An event app doesn’t just enhance your conference experience—it also makes planning your event a whole lot easier. You just have to know how to harness the power of your app’s content management system (CMS). Not only are you able to keep attendees up to date on the event, the event app platform provides a way for you to manage your event content seamlessly, and quickly push those updates out to your attendees as you need.
Here are three key things you can do with a CMS, to help you manage content and make this year’s event go even more smoothly.
Learn more about your attendees as they learn more about the event
Your event app can provide you with a lot of valuable intel on your audience, and the content management system is no exception. Attendees are curious creatures with strange habits and mysterious customs, and since it’s your responsibility to help wrangle them, it helps to be armed with all the information you can access.
If you’re feeling direct, one of the best ways to get more information from your attendees is to simply ask them. Use your event app to create content such as surveys, polls, or session feedback forms—no need for separate audience response technology or those awkward paper handouts.
When you have a built-in app content management system, the survey results are instantaneous, available online, and can be displayed in graphs so you can easily present them to the audience or the higher-ups. The beauty of it all is that you don’t have to transfer session feedback into a database for post-event debriefs and sales follow up, or struggle with integration to your other tech systems.
When you’re feeling a little less forward, you can use your CMS’s analytics function. A key part of event content management is knowing what works and what doesn’t, so our analytics are built into the platform, but never visible to the attendees. Analytics tracks all the activity in the app and makes the data available. Learn when and how your app content and features are being used, either by all attendees or at an individual attendee level.
Use this information to determine how users are engaging with your content, what is the most popular, who the event influencers are, what the success rate of your advertising is, and more. All these facts and figures will help prove the return on event and better prepare you for next year.
Make last-minute changes a no-sweat process
A typical issue with printed content is that they are often out-dated by the time of the event. On top of that, you also have to worry about communicating changes with your vendors, print deadlines, and printing costs—especially if you have to reprint to update your content. A significant advantage of moving to an app and the event content management system is that you can make changes whenever you need.
The air conditioner in the session is on the fritz so you need to move rooms. An impromptu social gathering is happening in the lobby so you want to let everyone know. Or a speaker missed their connecting flight so they will now be presenting tomorrow. Your senior VP changed their presentation deck at the last second so you need to share the updated version. All of these things are regular circumstances that would be impossible to quickly communicate using traditional printed means.
A CMS allows you to deal with the inevitable by allowing you to instantly share new updates or make last minute changes. The cloud-based system can be used to make changes any time before, during or even after the event. Some graphics can even be changed too: banner ads and the appearance of the activity feed, for example, can be switched up on the fly. And the best part? Users receive your changes automatically—and seamlessly—within minutes.
Get the attendees to create the content for you
Event content management should be as easy to use as your smartphone. And because it’s ‘two-way’ digital technology, it should also make it easy to get your attendees to create app content for you. You’ve already got a lot going on, so this is a great way to generate content for your app while engage your attendees!
Great event apps enable users to contribute their own content, including sharing content, personal updates, and photos. It’s common for the app’s home screen to showcase the latest updates and comments from attendees. And if your event app has a gallery, you can also enable attendees to contribute their own images.
That said, with an event content management system, you don’t need to worry about any unpleasant surprises — you can choose to have an administrative curator approve all contributed images before they appear in the app for other attendees to see.
Another good way to have attendees generate content is by integrating Twitter. This allows your event app to display the most recent tweets containing your event’s preloaded hashtag, and provides users with the opportunity to compose their own tweets with the same hashtag. Even if the user doesn’t access the component directly, you can still expose them to the Twitterverse; tweets composed using the Twitter component can be configured to show up in the home screen feed.
People love to share. That’s why blogs are popular but nobody keeps a private diary anymore. Put that tendency to good use and cross one more thing off your to-do list.
Event apps, content management, and you
Your event app gives you a great place to manage event content. Not only is it a near-instantaneous way to provide updates that will carry seamlessly across your event collateral, you can also create new content at any point, as well as provides the opportunity for attendees to create and share their opinions.
