5 Content Marketing Tactics to Get the Most from Your Conference

As a conference organizer, you put so much work into producing the day of show, it is often very difficult and likely overwhelming to worry about how you are maximizing your content for the hours, days, weeks and even months after the show. 

However, before we share some tactics, the first step in all of this is to understand why you even want or need to leverage the powerful content beyond the framework of the event. We can’t and won’t try to answer that for you, your organization, and/or your clients. That has to be on you to make it a priority and make sure your internal team understands why.

That said, as previous organizers, community builders and marketers ourselves, we thought we’d share our why(s):

First: In every organization we were a part of, we wanted to be seen as a thought leader and build our brand. It was our way of more deeply engaging our community, understanding the needs of our base, improving our relationship with our clients/members, and nurturing our prospects. 

Second: I’ve never worked for an organization that had a crazy amount of money, so we always had to find ways to work within a strict budget and get the most out of every piece of content we had the opportunity to create.

Third: Whenever an event was a part of our strategy, we always viewed the event as a large content production investment. Of course, the event was the best time of year to interact with our world, but just as important, it served as a way to develop content (under the event budget) that would allow us to nurture our world for months after, while also expanding our distribution. Quite simply, since we already had all of the pieces in one place, it was a way to save an incredible amount of time and money for the rest of the year. And often times we found that if we didn’t capture the content at the event, our marketing team(s) had a hard time producing quality content the rest of the year.

It’s really interesting that when you have a full content calendar, it somehow becomes easier to produce even more content on top of what was generated from the event.

So, with that preface, if you believe that leveraging event content after the event is incredibly helpful, then you may like these 4 tactics.

#1 Create a long-term content plan when you are selecting your speakers.

We highly suggest that you think about how each session and each speaker presentation can resonate long after the event is over pre-event, while you are building out your agenda. You are already thinking about how each session and each speaker will impact an in-person audience, so taking one more step in that process will go a long way.

Here are a few things we used to think about:

What is the topic the speaker or speakers are discussing? (Check - you already are doing that).

What sub-topics can be broken out even further to extend the conversation well beyond the event?

(One way to answer that question is to ask your speakers - they are the experts and definitely would understand the other areas that stem from the topic. They also likely understand what questions are typically asked when they talk about the topic - you can easily do this in the Call for Papers Process and/or onboarding process).

Depending on whether it is just one person talking or a panel of folks, you can easily get thoughts, ideas and quotes from each speaker. 

#2 Pillar Content: One Session = at least 20 Pieces of Marketing Content

Two things to think about:

First: We as consumers of content prefer different ways of digesting content, depending on the medium we are on. For example, I expect and like content differently on Instagram, versus Linkedin, versus Facebook, versus a blog, versus twitter, versus YouTube, etc.

So let me show you how we can turn one Session into at least 20 pieces of content.

Sample Session A: Why Every Conference Organizer Should Use Sessionboard

Content Piece #1: The In Person Presentation

Next Step: Most presenters share three key learnings in their presentation. So in the case of my presentation, it would be:

 - With Sessionboard, you can save hundreds of organizer hours not having to manually manage speakers and content.

 - Your team can now use that time saved to FOCUS on the most important aspects of the event (attendee engagement, content distribution, etc.)

- Increases the ROI of your event

Now I have 3 different talk tracks to build content off of. If I am recording each session, we suggest cutting the video into 3 smaller videos where each of the points are being discussed. A little bonus is that often times, the speakers will go off on a tangent and have some great quotes or a story or further advice that you can also break out into its own video.

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Talk Track #1: Saving Time Video

Content Piece #2: Video posted on LinkedIn

Content Piece #3: Video Posted on YouTube

Content Piece #4: Video Posted in your Email

Content Piece #5: Video Posted on Twitter

Content Piece #6: Video posted on your blog

Content Piece #7: Video posted on the speaker’s Linkedin

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Talk Track #2: Ability to FOCUS

Content Piece #8: Video posted on LinkedIn

Content Piece #9: Video Posted on YouTube

Content Piece #10: Video Posted in your Email

Content Piece #11: Video Posted on Twitter

Content Piece #12: Video posted on your blog

Content Piece #13: Video posted on the speaker’s Linkedin

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Talk Track #3: Increase your ROI

Content Piece #14: Video posted on LinkedIn

Content Piece #15: Video Posted on YouTube

Content Piece #16: Video Posted in your Email

Content Piece #17: Video Posted on Twitter

Content Piece #18: Video posted on your blog

Content Piece #19: Video posted on the speaker’s Linkedin

For the 20th piece of content, you can always host the speaker on a webinar and have them dive deep into some of the questions that came up from the in person session. You can have them focus on just one topic. You can also have them talk on the webinar with another expert and now the process starts all over again. 

Important to note:

- If you are doing video, always have the subtitles on, because many times people are watching without sound and it is often times easier to read.

- You don’t need Steven Spielberg to edit the videos. The content creates the quality, not your fancy introduction. 

#3 Prepare Your Influencers: Your Speakers are Your Influencers

This is stating the obvious, of course, your speakers are influencers and can multiply the distribution of your message. So how can you activate them?

Quite simply, you need to give them the assets to share. You don’t need to write the message for them, you just need to give them something of meaning that they think will resonate with how they talk to their audience.

#4 Manage Your Bottlenecks

One of the biggest deterrents of event organizers and marketing teams to share content after their event is the operational bottlenecks to collecting, managing and storing the content.

Here’ a question to think about:

How you are collecting and storing speaker & session content?

If you are collecting the content via email and storing it in a Dropbox folder, you have to make sure you are completely consistent with version control and making sure you are following the same storage process even up to the day of the event.

The issues that usually occur are:

Your team may be very methodical with this process, but as things get crazier and crazier leading up to the event, it is really easy to circumvent the process and start forwarding the last minute submission directly to your A/V team or not tagging the final versions the right way.

Also - it is important to note, the way you want to pull the data for marketing post event may be completely different than how you are storing the data for day of event production purposes.

The ideal solution is to have a tool that allows you to consistently collect all of the information, track any changes, and allow anyone on your team (with the right access) to be able to filter, sort and download the information specific to their job. Your A/V team can get the information in the format they way, your registration and ops team can get the details they need and want, and your marketing team can get the information in the format and structure they need and want.

#5 You’re only as good as your system

This goes without saying, but having a system that streamlines this process for you, can save you hundreds of organizer hours, help you distribute your content, reduce your costs and generate more money.

And of course if you’d like a demo of Sessionboard, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We make the content collection and management process smarter, so you and your marketing team can hit the ground running post-event with enough content to fuel your calendar until the next big event.

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