Conference recaps are marketing AND client service tools. Here’s how to craft recaps that your past, current, and future clients actually want to read (and share with others)
Articles, blog posts, and alerts that recap what you heard and learned at a conference are ridiculously effective multipurpose tools.
This content establishes your thought leadership by positioning you as knowledgeable and authoritative regarding the subject matter of a particular conference, while simultaneously providing valuable client service at scale by educating your clients about developments in their industry discussed at the conference.
Unfortunately for you, a potential creator of conference recaps, this content is fairly common.
Fortunately for you, if you follow the seven tips below, you’ll be on your way to creating uncommonly good recaps that resonate so strongly with clients and others that they’ll be compelled to pass them along to their colleagues.
Adopt a “Me and/or Them” mindset from the moment you walk into a conference
No matter the conference or the presentations you attend at one, there will be content you hear/learn that’s more relevant to you than to your target audience, and vice versa.
To better prime your mental pump when you write your recap, approach every conference you attend with a dual-track mindset: Expect to hear/learn information that will help you do your job better (the “me” content), and information that will help your clients do their jobs better, run their businesses better, or otherwise perform better in their roles (the “them” content).
By keeping both tracks in mind, and knowing you’ll be hearing information that fits into one (or both), you’ll be better able to determine in real time whether the content you’re hearing/learning is something you could use for your own professional development, or something that will be relevant to your clients, thus you should consider including it in your recap.
Knowing that what you’ll hear/learn will fall into one (or both) of these buckets will make you more efficient when you map out in your head what your recap might look like as the conference goes on, parse your notes, and begin writing your conference recap.
Use the “O-K-So?” framework when recapping what you heard at a conference
There’s a good chance you’ll have plenty of things you *could* say in your conference recap—way more than your readers likely have the stomach to digest in a conference recap document. (More on that in a second.)
Plus, there will be some time pressures to publish your recap relatively soon after the conference ends. (More on that in a second, too.)
But you’re still going to want to provide value in your recap so it positions you as knowledgeable, wise, and authoritative about the topics discussed at the conference.
The best way to balance these three concerns is to employ a framework for writing about what you heard/learned in a way that’s easy to read, concise, and substantive.
That framework is the three-part “O-K-So?” framework:
• O (Overview): Provide an overview of the panel or presentation, including who the speakers were and their positions and roles at their organizations.
• K (Key points): Share three key points from the presentation that are relevant to your target audience. Keep it to three so that you don’t bury your readers in information.
• So? (The “so what?”): Explain why your target audience should care about what you just shared, and, when applicable, the next steps they might want to take.
This last section is critical. It’s how you show your target audience that you’re thinking about their issues/needs by connecting the dots between what matters to them and what you heard/learned at the conference.
By not just sharing key points but also providing your audience with considerations for taking action on those points, you’re further positioning yourself as THE attorney to help them with their legal or business issues.
Brevity beats bulk when you recap what you heard/learned at a conference
As I alluded to above, your conference recap should be structured for easy consumption. You’re not producing a transcript of the presentations you attended. You’re synthesizing what you heard/learned and communicating those thoughts in a way that keeps your prose punchy and digestible.
In your conference recaps, you should:
- Be concise.
- Keep your paragraphs and sections relatively short.
- Structure your writing to be skimmable, such as by using bullet points.
This can be challenging, as it’s hard to condense everything you heard/learned during a conference into concise sections, paragraphs, and thoughts.
But that’s the point. You’re recapping a conference. You’re providing a service to your audience, and in doing so, delivering value. It’ll take a bit of work to synthesize your thoughts about what you heard/learned. Remember: you can still deliver value through content that’s easily digested by your target audience (and the people they’ll pass it along to), so long as the content is in sync with what’s important to your audience.
Inevitably, being concise and keeping your paragraphs and sections short will mean you’ll have to leave some topics on the cutting room floor. If there are topics you’d like to explore further but can’t include in a recap, congratulations! You have inspiration for future thought leadership content.
Share valuable materials and resources when you recap conferences
Recapping what was said at a conference is valuable to attendees and non-attendees alike, but so too is providing copies of what was presented.
If a speaker made certain materials available, including their slide presentation, and you found them valuable, there’s a good chance the readers of your recap will too. Give them access to these materials by attaching them to the recap or sharing links to them, even if your recap doesn’t discuss the materials in depth.
When you share the materials, explain what you found interesting about them and why you think your audience would too. Just because your audience wasn’t at the conference doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from the presentations and materials shared there.
Your conference recap should include a section about the vibes at the conference.
In the conference recaps I’ve seen, the authors didn’t include sections that describe a conference’s “vibes.” That’s exactly why yours should include one.
Discussing a conference’s vibes is 100% subjective, but that’s why it’s an effective way to demonstrate authority and expertise.
Include a section in your conference recap that describes the vibes at a conference by discussing:
- What people were talking about between sessions, at lunch, at happy hour, in the hallways, etc.
- What the crowd’s mood was. Was it jubilant? Concerned? Cautiously optimistic?
- Anonymized anecdotes (e.g., “I spoke with a GC of a manufacturing company. She explained that she’s seen firsthand a change in how . . . .”)
- Any other observations regarding what you saw or heard outside of the scheduled presentations.
This vibes section is another opportunity to show your readers that you have your finger on the pulse of the industry or topic the conference revolved around. You’re transporting them into the exhibit hall next to you and explaining what you’re seeing and hearing from the crowd. Beyond helping them get over their FOMO, you’re giving them your read of the room, which can be just as valuable to them as your recap of the panels and presentations you attended.
These additional insights are rarely included in recaps, which is exactly why they’re so valuable and why I strongly recommend your recap include a vibes section.
Be creative with the title you give your conference recap
After taking time to write a conference recap that will provide value to your clients and others, one of the worst things you can do is title it in a way that undersells that value, which will then fail to draw readers in.
There’s nothing wrong with using “takeaways” or “recap” in your title, but try to be more creative with your title than simply “Five takeaways from XYZ conference.”
Strive to create a title that distills what you’re about to discuss into one theme that catches the reader’s eye. (For this reason, you may want to consider writing your headline after you’ve written the first draft, so you have a clear sense of where your recap is going.)
This isn’t an academic exercise. If you were a healthcare executive, which recap would you rather read?
“Five takeaways from the [Big Healthcare] conference”
OR
“Five takeaways from the [Big Healthcare] conference that every healthcare executive should heed if they want their organization to prosper this year”
The specific, benefit-driven headline wins every time.
Balance timeliness with quality
Conference recaps have a shelf life. When writing yours, you’ll need to balance publishing it in a timely fashion with ensuring you have enough time to process what you heard/learned and write the takeaways you’ll be sharing in a compelling manner.
Remember, just like thought leadership regarding court decisions or new legislation, you need not be the first person to publish content about the conference. You don’t need to break any news. You just need to be the one who best connects what happened at the conference with what interests your target audience. That requires time to process what you heard/learned and put it down on paper.
The timing sweet spot for producing your conference recap is within one week of the conference ending. That’s recent enough for the conference to still be on people’s minds, but enough time for you to produce a thoughtful, value-filled 1000- to 1250-ish word recap.
After a week, though your content could still be valuable and compelling, it may not be as relevant and timely to your target audience. Worse still, your peers or competitors might have beaten you to the punch, producing a recap that propels them to the top of your clients’ and prospects’ minds.
Harnessing a multipurpose marketing/client service tool
Conference recaps are a powerful multipurpose tool.
By positioning you as knowledgeable, wise, and authoritative on the conference’s subject matter in the eyes of people who have been or might be clients, a conference recap is an important marketing and business development tool.
But it’s also a scalable client service tool that educates your current clients about industry developments and strengthens your ties to them.
Following the seven tips above will help your conference recaps stand out by being relevant, valuable, and compelling to your target audience—and so good that audience members can’t help but share them with their colleagues.
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