Thursday, January 17, 2013

Add Social MultiMedia -- Audio, Video, RSS Feed -- to Your Conference Listing

If you are a conference organizer, you may be producing videos of presentations made at your conferences and using them to promote the next scheduled event. Perhaps you produced a short promotional video that highlights the important benefits of your upcoming conference. Or you may have produced an audio interview of a speaker about his or her planned presentation. Or you may have a Twitter account or Blog where you periodically post content and news that relates to your conference. If so, you are among a growing number of conference organizers who are leveraging multimedia and social media to promote their conferences. Pharma Marketing Network can help you do that.

Pharma Marketing Network now offers conference organizers the ability to embed playback "widgets" in the listings of conferences in the online PMN Conference Calendar. Let's look at a couple of examples to show you how this works.

ExL Pharma and Pharma Marketing Network teamed up to host a live Pharma Marketing Talk show that featured an interview with Philippe Kirby, EUCAN MCM IT Director, MSD (Europe) Inc., who previewed the topic he was scheduled to present at ExL's 5th Annual Digital Pharma Europe conference. After the live interview, the show was archived as an audio podcast, which can be played back using a widget. The playback widget was embedded within the listing for the conference as shown in the following screen grab (click on image to view in original size):


After listening to such a knowledgeable speaker, who can resist checking out the agenda and other speakers for this conference?

NOTE: The conference organizers liked the podcast in the above example so much, they embedded the same playback widget in the conference home page as shown below (click on image for an enlarged view):



Another example features an embedded YouTube video produced by eyeforpharma to help them promote the 11th Annual eyeforpharma Barcelona 2013 conference. The video featured a presentation made by Rebecca Jones, Head of Marketing Effectiveness, BBC Worldwide, at a previous eyeforpharma conference. Notice in the screen grab below that some introductory text was also included to explain the video content (click on image to view in original size):


The third example is a special widget created by a third-party -- Medstartr -- that helped Basil Strategies raise funds for  ePatient Travel Scholarships. The goal was to help bring more empowered patients to the Doctors 2.0 & You conference. The widget includes a short video and a link to the Medstartr site where viewers can donate to the scholarship fund.


Many conference producers have Twitter accounts or blogs devoted to specific conferences. Pharma Marketing Network has posted content from selected conference feeds to the Events Forum located here. It is possible to create widgets to display items from these feeds much like the widget that displays summaries of posts made to this blog (see the widget in the righthand column). These widgets can also be embedded in conference listings like the playback widgets shown above.

Contact us for the latest prices and for a specific proposal to meet your needs.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Featured Conference Listing Doubles Clickthroughs

The Pharma Marketing Network Conference Calendar is a great place to get your meeting, webinar, podcast, or any other event noticed by the pharmaceutical community. At any given time, there are two dozen or more events listed chronologically in the main calendar page located here. This calendar is also sent out by email to thousands Pharma Marketing News subscribers and by Twitter to many more thousands of @Pharmaguy followers every other Monday. Depending on how long your event is listed, you can expect several hundred clickthroughs as a result of this "push-pull" promotion.

But if you want to get even more exposure, especially within a specific timeframe (i.e., during the "Early Bird" registration phase), you might consider a Featured Conference Listing, which puts your conference at the TOP of the page in a highlighted box. Here's an example of a recent Featured Conference Listing (click on the image to view a full-sized version of this screen shot):


As you can see, a Featured Listing includes:
  1. a “Featured Conference” box at top of conference calendar page; 
  2. a large banner (528 x 91 pixels); and
  3. a short paragraph that can include tag line, special offer, short description, etc. 
The typical Featured Conference Listing runs for 2 weeks online, plus one insertion in the Conference Calendar Update email version sent to PMN subscribers every two weeks. Of course, you can purchase more than two weeks.

A real case study illustrates how a Featured Conference Listing can generate twice (or more) the number of clickthroughs than what a chronological listing generates. The following chart shows the daily clicks for both the Featured Conference Listing ("f" clicks) and the chronological listing ("c" clicks) of the same conference from 19 November 2012 through 4 January 2013.


During the time period noted, the chronological listing, which in this case was an ENHANCED LISTING (i.e., included a small graphical banner, larger font and tag line), generated 88 clickthroughs ("c" clicks). During the same period, the Featured Conference Listing generated 270 clickthroughs ("f" clicks). Note the peaks in the chart every two weeks when the email version is sent out to subscribers and @Pharmaguy Twitter followers. In this particular case, the Featured Conference Listing ran for about 6 and one-half weeks. The chronological listing, meanwhile, ran for about 12 weeks and generated a total of 217 clickthroughs. Do the math: f/c = 270/217 = 1.24. In other words, the Featured Conference Listing more than doubled the number of clickthroughs! QED.

Contact Us for more details regarding Featured Conference Listing pricing and for a proposal that meets your needs.