Content is the ‘oil’ that can finetune event curation

Content is “the oil” that gives an organiser the ability to finetune a personalised and efficient experience for attendees, according to an industry leader.

Paul Miller, CEO of Questex, was speaking at the latest Digital Leaders webinar from ExpoPlatform about how technology can help with live show curation.

You can watch the full session and others on demand here.

Key to this is looking at the online behaviours they have in the communities built around in-person productions – such as profile views, articles read and other interactions.

He said: “Content brings in people – that’s the oil – then you’ve got data and once you’ve got data, you’ve got intelligence.

“Once you’ve got intelligence, you’ve got efficiency and saving people on the time that they’re expending.

“Make sure they’re getting the best use of the time they can if they could get so they’ll come back again – it’s a no brainer.”

He was speaking at the How to crack curation through content webinar, which saw him reveal howQuestex has been implementing these techniques to improve their offerings.

It was heard how placing such a focus on experience has helped the organiser hit great net promoter scores in the last year. They were:

• Tradeshows: 32
• Conferences: 54
• Hosted Buyer Events: 83
• Virtual Events: 52
• Overall: 43

Paul gave an example in marketing how analysing content consumption would allow them to better tailor approach.

This could mean sending an invite to a specific part of an event based on articles they have been reading, rather than leading with the whole live show.

Another part of this is trying to streamline experiences as much as possible – rather than celebrating huge numbers at tradeshows, try to make sure they are all getting as much value as possible.

He said: “The biggest issue for business is time – how much time can you afford to go five days to another event anymore?

“If you’re gonna do it, we better make it efficient for you.

“We’re trying to move to mass personalization, which is what Amazon and others do.

“As an industry we’ve got to flip from where we’ve been in terms of thinking about the ‘three days in March’ – actually the three days in March are a combination of the other 362 days that you’ve been interacting with your with your community.”

Paul believes the key to creating great content is to have someone within your team who is constantly engaged with your audience.

That allows them to understand their needs, interests and what keeps bringing them back to your community.

He said: “I’m a huge believer in the value of content, I think content has always been central to a media and event business – even things that we sometimes don’t consider content are actually content.

“The gold standard is to have a content team that is immersed in the industry they’re serving.

“It doesn’t always have to be 20 people, it can be one person to begin with.

“But somebody who understands the industry who is talking to the industry, who is talking to customers and talking to the audience and at the very least aggregating the most important stuff in that industry.”

Paul described how gathering content from your audience can be a great option, as long as this is “curated crowdsourcing”.

He added: “If you can have these experts in, if you can have them working for you, it’s golden.”

Subtlety when trying to promote your business through content is key to it being successful, according to Paul.

The main goal should be to inform your audience and help them solve a problem, rather than boldly promoting your solutions.

There are many forms this can take but it is important that it comes in a form that engages your community.

Paul added: “Content marketing at its very best, as long as it helps the eventual customer solve a problem or become more educated, I don’t think it really matters who produces it.

“It’s a bit of a sacrilegious comment in a editorially based environment, but great content is really not what we think is great content – it’s what the audience thinks is great your content.

“A very well written advertorial, which is helping to solve problems and very subtly saying ‘we might be part of that problem solving’ can be just as useful as a great editorial article from a content producer.

“The bad advertorials are ‘here’s my product and here’s all of its features and here’s why you should buy it’.

“Nobody cares for that – those days have gone.”

We hope you enjoyed reading this article and found it useful. At ExpoPlatform, we want to help you build better events and communities. Please get in touch and ask for a demo here. Thank you.