Leveraging Events for Your Content Marketing Strategy
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What do the Oscars, Dubai Expo 2020, and Fifa World Cup have in common? They’re mega events that guarantee many eyeballs. Such events generate content for the traditional medium of television and plenty of social media. While your brand may not be putting on a global mega event, any event can be a content marketing opportunity for both the event and the brand.
What does this mean? All components relating to the event can serve as collateral for your content marketing strategy because events are fundamentally about content. And creating digital content assets around your event are essentially building a digital event around your real-life one – whether it is virtual, face-to-face or hybrid.
The content can promote the event before it takes place, engage the audience when the event is happening, or receive feedback after the event is finished. It can also be an always-on version of the event that your customers can refer back to. The content you can use is not limited to what happens during the event itself; you can harvest all sorts of content before, around and after it occurs.
Creating the buzz
Your content marketing strategy should begin even before the event starts. At this stage, your content should tease the audience and make them interested in participating in your event. Various content can be published to create the “hype” and sense of excitement regarding your event, ranging from blog pieces to social media teasers.
For example, if you’re an IT company with an upcoming annual conference on IT trends, you can publish blog pieces around the topics of your conference before it happens. You don’t have to give the game away. The blogs can focus on the topic, almost like a primer before the main show.
The Oscars take a similar approach. To promote and create buzz for the 2022 telecast, they released a series of behind-the-scenes videos and interviews with the cast of the movies up for awards.
There is really no difference between the approaches taken by the really big events and every-day ones. It’s just down to how much you’re able to do, the strategy is the same.
The live experience
Once the event is live, anything that happens can be utilised as a chance to maximise your content marketing strategy to guarantee more coverage and eyeballs in the process.
Who could forget Ellen’s Oscar selfie that at the time became the most retweeted tweet in history, crashing Twitter during the broadcast? It proved social engagement and virality in real-time is crucial. Afterward, the selfie even spawned several memes, guaranteeing post-event coverage and additional boost for Samsung, the phone brand used to take the selfie.
Make the most of social media by just helping those that aren’t there get a feel for the experience, understand the insights, feel the buzz.
User-generated content can also be part of your content marketing strategy, meaning attendees’ or viewers’ responses can be retweeted or reposted on your social media accounts. One example was the reunion performance of the Spice Girls in the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Their performance generated 116,000 tweets per minute, a record at the 2012 Games. The video on YouTube has since garnered over 20 million views. This is where a good hashtag strategy comes into play.
Our experience
Click2View used this multi-faceted approach to content marketing with a series of events for our client, Workday.
Workday approached us to help them film a panel discussion with key industry experts on shaping workforce cultures to build stronger employee engagement. This is a typical engagement for a content agency. However we asked if we could push it further and help create content for their demand generation team.
The panel discussion was converted to other deliverables like a highlight video, cut down panel videos, a trend report, teasers, still images, social posts, and even a podcast. For the videos, the full-length discussion was trimmed and edited to highlight interesting quotes, and bites mentioned in the panel and shared on social media.
For the podcast, we edited soundbites of the speakers during the panel discussions along with short interviews with additional experts. Together, these soundbites were woven into the podcast with a host that provided context and transitions from one topic to another, ensuring a smooth listening experience. The vox pops of each speaker was also shared on social media.
The whitepaper was a detailed study of the panel discussion, reporting on the five main trends discussed during the panel. It featured key quotes from the speakers, supplemented with information from our own research, and also included infographics based on the statistics discussed in the session. Ultimately, it gave users who downloaded it a comprehensive report of the whole event, and some. Perhaps more importantly it became a piece of gated content for the client.
While it’s true that the ongoing pandemic puts a pause on many live events, the formula of crafting a content marketing strategy and assets also applies to online or hybrid events.
Why produce only one deliverable when you can have several? It’s all about knowing how to repurpose the content generated from your event. The right content for the audience is no longer negotiable, especially in today’s Digital Age.
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Click2View is Southeast Asia’s premiere full-service independent B2B content marketing agency servicing clients like Microsoft, Google, Visa, Prudential, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
