5 Tips for Creating as Much Content as Possible from Your Next Event
In-person events are a great way to engage with your prospects and customers in the most personal way: face-to-face.
Those event interactions can have a big impact on sales pipeline, and ultimately revenue. Beyond direct engagement, events can also be an excellent source of fresh content. Whether your company is at a conference or hosting an event, any event presents a rich environment for content creation.
Here are some things you do to get as much content as possible from your next event beyond:
1. Take photos of everything
You can hire a professional photographer or have someone from your team snap photos with an iPhone. Either way, you should take as many photos as possible at the event.
Photos of the venue, attendees, and presentations will all help you engage attendees after the event and supplement the rest of your event content. Your photos will be useful for social media posts, an event recap blog, and promotion of future events. A photo collage will also look great in your event recap email.
2. Write a recap
This one is pretty obvious, but always worth doing. An event recap post is a great chance to engage both attendees and people who couldn’t make it. A recap post gives you a great opportunity to highlight themes discussed at the event that directly relate to your brand’s message.
One thing to keep in mind when you are recapping a large industry conference is that every other company there is probably doing the same thing. Make your recap stand out by focusing on a very specific topic and get it published ASAP. For longer conferences, doing a day by day recap can get people engaged with your content while the event is still happening.
3. Conduct interviews
Events provide an opportunity for you to interview attendees, customers, and thought leaders in-person. Video is a great format because it takes full advantage of the fact that events let you speak with your interviewees face-to-face.
If you want to get more in-depth interviews, you’ll want to arrange them ahead of time. No one wants to be put on the spot and feel like they’re being interrogated. That said, quick on-the-spot interviews also work well as long as you have enough people to participate. If your company is giving a presentation, asking the audience to tell you their biggest takeaway from the presentation or the event as a whole is a great question.
4. Follow the social conversation
Since every good event has a hashtag, it’s easy to keep track of the social conversation. Twitter provides a great place for attendees to share their thoughts and highlights from the event.
Finding some good tweets from the event that align with your message can provide a great supplement to a recap post. Keeping track of what people are buzzing about at the event can also help direct your content to address the most popular topics of discussion.
5. Share the slides
If your company is hosting the event, make sure to have all of the slide decks queued up to load into SlideShare. Event attendees are always hungry for the slides after a good presentation. Since you own the attendee list for your host event, promising that you’ll send along the slides in the follow-up email will boost your open rates.
If you are presenting at someone else’s event, consider preloading the slides in SlideShare and having your presenter share the link to a landing page with the slides. Even if you are just sponsoring an event and writing a recap of other presentations, it helps to embed the SlideShares or include the links in your post.
Be sure to extend the shelf life
While you’ll definitely want to create some content related the specific event you’re attending, keep in mind that event-specific content doesn’t always have a long shelf life.
Would you read a standard recap post from a content marketing event that took place in 2014? Probably not. But a post from 2014 about developing a content strategy based on ideas from a conference? That might still be relevant. Think about the big picture of how you can get the most content from the event that will be relevant to people who weren’t there and stay relevant for the longest amount of time.
One of the best parts of being a content marketer at an event is that there are endless sources of inspiration all around you. Listening to thought leaders in the industry talk about your industry can provide you the idea for your next eBook, blog post, video series, etc. All of the content you create will add to the fact that events are the most effective marketing tactic.
For more on how to improve your marketing events, check out the Attend blog.