Creating Captivating Content for your Audience
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
These days, content is king and it runs the show at your special event, meeting or in social media efforts to drive event attendance. In order to ensure you are providing your attendees and network with valuable and impactful content, it is vital to understand your audience and what key topics are relevant and interesting to them.
How do I do this?
- Determine who you are reaching.
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- Look at the job titles of your event. Are they mid-level managers, C-level executives or entrepreneurs? Your content and tone should be tailored to your specific audience.
- Listen.
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- What are these people saying online? What type of content are they sharing with others? By utilizing Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks, you are easily able to target the expected demographic of attendees and see what content they find compelling. This listening exercise will provide you with insight about what topics your audience is interested in, as well as what they are sick of hearing about. (You don’t want to fall in that trap!)
- Determine the format of your content.
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- Once you know your audience and the issues that are important to them, you’ll be able to choose the right format for your content. If you have a complicated product to explain, a well-produced video showcasing its features may be the best option. If you have extensive information to cover in a short period of time, a detailed PowerPoint presentation that can be shared with your audience post-event may be the best solution. Either way, the key is to create content that meets the needs of your audience at that point in time.
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- After an event or meeting, find out what your audience and attendees found to be the most compelling by surveying them. Use this information when creating content for your next event, knowing what resonates with this crowd even more.
I’ve created the relevant content. Now what?
In today’s digital world, content lives far beyond your event or meeting. When creating your content, be sure to think about how it can be shared post-event or how it can be repurposed into other forms of content such as a whitepaper, webinar or podcast. A few ideas to help your content continue to be seen include:
- Make content available post-event by putting it up on your web site and all of your social media accounts and cross promoting it immediately after the event.
- If there is a Q & A session, take note of the questions asked and create a short podcast answering these questions.
- Listen to what was said about your event or discussion by monitoring online conversations after the event and creating content to address the issues and questions that arise. Event #hashtags will help you easily identify and review Twitter comments about your event.
- Share this content with the rest of your internal team and encourage them to pass it along to others.
By implementing the strategies and approaches listed above in your next effort to create compelling content, you will see greater value in what you share both during and after the event.
For more questions about how to creating useful content and how to share it, check out this BtoB webcast [http://cot.ag/cMKbGi]. You can also visit www.fathombusinessevents.com to see how businesses are using a non-traditional venue, the movie theatre, to share content with national audiences.
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