Published: January 2024
When planning events, building a content strategy that correctly reflects the event’s objectives, branding, and overall message is essential. From planning key goals to call-to-action measurements, we’ve collated several considerations when building your content strategy around your event…
Kickstarting your content strategy, you’ll need to get to grips with your event theme and objectives. You’ll need to clearly outline the purpose of your event, whether that’s increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or launching a new product. These aims will define your content’s most effective channels and help you to define the content’s goals. Are you aiming to inform, entertain or inspire your audience? Do you want to engage sponsors, increase sales or gain brand affinity? The most important question to ask is “why”?
With defined event objectives, you’ll be able to tap into the current trends and nuances of the same type of events. What’s happening in the world of conferences, product launches or experiential? What are people engaging with, how are they reacting, what’s gaining the most traction?
Doing this will, in turn, allow you to identify your content’s target audience, from their needs and wants, to their pain points. Consider your ideal attendees' demographics, interests, and behaviours, then tailor the content to land the correct messaging. Focus on their preferences and interests and include all the essential information they need. By defining your event objectives, you’ll determine the current trends and ultimately your audience, creating further reach and resonating through your content’s messaging and tone of voice.
Once your event is underway, it’s vital that you keep your ears to the ground and capture the most memorable moments with your audience. Whether it’s something big or small, there will be something that resonates with your audience, and you’ll need to capture this to promote post-event.
Pre-event, make sure you’re focusing on your “wow” moments - perhaps you have a surprise guest speaker or show-stopping entertainment planned. Singers, comedians, hosts - anyone with a recognisable face are always a great way to promote. Planning beforehand is essential, make sure your photographers, videographers, and PR contacts are at the ready to capture any assets.
It could also be something more granular or specific - perhaps a popular area of a conference that people gravitated towards, or a particular design element of an activation that caught people’s eye. While your event is live be sure to capture these responses and create assets that can be used as evidence. Quick feedback surveys are a must, so make sure you send follow-up emails or have team members on the ground ready to collect these findings.
Post-event, it’s a matter of reinforcing and amplifying these memorable moments throughout your content, reminding the people who attended your event why it was a success and showcasing to those who didn’t what they missed out on. Creating shareable content that will get people talking will be easy, as long as you’ve captured these memorable elements...
Something to consider when collecting these results and findings is your content’s call-to-action (CTA). Your CTAs will determine how people interact with your content pre-, during, and post-event. Once they interact, this content will work in conjunction with your SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) to track event success.
See our latest whitepaper, Maximise your events with ROI, for key examples of SMART measurements.
Your content will be a variable you can measure and help to highlight the overall impact your event had. Newsletters, website pages, shareable social media and digital assets will be able to provide engagement rates, impressions, reach, views, signups, click-rates and event-specific hashtags. An effective CTA will determine how people interact with this content and may be the difference between people considering your event or scrolling on.
CTAs such as “secure your spot” or “don’t miss out” can create a sense of urgency for potential attendees on the fence. For newsletters, “get in touch” or “lets talk” can be included for ease of access, so attendees can contact organisers effortlessly. Measuring things like video views will be able to show how engaging your content is, you just need to get people to click that play button. By focusing on your CTAs, you’ll ensure measurables like signups and video views can be part of your overall event SMART goals, proving success and allowing more scope for future strategies.
Building a content strategy around your event isn’t just complementary, but a strategic aspect necessity to amplify your event’s impact. From initial planning, where your event objectives will set the tone, to capturing the memorable moments during the event, and finally leveraging effective CTAs, you’ll be able to enhance the overall event strategy, setting the stage for future success.
Get in touch to reconsider designing your content strategy around your event...