How can you run a content strategy for your online events?
- Choose the best kind of content
- Set your goals
- Identify your audience’s needs
- Take note of KPIs
When you’re planning an event, you probably have a lot of questions in mind. You may think that there are just too many things to be done when it comes to promoting your event, finding the right audience, and scheduling it. In this case, it’s important that you understand how to run a content strategy for online events.
What Is A Content Strategy?
Content strategy simply refers to a marketing process that focuses on all aspects of content creation, marketing, and distribution. Holding an online event means that you have to plan out the kind of content that your business produces before, during, and after the event. Read on to learn more.
Choose The Best Kind Of Content
If you’ve been in the events industry for some time now then you understand just how crucial it is to choose the right kind of content to churn out. Every organization has different needs. For example, some may work well without publishing blogs for their site while for others, it’s a necessity. On the other hand, niche businesses may require something far more tangible than just their products and services.
With that in mind, you need to be able to find the right content format that can serve your business. It’s important for you to diversify and continually experiment on using and combining different kinds of content for promotion.
For example, blogging is always effective since you could come up with a wide range of topics that are not only related to your brand but are also relevant to your target market’s expectations. If you want to take it up a notch, you could also add other digital marketing techniques such as infographics, visuals, charts, graphs, and the like.
It’s a good habit to regularly publish blog content especially when the scheduled date of your event is nearing. This gives a lasting impression in the minds of your potential audience. Furthermore, they can continually refer back to your blogs or even use it as accompaniment during the day of the event itself.
Set Your Goals
Any business who’s planning an event always asks the question, “what do we want to achieve?”. Every event that you broadcast or live stream to a group of people is meant to elicit a response from them. Whether or not this is the response that you seek all depends on the goals that you have set from the very start.
It’s important to set both long-term and short-term goals. If the intent of your online event is more transactional-based, then you’ll need to be able to do something to increase your sales. On other occasions, you might simply want more brand exposure for your organization.
Once you have defined these objectives, you’ll now have a more concrete guide when it comes to producing content that will supplement your virtual event. Try to play around with the tone and style of your content. As people encounter them more frequently in their online ventures, they would be more conditioned to associate what they’ve learned from your content and apply it during the event proper.
Identify Your Audience’s Needs
As mentioned before, the purpose of content strategies is to align content with a specific online event. You cannot come up with a topic or discussion for an online event if you don’t have any idea about what your audience expects from you.
This is the part when you’ll need to maximize resources such as social media. Make sure that you maintain a consistent social media presence, even more so in the days leading up to your event. Talk to your customers online by attending to their inquiries and being receptive to their suggestions.
Your customer inputs ultimately serve as the basis for what you will present during the online event. This will help you plan out what kind of discussions to cover, which guest speakers to invite, and how you can organize the flow of the event.
Take Note of KPIs
Finally, it’s important for you to take into consideration the key performance indicators for the event. In many ways, this is similar to setting your goals and objectives, but this approaches your content strategy with a more specific view.
One KPI to consider is attendee satisfaction. This metric gauges the level of enjoyment your audience experiences during an online event. A good way of getting this information is through online surveys which you can strategically choose to do right before the event ends or even a few hours after the completion of the event.
Another KPI is event engagement. This gives you a clear view of attendees’ level of interest in the content of the event and how frequently they interacted with guest speakers or other members in the audience.
Use this information to change the way you market your events in the future by keeping strategies that work and changing or improving the ones with poor results.
Key Takeaway
Learning how to run a content strategy for online events may be challenging. This is undoubtedly a data-driven process, so it’s important that you make full use of all the tools available to you.
In many ways, a content strategy not only helps you promote your event, but it also provides you with invaluable insights on what you could have done better on the event’s culmination. By setting goals, understanding your audience, and focusing on the kind and quality of content you need, you can already get started on crafting your own strategy for future shows.
