Back in June 2022, I attended the IABC World Conference in New York 🗽 (IABC stands for International Association of Business Communicators). I was the only attendee from Microsoft and enjoyed meeting people outside of the tech bubble and learning more about storytelling, social media, and the multi-faceted communications discipline.
For those who didn’t get a chance to attend or attendees who want a refresh, I am recapping my top 50 takeaways from the jam-packed sessions.
Being more effective at reaching audiences
- 80% of our time should be spent pitching to the top 20% of journalists
- Understand both the business and consumer angle when developing key messaging
- Micro audiences are important:
- Geographic > Demographic > Psychographic
- Try A/B testing on messaging and demographics
- Example: City of Markham found that enforcement language was more effective with Asian demographic vs. educational language was more effective on other demographics
- Don’t underestimate power of the word-of-mouth
- Don’t just repeat a message when doing a campaign
- Follow-up posts should add extra value on top of the original post/message
- Consider how comms drives customers/audiences down the funnel = retargeting strategy
- People are becoming more polarized
- People are losing trust in the authorities, companies are filling that gap in trust
- 3rd party influencers will continue to play a bigger role in validating news
- CXOs are increasingly focused on outcomes not output
- Tailor messaging to each group based on Value Spectrum Analysis
| Low Value | High Value | |
| Low Loyalty | Move customers towards high value or high loyalty | Drive customers to high loyalty |
| High Loyalty | Drive customers to high value | **We want to move customers towards here** |
Improve messaging
- Don’t start with WHY, but WHO
- Start with what people find interesting
- What people want to hear is often not what we want to say
- Ask what are the 3 words people will think about Microsoft after reading your content
- Trust >= Truth
- Human attention span is 8 seconds and the avg person gets 1/3 of decisions wrong b/c of info overload
- Identity drives purchase decisions
- What identity are we getting decision makers to buy into?
- What are their values?
- There is a difference between highlighting optimization vs. transformation
- Emphasize key findings
- Speed/scalability
- Flexibility/resiliency
- Talent (skilling/resources)
- What is the value we created beyond the expected?
- Expectation inflation = good is no longer good enough
- Everyone wants more for less
- Disappointment is when expectations are greater than reality
- Brands are in greater danger of being invisible than controversial
- Look beyond the generic to cut through
- Design for REAL not IDEAL
- Introducing new ideas can be dangerous
- Anchor new ideas to something familiar
- Gladwell Method of Storytelling
- Focus on a small moment/detail
- Connect it to a larger trend, issue, etc
- Return to that small detail
Ideas for creating engaging content
- Zoom In – look for tiny details that affect the most people (e.g. Suez Canal situation = storyteller focused on shortage of cutlery that affected the restaurant industry)
- Many to One – take generic info and apply it to 1 persona
- Polarization – Asking audience to vote/choose a side
- Connections – Relate topic to the weather, pop culture, books, shows, nationaldaycalendar.com
- Step by step guide
- Answers to FAQ
- Lessons learned/what not to do
- Myth busters
- Share unexpected insights that will surprise people
- Curating a list for topic X
- Ask the expert
- Immediate actions to take to accomplish X
Exploring social media
- Social media should SIMPLIFY the message and make it easier to understand
- More platforms = more confusion. Develop/follow social media principles.
- Look at search engine keyword analytics and integrate these keywords into content
- Leverage employees as advocates
- Questions to ask
- What is the strategy for this platform?
- Why are we doing it this way?
- How can we measure if this strategy is effective?
- Who is the audience? Which channels are they on?
- How do we build community?
- 5 steps for an effective digital comms strategy
- Identify business goal
- Understand situation/landscape
- Get insights to target audiences (segment and determine what they find valuable)
- Figure out plaform/purpose for each target audience
- Keep the business informed and engaged
Leveraging data & metrics
- 59% of people share content on social media w/o reading it
- If you don’t have data to back up a statement then it is an assumption
- Measure for effectiveness, evaluate on value
- Gain SEO insights on how to reach BDM/EBDMs
- Barcelona Principles #3 and #7 are good global PR metrics to follow
- Vanity metrics grow bigger and appear impressive but aren’t that useful
- We should measure what we’re NOT good at
- Valuable metrics
- Lead to actionable decisions
- Are representative, relevant, fair/ethical
- Consider context
- Matter to customers
- Actionable metrics
- Domain authority
- Backlinks
- Source rate
- Click through rate
- Conversion rate
- When hosting events, the critical content should be at the halfway point b/c of peak attendance
Conclusion
Overall, this was a great conference with a strong community of people who are very passionate about communications. I am excited to apply these learnings in the new fiscal year and stay connected with the communicators that I met from around the world.
Fun facts… the next World Conference 2023 will be hosted in Toronto 🇨🇦 and Canada has the largest membership! Also, if you’re a student in marketing or communications, you should check with your university to see if you can get a free membership.
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