Competition for winning international congresses is back-breaking. What PR can destinations use to truly stand out from the global competition – that is the topic of ICCA’s Best PR Award 2015 which will be presented at the annual congress in Buenos Aires (1-4 November 2015).
Veitshöchheim/Germany, 19 October 2015 – Being content marketing and meetings PR experts, tmf dialogue marketing was always convinced that PR messages which claim to be relevant for congress organizers (and their media respectively) must be built around intellectual expertise of the destinations and around interesting and personalized stories related to this expertise. It is good to see that destinations now are capitalizing on this knowledge and bring forward highly creative and very energetic concepts to help them develop a strong knowledge partnership with their congress planner clients.
7 tips on how to use knowledge partnerships for great PR content:
1. Use your ambassadors or make a list of key experts and key knowledge segments of your destination
2. Collect case studies of congresses or meetings in those segments they took place in
3. Prepare interviews with the key experts – thus adding faces to the topics
4. Share these case studies with planners and with the media, both trade as well as vertical. You can use content distribution and PR services to connect your stories with the target groups
5. Check related organizations and institutions on-site and include them in your content production
6. Mix this content with destination news
7. Mix with information about other congresses that your organization secured to show your competence
Delegate boosting has become an important issue for congress organizers; often the congress is the main cash bringer for the association and delegates need to be pampered and fed with interesting information to find good reasons to join the congress.
By creating valuable content and stories as described above, you can offer a PR partnership to congress planners as part of winning the business for your destination. The association’s congress websites could largely benefit from this service and attract more delegates. And it is also a great promotion for your destination to high-level target groups – the delegates of large congresses!
This year’s shortlisted ICCA Best PR Award candidates are (in alphabetical order):
-Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre (BCEC)’s campaign to generate an international profile for Brisbane as a centre of science and research excellence around hosting the G20 Leaders Summit
-Dubai Business Events, for its PR strategy to position Dubai as a new destination for associations and business events
-Glasgow City Marketing Bureau’s PR strategy based on partnership with their clients to support their events and showcase the city to potential clients
-Greater Bogota Convention Bureau for their PR campaign supporting the bid for the One Young World Summit
-London & Partners for their ‘Love the event & Love the experience’ campaign
The 5 shortlisted candidates will present their PR campaigns at the upcoming ICCA Congress, taking place 1-4 November in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The “PR Excellence” session will highlight the key principles in obtaining exceptional PR results and give practical advice to improve PR performance. In the session (Tuesday, 3 November, 13:30-15:00) a media panel consisting of Martin Lewis, IMRs Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board and Chief Editor at CAT Publications, and James Latham, Executive Producer at IMR, will give feedback to the PR campaigns of the ICCA members. The session is moderated by Johanna Fischer of tmf dialogue marketing.
