1:3 Content marketing for event organisers

Welcome to the Event Martech Podcast. This is your host Lee and on today’s show we’re talking Content Marketing. Now, if you are an event organiser, you want to be able to attract people to your show. I think it was Seth Godin, I’ve heard it from Chris Ducker as well, that content marketing is one of the only channels of marketing left. Let me share with you some of my own experience and then we’re going to deep dive into this. So I’ve been running my own personal brands now for about five to six years and I’ve been producing content consistently throughout that entire period. Now, that’s allowed me to create a live event that has been really successful and it’s attracted people from all around the world and it’s happening again in just two months time. So, I personally know the power of content marketing. I know that it allows me to stand out to the people that I am trying to reach out to.

I am leading with value and people are receiving that value. They are getting benefit from that, and in turn, they are connecting with me, they are purchasing my products and they are coming to my events. And that’s wonderful because I know that lives are being changed. And all of that is simply through creating content by talking on my podcast, by writing blogs, and by showing up with the selfie camera either on social media or on YouTube as well. Now if you’re a professional conference organiser, event organiser, etc, you probably already have so much content in your archives that you could repurpose as well. So can I encourage you to listen through this entire episode and then start to develop your own content marketing plan. So in this episode we’re going to talk about why you should be producing content, who you should be producing that content for, how you can find some inspiration.

I know it’s really hard to think up what should I write about or what shall I produce some content about. Next we’re also going to talk about the magic of repurposing. Definitely something that conference organisers can take advantage of. And then finally we’re going to talk about the marketing of your content. So this is going to be a very simple framework for you to hang your own marketing strategy over. So first let’s talk about why you should be producing content. And it’s important that everybody on your team understands why you are producing content that will market your event. So the key is that this content will allow you to build your brand. It will allow you to build credibility, you are leading with value and you’re giving to your industry, to your community information, advice and help that they can use. And they get access to this for free, which is phenomenal.

You can provide people with quick wins that will help them with that will help their lifestyles and that will help their business and they will grow to know, like and trust you, there are obviously many other benefits as well, such as the SEO impact of you being able to produce all of this content. And also there is the brand equity that you can continue to build in your industry. You can become the big fish in a small pond as opposed to trying to attract as many people as possible by investing tonnes of capital into those social media and those PPC ads. To be Frank, your brand needs a voice. Your event needs to be perceived as the place everybody in the community comes together. So if your brand is producing valuable content for the community, if your brand is showing up, then your credibility will go through the roof.

This is certainly something that I’ve experienced over the last few years of really heavily investing in producing valuable content and growing our community. So who exactly should you be producing content for? And I know this seems like a really obvious question, but there is something that we don’t consider. We might focus primarily on our attendees footfall (people through the door). People at our event is one of the biggest things that we will focus on. But we often forget that there are many other people involved. If we’re doing a large expo, an exhibition here in the UK, they would call it. Then we perhaps want to attract exhibitors. Also we want to be able to attract good sponsors and we also want to be able to get great deals with our suppliers. So this means when we start to produce the content, we need to consider who we are producing that content for.

We might need to create two or three avatars for the type of consumer for those types of content and then we can focus on those silos, all those buckets of content and make sure that we keep them updated regularly. So whilst with attendees I might be sharing information about the latest technology, etc, to attract them to my exhibition, I might also be producing other content where I do a behind the scenes of a setting the exhibition stands up from last year or something that’s going to attract that particular audience to my event. They’re going to see how professional, how slick and how amazing it is and what a great fun we’re having. We are clearly a team that people want to get aligned with. So make that list of customer avatars and then you can start to explore the sorts of content that you should be producing for them.

Now, when it comes to creating content, writer’s block absolutely sucks. I get it. So here’s a few ways that you can get some inspiration for the content that you can produce. Now, the best place I’ve ever found for ideas on content is my inbox. In your inbox are questions that past attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, etc, have asked of you. And if they’ve asked that question, it’s more than likely the other people are going to have those same sorts of questions. The content you could be producing could actually be how to put on a really good event that’s actually going to show that you know what you’re talking about and that’s going to encourage potential exhibitors and sponsors to align themselves with your brand because you guys clearly put lots of care and attention into it. Investing in good content for your attendees so they know how to get there, how they’ll be looked after, how they can get the most from their event, etc, is equally as good content that you could produce to put their minds at rest.

Another area you can look into for inspiration is the community and that is say through social media on say a Facebook group or in a LinkedIn group. Go and find where your target audience hang out and get involved. Have some conversations with those people. Read through the comments and see what questions are they asking, what help and support are they giving each other so that you can create some content that will add value for that audience and allow you to build up your follower base. We so often forget that our inbox is such a valuable source of content, but equally so are our team. We are surrounded by team members who get asked questions every single day and who are having conversations with the community. So canvas your team. Ask them what are the hot topics? What do people ask them regularly? What information could we be providing to our audience to help them out?

One more idea, although this is not an exhaustive list of inspiration, but another idea would be looking at the content that you have built up over the past few years of your event, so that will be photography, video, etc. Take a look at that. Is there any of that content that could be reshared that leads perfectly into re-purposing. You probably are sitting on a gold mine of content that you could be sharing with your community. Perhaps you have entire videos of your speakers offering a fantastic talk one or two years ago and the content is still absolutely relevant. There is potential for you to use that content. Obviously check on the contracts that you have with speakers, but if you are allowed to use their content, then you should be able to publish that video. Maybe you could make small parts of it available. You could use a service like rev.com to have the video transcribed and then you could convert that into a blog.

You could also pull out small snippets from that video and use those in your social media posts. Now, if you don’t have a particular speaker agreement, it will be worth reaching out to those past speakers to make sure you’ve got permission to be able to use the video and use the content that they shared at your event, so be sure to connect with them and also on that you may also be able to get valuable content from your previous and upcoming speakers as well as well as your exhibitors. Ask them to submit content, either content ideas or content on particular subjects that you would like them to produce content on, and then you could be the publisher, the syndicator of that valuable content. The great thing about being an event organiser is we are the people that bring everyone together, our sponsors, our exhibitors, our attendees.

We build community and we can utilise these community ties to build our content and to add value. Now we’re coming in to land, but there’s one important thing that most people forget with content marketing. They focus primarily on the content, but they forget to market that content. So I’d encourage you, whatever strategy you put in place and show that as you publish your content, you have a way of promoting that content. There are multiple marketing channels that you can consider, but take a look at your email list. Can you push out there and also take a look at social media, either paid ads or also just organic growth. What we do with our podcasts is we put eight to 10 posts out a week just promoting that podcast or that blog. We’ll use imagery, we’ll use audiograms or videos, etc to capture the eye.

By doing this, we ensure that the content we are creating gets seen and gets shared. And I want you, this does take time. It’s not a quick win. You will have to produce content to test and to iterate to see what works and what doesn’t. But over time, this will help you build your brand. This will help you drive more followers, build more engagement and drive more traffic to your event website. And if done well, lead to more conversions so that you have a simple framework for you to hang at your content marketing strategy over. And let’s just recap what we talked about. First of all, I started with why you should produce content, how leading with value will help you stand out and build your brand. Then we talked about creating avatars for the different people that you want to attract to your brand room, but we’re talking attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, etc.

We then looked at how to find some inspiration for the content that you’ll produce. And we talked about looking close to home, like your inbox in your team, or getting involved in community to build up an understanding of what people need and want information on. Then we talked about the magic of re-purposing, having a look at all of the valuable content that you have in your event archives that could be repurposed. And finally, we encouraged you to market the content that you produce. That could be through your email list, through social media and so on. So folks, if you are inspired, hit us up on our website. That’s https://eventmartech.com/ and come and have a conversation in the comments. Let us know how you get ideas for your content. Let us know if content marketing has been working for you and also the things that haven’t been working for you so that we can all learn from each other. You are awesome. If we don’t see you in the comments, we will see you in next week’s show.