Client Magic Micro Course - Day 4: Format Innovation

If you want to design exceptional client experiences and stand out in today's market, it's important to consider two key things: your cornerstone content and the format you choose to deliver it. This is true whether you're delivering a pitch, hosting a workshop, or running a meeting.

To ensure your content has a lasting impact, it's crucial to carefully consider how you set it up, how you deliver it, and how you encourage your audience to engage with what you’ve shared with them.

In this lesson, we'll guide you through the fundamentals of cornerstone content and format innovation so that the experiences you design leave a lasting impression on your clients.

Let's get started!

Formats

It’s time to get deeper into design.

To create a memorable client experience, it's crucial to focus on the formats you’re using. Without well-defined formats, your content may seem disorganized or flat, leading to disengagement and confusion among your audience.

There are numerous formats you can explore when delivering your content to your clients.

You may choose to present your content in a traditional format, such as a classic presentation or a workshop. Alternatively, you might consider a more interactive approach, such as setting up hands-on exercises that allow attendees to engage with your content, organizing small group discussions to encourage collaboration and idea-sharing, or prepping unexpected surprise content that is more for show than for telling.

Whatever format you choose, it's important to ensure that it aligns with your goals and resonates with your audience’s values to maximize their experience.

Five of the most common formats are:

There aren’t really any set rules on which format to use, although three factors to consider are matching, duration and energy.

1. Matching

When designing, consider the match between the topic and content, and the format you're using.

If you're demonstrating a new hands-on / tangible product, a presentation format may not be the best fit. Why not produce a clickable prototype people can play around with? Similarly, a hands-on exercise may not be the ideal format to use for sharing last quarter's financial results, especially if the audience aren't subject matter experts.

Using multiple formats in one session can be an effective path to take, as long as they are used in the right context. For example, even a physical topic can benefit from a lecture portion if it's well-matched to the topic and content.

2. Duration

When looking at duration it’s worth thinking back to one of your least enjoyable presentation experiences.

Got one? Great. Or maybe not so great - it probably felt like it went on forever.

Yup, one of the most common complaints about presentations is that they go on for too long. To keep your audience engaged and avoid evoking memories of past presentation nightmares, it's essential to consider duration when designing your client experiences.

Switching formats at least every 30 minutes is a simple but effective way to keep energy and engagement levels up. As for delivering content online, try dividing by 2 and switch format every 15 minutes. While you can usually afford to go a little longer, this is a good rule of thumb to follow, especially when you're starting out.

A 45 min session may look like this: Check-In Round (5) → Presentation (15) → Hands-On (10) → Q&A (5) → Presentation (5) → Summary (5)

3. Energy

Client experiences that involve audience participation or engagement (yes - that’s pretty much any presentation, workshop or event), require careful attention to manage the audience's energy. To keep the audience engaged and interested, vary the pace of the experience and use storytelling techniques to create emotional peaks and valleys.

By including interactive segments and building to a climax, you can create a sense of excitement and anticipation - even for topics that may feel mundane (seriously!).

In addition to building momentum and creating engaging content, it's also crucial to end on a high note. A strong ending can leave a lasting impact on the audience, so consider delivering a final message or call to action, providing a memorable takeaway, or ending with a high-energy activity or performance. Get creative :)

By using multiple, well-matched formats on regular rotation, you'll increase the chances of your content connecting with your audience and keeping them engaged throughout your session. It's a win-win situation!

Delivery Methods

We’ve spent a bit of time with Formats. What about how you deliver them?

When it comes to delivery methods, again there are lots to choose from.

Here are just a few:

As a client experience designer, it's important to think outside the box and experiment with unexpected delivery methods to create engaging and memorable experiences for your attendees. While the typical formats may be appropriate for most activities, trying something new and unexpected can add a touch of magic to your sessions.

For instance, have you considered incorporating audio in a unique way? One idea could be to have attendees record the audio of an idea in a pair breakout room and then share it with the group, encouraging collaboration and discussion in a new format.

Don't be afraid to explore and mix things up to discover new ideas and create unforgettable client experiences. Remember, format innovation can be the key to unlocking your audience's engagement and participation.

Combining the elements

By combining a chosen Format and Delivery Method, you’ll be able to start seeing your Cornerstone Content (the main piece of work you’re bring into the experience) take shape.

For example, for a presentation focused around showing the work you’ve done for a client, your Cornerstone Content idea could be:

• Format: Presentation + Hands-On
• Delivery Methods: dedicate a few minutes to discuss the work, alongside a demo that shows real results plus a video walkthrough to aid their visualization of the outcomes.

Lead-in and Lead-out

Once you have this basic plan in place, you can then add additional formats either side of the content.

Using the same example, you may choose to use:

Presentation > Hands-On demo > Group Discussion

Here we’d use a presentation format to lead into the Hands-On activity, followed by a brief Group Discussion. We may choose to support this discussion with a technology tool like Menti to capture data, perhaps anonymized to avoid putting people on the spot.

Adding these lead-in and lead-out sections strengthen the central content and encourage better outcomes for your audience.

What was an idea for traditional presentation suddenly becomes a far more varied and engaging piece of Cornerstone Content.

Putting the pieces together

Once you have your Cornerstone Content and format in place you can repeat this process for other key content elements in your client experience and slot them into the structure you created in the last lesson.

By keeping an eye on the matching and duration of each section you can maintain engagement and energy while getting across all the key points you want your attendees to absorb.

Sweet!

But what about the content design?!

We could go down a rabbit hole with the specifics of content design (there’s an endless range of options and creative ideas!), so to keep things easily digestible we’ve left it out of this primer course.

That’s not to say the content design phase isn’t key – quite the opposite in fact. In our other courses, there are a bunch of sessions on content creation, but if you have an immediate question on this area feel free to get in touch and we’ll do our best to help out.

Now you’ve got the key parts of your client experience in position, it’s time to move out of your design phase and into Delivery Essentials.

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