Develop The Long Term

As you shift from a focus of a short-term, one-night stand conference experience to a long term relationship (LTR) with potential and registered attendees, you need to plan things differently.

A LTR view means you look at each year and think about how you can begin to develop, build and maintain a community experience all year long with conference participants. Not just at the annual meeting.

So how do you create a LTR strategy with your conference participants?

Six Steps To Develop A LTR Plan For Your Conference Participants:

1. Transition from the conference as an information-transfer experience to a relationship building experience

Stop seeing your attendees as a monolithic audience and consider them individuals that you, your presenters and other registrants can develop relationships with. This means thinking about all the conference communication pieces differently. Does your message point them to content that helps solve their problems? Does your message help them connect to others that share similar interests? Does each message build or detract from the relationship building experience?

2. Consider every touch point with potential attendees as relationship building experiences that can provide two-way interactions

When you consider a LTR, you think about a variety of ways to engage people before they arrive onsite. Potential attendees are invited to help co-create the conference experience. You invite them to share their wants, needs and problems with you early before designing the conference schedule. You let them help you develop the beginning, middle and end of the conference narrative. You see mass emails differently. You think about customization to different niche groups and how to allow them to connect with other likeminded peers.

3. View the conference experience as an overall, umbrella narrative that has three parts: before, during and after

Think of your conference experience as a big pie. The focus of your pie is the conference narrative. The onsite content is only one slice of the conference narrative. Blog posts, eNewsletter articles, short videos, organization magazine articles, webinars and web resources from conference speakers and leaders are all pieces of the conference narrative pie. When you shift the center of the universe from the onsite conference experience to the conference narrative, you create new possibilities to extend the reach and range of the conference.

4. Find ways to tell the conference big story in different formats at different times throughout the year

Extend your thinking form a one-time a year format with stand and deliver presentations to providing content in different formats and places where the conference community lives. This means building an integrated experience all year. Think of the TED model for an example.

5. Package your conference narrative and the slices of pie for spreadability

How easy is it for your potential and registered attendees to share the conference narrative and slices of pie with others? Are pre-and post conference webinars, blog posts, eNews articles, videos and web resources spreadable? Is your conference content locked-up to a one-time experience onsite or behind the registered attendee wall? Or is it shared throughout the year and continuously fuels the LTR with conference participants. Are conference participants talking about you all year long or just a few weeks before and after the event?

6. Create a living conference community experience

Where do your conference participants go to maintain their conference relationships? Do you provide an online community gathering place? Or are you only providing a conference eCommunity that is temporary, much like their hotel stay? Your conference participants want a place where they can build an online home together. Give it to them and seed that home with the slices of the conference narrative all year long.

Digital and Social Media Transforming the Trade Show Landscape

New research from the Centre for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) and George P. Johnson Experience Marketing (GPJ) suggests that corporate brand marketers and exhibition organizers are using a broader array of digital media to add value to their exhibition marketing investments and create richer experiences for their audiences.
Co-produced by The Jordan Edmiston Group and with the support of the Event Marketing Institute, this report was created to help the exhibition industry, brand side exhibitors and producers of exhibitions make better decisions about deploying digital, social and virtual media as crucial components of modern exhibit portfolios, the Digital + Exhibit Marketing Insights 2010 report is available for download at www.ceir.org. Now in its second year, this unique research program confirms that trade show professionals are leading the charge to integrate digital into nearly every aspect of pre-show promotion, onsite interaction and post-event sales fulfillment.
“Exhibition marketers have been increasingly leveraging digital media to enhance the value of their events, facilitate partner networking and promote their products and services,” said CEIR Executive Director Cathy Breden, CAE, CMP. “However, this data suggests that a much deeper and broader change is sweeping the exhibit marketing industry, with players at every level making a real commitment to digital adoption.”

Key findings from this year’s research include:
• 72 percent expect to have a digital event strategy in place by the end of 2010
• 44 percent intend to build up their own internal digital marketing talent and capabilities
• Digital media use includes online ads pre-event, SMS onsite and RSS/content downloads post-event
• 78 percent believe that digital marketing increases exhibition marketing effectiveness
• 40 percent of respondents indicate that up to 10 percent of their exhibition budget is spent on digital
“Trade shows and related exhibit marketing campaigns are a key source of revenue for brand marketers, and digital, social and mobile communications are proving to be a rapid-deployment toolset that can improve results and ROI,” said GPJ Senior Vice President of Program Strategy/Worldwide, David Rich. “Having experience marketing strategy with a well thought out digital component, digital strategy, and the system in place to refine it on an ongoing basis, is a crucial aspect of trade show marketing planning and leadership, especially in terms of developing creative ideas, messaging and brand experiences that move the needle.”

Corporate trade marketers, media and show producers can use the research to:
• Inform budget-making and strategic planning process
• Develop best practices for deploying digital across the exhibition life cycle
• Measure investment in digital against the industry standard
• Evaluate agency creative and digital competence