4. Conference in Ljubljanae
On September 6th and 7th, the EEPG, together with our host Rokus Klett, organized the EEPG Open conference "Content marketing: Transforming Ed Pub". Even though the conference was heavily promoted at various IPA meetings, through personal emails and twitter and newsletters, only one non-member publisher sent participants. This was surprising since before the event quite a few non-members had expressed interest. Questioned afterwards, some people gave feedback regarding the difficult date. This means that for the 2020 conference we will have to look at possibly new formats as well as dates.
The conference was attended by 36 colleagues from Veritas (Austria), Prosveta (Bulgaria), Profil Klett (Croatia), Systime (Denmark), Otava (Finland); Sviesa (Lithuania), Learnetic (Poland), Art Klett (Romania), Kreativni centar (Serbia), Rokus Klett (Slovenia), Natur och Kultur( Sweden) and Ranok (Ukraine).
The venue was the Austria Trend Hotel in Ljubljana. Day one started with two presentations from a Slovenian (Janja Zupancic) and a Croatian (Nastasa Mozgon Kauzlaric) headmaster on how they see educational challenges, what they expect from publishers and how they can and would like to cooperate with publishers. After lunch Katie Roden gave an inspiring keynote on "What makes content marketing different?" There will be a video available of her talk but our video producer won't be able to deliver the final cut before the end of November. The presentation was tailored to the educational market (even though bringing lots of examples from different areas) and an excellent follow up to last year's talk by Stephen Walsh. All
presentations are online.
The evening was spent with a boat tour, a walk through the city and an excellent dinner at the castle in Ljubljana.
On day two, the publishers from Rokus Klett, Ranok, Systime and Otava gave presentations about their ideas and practices concerning content marketing. They sparked off interesting discussions amongst the participants.
One of the highlights of the conference was Katie's impromptu workshop "Lessons learned" which picked up on the various issues that had been discussed during the conference and gave everybody some very practical ideas on how to improve customer relationships and work on "different" marketing concepts. She used slide 11 from her presentation to kick off the workshop. It is worth looking at this slide for inspiration.