Events - right now mostly digital - are the cornerstone of a marketing calendar. They offer a great opportunity to engage the people that matter and drive commercial conversations forward.

The amazing opportunity that events offer is balanced by the time, effort, and cost that running or attending an event requires from your team. 

Given the high investment in events - physical or digital - it’s important that you get them right. Having a content plan around your events goes a long way to ensure that you leverage the effort of events for maximum benefit.

Pre-event content

In the lead up to your event, you’ll be thinking about driving sign-ups and awareness. The way that most firms go about this is with a token social media post or two and an automated email.

With the effort going into planning the event, it's a small and worthy extra step to write content in the build-up. A few short, punchy insights from your team about the event makes it easier for your audience to get a taste for what they will learn and gives your team a perfect excuse to share one to one invitations with their own networks.  If you can also get your key speaker/s to record a quick video or audio piece outlining key benefits those attending will gain.  The more authentic and personal the better.

Post-event content

Even if you meet them at an event, clients are highly unlikely to engage your firm based on this single event interaction. What your event interactions do is earn you the right to reach out, to continue conversations, and to deepen your relationships.  

The perfect way to do that is to have a “summary post” published after your event with key learnings and takeaways. This content is ideal for sharing post-event with those people who attended, and you met and provides you with an asset your can share with those in your network that couldn’t attend.

If you’ve got recordings of the event or snippets of video or audio be sure to include them in the post - this is the perfect place to do that.

Reusing your event content

An event happens once, but that may not coincide with when your clients and prospects have the opportunity to engage your firm.

If you can, make the most of your event by reusing the content throughout the year as advertising. Take segments of the most salient points from your presentations and point your ads to the entire presentation.  In short, make sure you squeeze every drop of advantage you can from the effort you have invested in your events.

Finally, measure and learn.  See what interactions you drove, what leverage your gained and what type of content resonated with your audience.  Feed that back to your central marketing team and ensure you continually improve.  

It might not necessarily be perfect first go but as the Chinese proverb states "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"