Lessons From the Making of TEDxParklands
‘’Gabriella, I would like to involve you in something this year. It’s going to be big!’’
This was a message I received from Betty on my birthday, early 2017. We’ve been friends since high school and spent four years in the same university. Now, you know it’s bound to be something massive when a friend calls you by your full name! Especially while they had all sorts of nicknames at their disposal. I immediately understood this was the kind of ‘something’ we discussed on email and not over a loose text. The conversation that followed (like I rightfully guessed) over email, led to my appointment to the TEDxParklands, then TEDxYouth@Parklands (2018) committee as the Marketing, Communications and PR Lead with Betty and Annstella as the Lead Organizers.
As soon as I got over the excitement, I couldn’t help but obsess over the, ‘Wow! Where do we go from here?’
And boy, has it been a journey!
The recently concluded TEDxParklands event taught me a host of lessons that I desire to commit to memory and share by penning down here:
- Stakeholders
Be very clear about who your stakeholders are and the role they play in the short to long term achievement of objectives. It becomes easier to understand where they sit in the overall vision and hence how best to engage them.
2. Objective Driven Marketing
It may be satisfactory to put out communication and get a general sense of responsiveness. However, of greater importance is understanding what each marketing phase; down to what each piece of communication should do for you as a brand or event owner and hence ensure to have a pulse on measuring the effectiveness. We worked with a single objective per marketing phase -from Awareness to Lead Generation down to Conversion. By the end, we could show how our efforts directly impacted the success of the event, down to how much it would cost us to acquire and retain customers. Be as granular as possible.
3. Leave No Room for Assumptions
Creating an allowance for two-way communication with your stakeholders is very critical. Ensure you understand and therefore can meet the expectations of your audience and partners prior to the event, engage with them throughout their conversion journey, collect and action feedback!
4. Measurement and Metrics
The understanding that TEDxParklands is not only an event but also a brand helped me create a balance between monitoring quantitative and HEART* metrics. The ability to report ‘ We received 49 clicks on this piece of content, 41 registrations and as a result, 30 people paid for the event’ alludes to the first metric while ‘ How can we partner to make this a success moving forward?’ Or ‘ I really appreciate the communication from your team ‘alludes to the second. Both are extremely important to any marketer who’s out to measure the impact of their efforts and understands where they fit in the bigger picture.
Create a balance between monitoring quantitative and HEART metrics.
5. Partnerships
Ensure to align with teams and organizations whose vision is aligned with yours. Do your homework. Not everyone is a good fit for your brand and that’s fine. Partnerships must be an open, genuine win-win for those involved.
I believe the success of any project and brand is as a result of excellent performance from all the moving parts. It’s concerted efforts of the marketing, logistics, events, finance and production teams. Create a great product people want and it will sell itself.
Visit our website TEDxParklands and social media platforms LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook for more on what we have in store.
*HEART metrics are a framework developed by Google that measures user experience.
Published By Gabriella Kanja — Marketing, Communications and PR Lead, TEDxParklands
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
