Content Strategy for Digital Events: Part IV – After Your Event

In Part III of this series on creating content for digital events, I identified a number of strategic and tactical suggestions for content delivery during your event. The key objective of the implementation phase is to maximize engagement, and more importantly, to increase knowledge retention and transfer of that knowledge back to the job.

Because the only thing that matters about your digital event is whether it impacted individual or organizational performance.

That’s it.

The problem is no one’s evaluating individual or organizational performance.

Evaluation

While individual and organizational performance improvement are the ultimate outcomes for your digital event, they don’t need to be the only ones.

You can and should track registrations to identify trends or patterns in topics, speakers, formats, time of day or days of the week, etc. This type of information can be very helpful to your marketing efforts.

You can and should also collect additional information about your target audience in order to better meet their ongoing needs and hone your messaging.

There’s plenty of other data you can collect over the course of a digital event. It all comes down to what metrics are important to your organization.

Additionally, you should solicit feedback about your digital event as soon as possible. You’ll get the most authentic feedback (good and bad) and the experience will be freshest in participant’s minds. We forget 70% of new information within 24 hours unless it’s reinforced. After that, all you’re left with is mostly affective responses (likes or dislikes), which is of little value.

Sadly, most of the digital events I’ve attended lately are only collecting a minimal amount data at registration and often little or no post-event evaluation data at all.

In order to evaluate individual or organizational performance, you either have to follow-up with your participants after they’ve returned to work (at additional cost and time) or you have to ask them to estimate the impact your digital event might have on performance.

That’s the approach we take because, frankly, it’s easier.

We also believe it’s important to evaluate your speaker, your program effectiveness and any support resources offered during the event.

For a free copy of our program evaluation template, email info@event-strategy.net.

Content: post-event

Besides evaluating your digital event in ways that lead to process improvements and drive value, what else can or should you be doing with content after your event?

• Send out a recap along with a link to the archived event. Remember to send this out with the event description, objectives and presenter’s bio just like you did with your invitation, but include a brief recap so those who weren’t able to attend can determine whether it’s worth their while to review the archived event.
• In addition to sending out a recap, spend a little more time and effort in post-production and create a condensed version of your digital event (highlights or key takeaways) for easier consumption. Think of it like a movie trailer or a book summary. This increases the likelihood your event will be viewed more times by more people, which makes good business sense.
• As I mentioned in Part II, the most important question to ask and answer at the conclusion of your digital event is, “What’s next?” Now that you’ve started a conversation, what’s the next conversation…and the next…and the next? Very little in life is “one and done”. This is where content wants to go. Follow it. Better yet, facilitate it. If this was an introductory event (or topic), what’s the immediate or advanced events look like? See if you can’t achieve your original goal, solve your original problem, or address your original challenge by carrying the conversation to its ultimate conclusion. Like Netflix, think about serializing your content instead of taking more of an ad-hoc approach.
• Enlist your presenter in providing a recap of the event or raising the question, “What’s next?” As the subject matter expert, they may be the most logical person to follow-up with your audience.
• You likely came across a number of helpful support resources at the beginning of your content development journey and discovered more along the way. Not all of this content ended up in your event. Gather it now and share it. Ask presenters and participants to share their favorite resources. Provide that value-added service and your audience will remember you (and your events) for it.
• Monetization: Generating revenue with content. This is the Holy Grail for most content providers and whether you realize it or not, if you’re producing a digital event, you’re a content provider. Think TED. They perfected the “freemium” model. They share their ideas worth sharing with the world. Their in-person event is sold out years in advance and their sponsorship deals are valued in the millions of dollars. Think Red Bull, which sees itself as a media company (and actually created its own). The content Red Bull captures via its various sponsorship activities generates over half a billion dollars per year for the parent company. We can’t all be TED or Red Bull, but what we’ve learned from them is that well-curated, compelling content is an unrealized revenue opportunity that’s worth realizing. When your content is ready for prime time, try a tiered approach with some valuable content under more premium content under more customized content, bundled with other products and services. But be careful. If you move too fast before your content is ready, you’ll risk losing your audience to your competition or worse, the Internet (the lowest common content denominator). Bottom line: If you want to monetize your digital event, you’re going to have to up your digital content game.

Summary

Every digital event is just a starting point for the next one.

And every event, digital or otherwise, represents a tremendous content creation challenge and opportunity. Given all the time and effort you put into your digital event, why not leverage it to the max?

Given the huge losses in revenue from postponed, cancelled, or reduced-sized in-person events, monetizing digital content is critical, now more than ever.

The current crisis has caught the events industry flat-footed. We’re desperately scrambling to produce digital events that complement or replace our in-person events. In this scramble to scale, the focus content has a been lost or neglected.

But more than any other event element, quality content represents the difference between a mediocre event and a successful one.

One day, it’ll be safe to meet face-to-face again. Until that time, this crisis presents us with a unique opportunity to master the art and science of content in order to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage.

Quality content is the solution for today’s crisis and your hedge against tomorrow’s.

If you have some ideas to enhance digital content after the event, email us info@event-strategy.net and we’ll add it here.

A slightly edited version of this series appeared on https://www.northstarmeetingsgroup.com.