How to Leverage Events to Build Out Your Content Strategy
Online and offline marketing channels are both necessary for a successful marketing strategy, and both help marketers work toward the same goal: driving business results. When online and offline channels—specifically, online content experiences and in-person events—are used in conjunction with one another, they can work together to create an especially powerful touchpoint for prospects and customers.
Oftentimes, however, marketers don’t leverage this untapped, natural synergy between event and content marketing. In creating more robust marketing campaigns that would utilize both online and offline channels, marketers could address one of the key pain points of content marketers today—the demand to quickly and consistently create and deliver high-quality content.
The State of Content Marketing
To meet the high demand for content, marketers often find themselves churning out content and social media posts at a pace faster than their ability to generate new, valuable ideas. Quality is put on the back-burner in order to make room for quantity, and content marketers get caught up in a vicious cycle that prioritizes awareness and views over engagement.
If your audience clicks through to your blog post only to discover an iteration of something they’ve read elsewhere, it’s not going to do you any good. Everyone already knows this: you want potential leads and prospects to click through and remain engaged. But how can you consistently create content that will do this?
How Content Marketers can Extract Value From Events
If your company is hosting an industry event, there will likely be a lot of industry experts in the room, in addition to the event’s speakers and panel participants. These experts are full of valuable and insightful information, and because they’re attending your company's event, you already have an established relationship with them. As a content marketer, the smartest thing you can do is leverage these relationships.
Here are some tips for how you can tap into their expert knowledge before, during and after your event, ultimately fuelling your content strategy by helping you produce insightful content across various channels.
Before Your Event: Guest Blogs and Live AMAs
As your team plans your company’s event, they will likely book speakers or panelists far in advance. As part of your strategy for marketing the event, reach out to these speakers and ask if they’d be willing to write a guest blog post or participate in either a live Twitter chat or “Ask Me Anything.”
The benefits of this are threefold: it will get your audience excited about the event, it will help your speakers further market themselves and better understand what your audience is hoping to learn, and it will help you generate high-quality and engaging content. Depending on how many speakers you’ll have at your event, you might be able to create a series of posts from industry pros.
During Your Event: Record, Live-Stream, Document and Share
This is when the experts will either deliver their presentations or participate in panels—what might be considered “offline” content. Make sure you’re recording this content so the videos can live online afterwards, and also encourage your attendees to use your event hashtag to share in-event highlights across their social media platforms.
In order to reach those in your audience who aren’t able to attend your event, you should also take advantage of the opportunity to live-stream. Be strategic about what you choose to live-stream, though—even though your “virtual” attendees might want to watch the panels and presentations, this content won’t be engaging for those who are there in-person. Instead, consider live-streaming Q&As or interviews with your industry experts that will air either right before or directly after their presentations. This will engage both your in-person and virtual attendees, and will create a greater demand for the video recordings of the presentations once our event is over.
After Your Event: Recap With More Content
Besides publishing the video recordings of in-event sessions, be sure to publish blog posts highlighting the best content and ideas from your event. If your attendees found one speaking session particularly insightful, you might consider asking that speaker to team up with you to write a guest blog post, participate in a live Twitter chat, or produce a webinar.
Aim to stay in touch with these experts long after your event has ended. Your company has already established a relationship with them—and you should continue to leverage that relationship as long as it continues to serve both parties.