Ninja Moves for Improved Conference Session Marketing
In 2013, we conducted a survey in partnership with our friends at Tagoras.120 conference/education professionals responded to the question "Does your organization re-write any of your speaker session submissions (e.g. titles, descriptions or learning objectives) for this meeting?
47.5% responded that they always or frequently do. The same question was asked in a 2011 survey. 34.6% responded with the always/frequently response the first go around. We didn't do a survey in 2015, , but our pulse tells us that more organizations are moving in this direction.
Education professionals will often team up with a member of the marketing team to upgrade this area. Writing headlines that resonate and attract is an art. This needs to be coupled with the education/learning expertise for communicating what the participants will be able to do after the session.
If you do this, it's very important to have your presenters involved. They're the ones that ultimately need to deliver as advertised. Better yet, provide your speakers with examples of session titles, descriptions and learning objectives in your speaker portal.
Our research also tells us that emails about specific education sessions tend to be the ones with the highest open rates...even for tradeshows.
We're continuing our new webinar series at 2:00 PM EST on Tuesday, November 10th. This one will be on Creating EPIC Conferences presented by Jeff Hurt. If you're interested in participating, click
here to review and/or register. All webinars are promotion free, progressive learning opportunities.
How often are your conference communication pieces in lockstep with your attendees' needs? Do your conference emails tend to go out as a one-size-fits-all blast to your entire database? Or is your copy customized with critical issues for each primary target audience segment? If you want to increase your conference attendee acquisition, you need targeted emails and marketing. Message maps are one way to create customized conference marketing content.
You might not give much thought to your presentation title for a conference presentation. The conference organizers will have asked you to provide a title and an abstract for the conference program and you manage to slap something together just before the deadline. But your presentation title can determine whether you have a smattering of people attending, or standing room only.
When planning a road trip, you usually start with the final destination in mind. Rarely do you take a spontaneous, free-for-all trip with no idea of where you'll finally end. Unless you're on the run like Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise. So, it is with conference session descriptions and learning objectives (LOs). Your LOs serve as guideposts along the path of your presentation to help your attendees learn and retain information. They are critical to the presentation and vital to your conference marketing materials.
You're browsing a conference website. The dates look good. The city is appealing to you. The hotel seems to offer a reasonable rate. The schedule is jam-packed with offerings. So does the conference offer anything of education value? You click the link to the education sessions. There you see a long list of hyperlinked session titles arranged chronologically by date and time. Boring titles equal boring sessions...
The humble headline. Such a simple construct, really - a one-line summary of a piece of content and why it's worth reading. Yet, good headline writing is a deceptively complex process. In fact, crafting a clear, powerful, and compelling title may just be the most difficult part of content creation. Why? Because there is a lot of contradicting advice when it comes to identifying what it takes to write a good headline. For instance:
