THE ACTIVITY IS SO SATISFYING

nabilislam1225

Most companies have event staff to manage their meetings and seminars. Good people follow content best practices when developing their campaign strategy. But few companies actually apply content strategy to their campaigns.

I like to think of events as another form of content. Even the fun part.

I learned this through a hard lesson. I have been asked to take responsibility for a large number of activities once. For our next annual Wingnut Show (renamed to protect the innocent), my first step was to book some high-profile keynotes and let the conference planners do the rest.

Bad move.

Attendees gave us low marks, saying the program did not meet their needs and lacked cohesion.

That's when we apply our content strategy approach. Excellent results appeared quickly.

Audience comes first

The first thing we do is look at the data. Post-conference survey results from previous Wingnut Shows tell us why people attend conventions and what they expect from them. Inevitably, this is a deep understanding of their self-interest.

Attendees want to learn best practices Canada Mobile Number List from the Wingnut industry so they can do their jobs better and make progress. They want to connect with colleagues to meet comrades and grow their network.

I doubt you'll find something like that in most events.

We also looked at participants: age, gender, major, industry, company size and education.

From here, we are able to build the role of the target participant for the next activity.

competition

When you develop your content strategy, of course you watch the competition. That's what we're doing for our next Wingnut event. We listed other players and indicated their pricing, content focus, target audience and location.

It's great to see what the industry is talking about, not what. And, just like when you read a competitor's blog, you'll get ideas.

We want to see the gaps we can fill that haven't been addressed and that we have a "right to win."

Just as you're thinking about guest blogging opportunities, this exercise gives us ideas for event partnerships or co-promotional relationships.

trend

The next step in developing a content strategy for our upcoming annual Wingnut event is to look at online trends.

Google Trends, Google AdWords, SearchVolume.io and other tools are able to give us ideas on trending topics. Check out the search results on our Wingnut website for clues too.

Looking at trends on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can give us clues about trending social topics. BuzzSumo is one of my favorite tools for getting this information. It tells you about social sharing.

It's also helpful to check out FollowerWonk to see who Twitter's influencers are and what topics they're using to get people's attention. Reddit and YouTube are also full of threads about trending topics.

influencer

When developing your content strategy, you always look at influencers. They are who you write, quote, interview, and socialize your approach to.

Even more so for events. Just as some of the best content strategists I know pursue an influencer strategy, the best event planners attract influential keynote speakers first.

Compelling keynote speakers are usually those who influence trends that interest your audience. They will get attention and take action.

so similar

Imagine this headline: "Michelle Obama Reveals Why She Uses Nuts". This story will attract a lot of readers to your blog through SEO and Social.

Same thing: "Michelle Obama at the annual Wingnut conference keynote." Yes - a lot of people will come.

Thematic strategy and influencer strategy go hand in hand with events.

value proposition

When developing a content strategy, you always define the meaning, relevance, and goals of your content. How would you describe it? "Our blog helps Wingnut users do better by answering questions, uncovering the latest trends and helping them succeed."

We have a similar value proposition for our upcoming Wingnut conference: "The annual Wingnut conference will help industry professionals by educating them about new trends and skills and connecting them with their peers."

build activity

We now have audience research, target personas, information about trends, and knowledge about key influencers. Time to go to work.

Since our target audience is professional development, we selected three of the most popular topics and established breakout sessions for each. We end each day with a keynote speech and an award at one of the luncheons.

We use characters to calibrate consistent difficulty levels in programming. What we do is content; why not have an event?

We know from our survey that previous attendees found the web scary. So we built a structured network that makes it easy for people to connect based on shared job titles. We also heard that they like music, so we used the music format information from the radio station to program the music the target characters liked (including the live band at the reception).

Just as content strategists sometimes use editorial advisory boards for focus groups, we have a board of Wingnut industry professionals. They gave us useful advice about the procedure before we published it online.

We also used a pre-match survey. I guess it's hard to do with editing content, but for something like a skill-based tutorial, it's better to ask the participants how specialized they are on a given topic in order to guide them up to their skill level.