Engagement + Marketing

5 Questions to Ask When Planning Your Communication Strategy

Event Farm's Brennan McReynolds provides meeting professionals with key tips for engaging with and evoking emotion from their audiences.

Before your meeting even begins, he said, it’s important to consider how you’re going to reach out to attendees and what channels will be most effective.

Here are 5 Questions that are critical to ask when planning the communication strategy surrounding your event:

1. Can I segment my audience? 

Look at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter — there are different types of attendees out there, some more social or visual or business-focused than others. Different people want different things out of the same event, so it’s important to see where you can take a more tailored approach to attendee communication.

2. Where does my audience focus reside?

This goes back to #1: In order to reach out to your demographic (and the various segments within it), you have to know where your demographic likes to hang out, what news they like to consume, and what channels they use to communicate with their peers and colleagues on a regular basis. By utilizing these channels, communication will become more organic.

3. How do I communicate to them across the channels?

There are a million ways meeting professionals can utilize all of the various online platforms available today, so it’s important to know how to cut through the noise. Keep your message consistent throughout, but vary your method depending on the channel.

4. Can I use multiple channels?

Mixing up the strategy is key, but it’s important that you don’t use a new technology or social platform just for the sake of using it. There has to be a specific purpose to each channel you use, so think strategically before embarking on a new project.

5. Am I learning from their behavior and creating metrics?

Nowadays, event organizers have access to more data than ever. It’s important to look at the numbers, and more importantly to look at your audience. Are you paying attention to attendees at the conference? Are you, as futurist Mike Walsh puts it, thinking like an anthropologist? Take the information you observe, analyze it, and apply those lessons to your next event.

 

Sarah Beauchamp

Sarah Beauchamp was formerly assistant editor of Convene.