Preparation of our Conference Day
Who is the target market?
Our target market are mainly media students who are most likely to be in their third year and recent graduates.
What is the value for this market?
They would be getting an insight into the industry and useful tips for preparing for their own next step in preparing to enter the industry themselves.
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When will the event take place?
On the 12th and 13th of January 2021.
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Where does the event exist within existing events?
There are few events that fall into the same niche as ours.
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Why is this event a good idea?
Because the job market this year will be even more competitive than usual and the industry has changed and adapted due to the pandemic. Our conference will give students first-hand tips and knowledge from professionals who have successfully made it into the media industry.
Target Audience
To get to know our target audience better we developed a persona as well as an empathy map. We moreover created a survey to find out more about our target audience's current situation and worries so that we could cater to those in our conference.
Format and Budget
First we had to decide on a venue. Quite early on it was clear that due to health and safety concerns in the light of the pandemic, it would have to be an online conference. We considered Zoom as well as Microsoft Teams for this.
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This also meant that speakers would not have to travel to Southampton so we would not have to plan a budget for catering or travel expenses. Our client told us that he would pay each alumni that gives a talk 50 pounds and each seasoned professional 100 pounds. We were not given a marketing budget
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The Speakers
In preparation for the conference day (Wednesday) we identified several potential guest speakers including Solent Alumni as well as professionals from 3 categories: content creation, entrepreneurship and digital marketing.
We created a detailed schedule with exact time slots for each speaker to know how many speakers we needed and which time slot we would offer to each of them. We then contacted those. Unfortunately, we did not get as many responses as we had hoped for. Our client provided us with a list of potential speakers that the had identified and we contacted those as well. In the end we had 3 speakers secured for the morning and 2 for the afternoon. We made sure to get a photo and a short bio from each speaker that we could use for the event promotion. We moreover sent them a recording agreement that we asked them to sign.
The Website
One important aspect of our promotion was to build a professional website for the event as a form of public presence. We filled the website with information about both days of the event, speakers we had secured, the schedule for the days, links to our social media and joining links. To get information and marketing materials for the Tuesday of the conference we were in contact with the group that was responsible for the organisation of the day.
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The promotion and marketing
We used the 4As Model by Brown and Fiorella (2013) to identify how we would reach our target audience and convince them to come to our event. We set up a Facebook page as well as an Instagram page as thanks to previous social media campaigns we had done, we knew that our target audience was very active there. Facebook made it really easy for us to share the event with all our contacts (many of which fall into our target audience).
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Getting ready for the Event
The roles we had allocated were: Mia was doing the presenting, Tom the Q&A, I was going to listen to the individual talks closely and provide a collection of questions Tom could use and Jake was going to do all the technical things like monitoring the mic and spotlighting.
We did multiple run throughs in advance to make sure the conference flows smoothly. During the first run-through we realised that we were putting a lot of weight onto Mia when asking her do moderate nearly the whole conference. Therefore, we decided that Mia and Jake would split the morning moderation, I was doing the afternoon moderation, and Tom was sticking with the Q&As. We then each polished our sections of the script and when practicing again the flow was a lot better.