Speakers:
Patti Sweet: Director of Digital Strategy, Health Affairs
Lori Carlin: Chief Commercial Officer & Senior Consultant, DeltaThink
Jessica Lawrence-Hurt: Marketing Strategist, most recently at Cadmore Media
Hannah Heckner: VP of Product, Silverchair (Moderator)
Hannah Heckner: We discussed areas that organizations should think about when getting their digital meeting content strategy together. As we think about curation, knowing your audience, knowing your content, and putting some structure around it to make it more discoverable, how would you recommend that organizations get started?
Lori Carlin: Know your audience. Know your community and know your customers. It doesn't require months of market research. It can be done quickly and easily to understand what's important, what they need, what's going to resonate with them, why is this a benefit to them. And that will point you to the gaps answering questions. Questions like, “What are the challenges, what are the opportunities where you can develop something that will meet that need?”
Patti Sweet: I am going to say two things–“test things” and “see what works.” In terms of this content in particular, it is important to think about cataloging everything in the same way that you would print content. Also, ensuring that you're following best practices for how you catalog it. For example, if you're putting it on YouTube, ensure the right metadata, the right user experience, even how you categorize your YouTube channel.
Looking at ours, we spend a lot of time making it like a storefront, like you would a website. I think often brands put something on YouTube and think to just link to it on the website. But the user can still find your content via YouTube. This is the second largest search engine, so it's important. Even with cataloging content, we had a year of events for a membership program, we launched for 8-10 months, and then put it behind a paywall. We'll launch with what we have and then go back and put all of the content in the places that it needs to live. It is important to have that process to be able to catalog the content so that it can become evergreen in the long-term, regardless of if it's hot and newsworthy at that point in time.
Jessica Lawrence-Hurt: I agree with Lori and Patti, especially about knowing your user. I do think societies and associations generally do pretty well. It differs between organizations and between subject areas, but you do have to know who your potential audiences are, and there are usually multiple. I would also say, talk to other people out there. This is a great community. People are willing to talk about their successes, but also their challenges and even failures. We're all figuring it out together. So reach out to partners. Talk to other organizations in similar subject areas to yours and find out what they're doing and look for opportunities to collaborate. There are a lot of potential partners, whether in curating content or the production aspects.
In addition to getting your analytics in order, make sure you're capturing your content at the bare minimum, and then talk to others and experiment. Patti's absolutely right, publishing needs to move away from waiting to launch a perfect product and more towards launching something that's 80% good and then iterating on it and doing better the next time around. I think these types of products really lend themselves well to that iterative process.
Ready to start building your digital meeting content strategy? Get in touch with our team for examples from other publishers, or learn more about Silverchair Symposia, our platform for digital meeting content.
Want to hear more? Check out the full webinar, 2022 Platform Strategies Content Trends Webinar!