3. Work with your sponsors. This takes time and effort, but working with exhibitors – in coordination with your sales team – to engage them in reaching out to their contacts is important. There is certainly pushback and challenges around executing these efforts, including “why would I want my client on the show floor where my competitors are?” The message should be around your seamlessly working to invite their prospects - the message being “Wouldn’t you like that prospect that’s been in your pipeline for six months at the event?”

1. 4.      Leverage Team Send. Develop an incentive: once you have a “good” contact registered, engage them in inviting others. Pending bandwidth, this is a great opportunity to roll out the “white glove” approach to people who have committed to your event. A phone call or personalized note is both a great CRM effort and works toward building ancillary attendance.

Social Media Strategy Trends

At a recent panel at BlogWorld Expo 2010, as the panel discussed where they saw corporate social-media strategy heading, three prominent trends emerged:

·         Listening to your customers is great — but reaching out to them is better. Right now, most companies’ crisis-communications strategies are modeled on the 24-hour news cycle, Companies know a story can break at any moment and they need to be ready to respond. The problem with this plan is that no matter how fast a company’s reaction time is, they’re still waiting on customers to get angry before staffers get involved, and by that point, it may be too late to avoid an incident.
Great customer service is the best crisis-communications strategy, because great service can keep uproars from happening. Firms should make staff available to answer questions and talk with customers before they become truly disgruntled, user forums are a great place to start doing this.

·         No one department can control social media. Who owns social media in your organization? Is it public relations? Marketing? Human resources? While plenty of companies are facing internal power struggles over the answer to this question, in the future it’ll be a non issue, as social media becomes less of a coveted resource and more of a tool that all employees uses to do their jobs.
Leading organizations may have a top-down approach now, but they’ll soon move to a hub-and-spoke model, in which all departments are responsible for social communications in their areas of expertise. Soon, asking who controls all of an organization’s social media will be like asking who is in charge of all its writing, he added.

·         Listening doesn’t mean forgetting who’s in charge. One thing all the panelists seemed to agree on was that companies need to understand that their social-media fans are a subset of their customers — and not necessarily a representative sample. Much of the later part of the panel was devoted to handling packaging and logo mishaps. Companies bear responsibility for making sure that complaints they respond to truly represent how the bulk of their customers feel — not just a vocal minority. Feedback is not a substitute for judgment.