My first in-person event was overwhelming. I was there to report on the conference, doing person-on-the-street interviews and attending as many programs as possible to write blogs and live updates for the tech company that sponsored it. Getting to all the sessions and programs was impossible even with a small team. And we were getting paid for it.
The event was incredibly successful: Sales booked dozens of on-site meetings, NPS scores were high and brand awareness skyrocketed. But I couldn’t help wondering — subject-matter experts had spent months creating sessions that would engage ideal prospects and existing customers. After the event, what happened to all that content?
A new approach to event activation
“We put so much time and effort into the event program, creating an amazing onsite customer journey, trying to be thoughtful about our digital attendees and then after the event, the sessions go into an online library and just kind of die,” said Meisha Bochicchio, digital content marketing program manager at VMware.
She is working to change that, building a new program to repurpose more than 800 sessions of VMware event content — valuable content that will boost engagement and extend the reach of the company’s events through targeted campaigns.
She’s thinking through different ways to re-create the content meaningfully and considering how it can support other business units and their programs.
“I’m tapping into things like our customer rewards program, how we can keep engaging with our customers throughout the year with our repurposed content…how we can tap into some of our existing customer newsletters that might live on different business units,” she said and how they can “support and enable each other with this content.”
Dig deeper: Marketers are reimagining their event strategies
Why repurposing event content isn’t widespread
In the era of doing more with less, extending the life of event session content seems like an easy win. So why aren’t more companies repurposing event sessions into new formats and assets for different parts of the lifecycle funnel?
It isn’t an access problem: 70% of events are now hybrid, and most companies returning to in-person prefer hybrid events will combine both formats for the foreseeable future. That digital component means libraries of great content are just waiting to be reused.
It isn’t a technology issue: New tools make it easy for even nontechnical staff to pull high-quality transcripts from sessions or video clips from panel interviews.
It isn’t a lack of vision: Most marketers understand that event content that lives on for months increases post-event touchpoints, drives more leads and grows brand awareness.
It comes down to ownership. The event team closest to the content has hit their KPIs and moved on to the next event.
Content marketing supports the company’s various go-to-market plays, staying one step ahead of unwieldy metrics (hello, GA4) to reach prospects in increasingly fragmented channels.
Brand is the steward of company strategy and doesn’t get that granular with tactics.
About half of content marketers are already using in-person events in their campaigns. Someone like Bochicchio, who sits on the event team but manages content marketing programming, is ideally suited to the role. Why aren’t there more like her?
Dig deeper: Doing more with less: How marketers can make content go further
Collaboration is the key to post-event ROI
Maximizing ROI from events requires a new mindset: viewing events as a moment in time, just one part of the event lifecycle. Event sessions are cornerstone content that can drive activations year-round in account-based marketing outreach, sales outreach and even in-product. But one team alone can’t achieve it.
You need executive buy-in for a role that works strategically across functions, someone who knows the event content and how to curate and package it post-event to support other teams and their priorities.
You need the will to establish new KPIs — an attribution formula that credits both the event team who created the content as well as the teams who use it in post-event campaigns. And you need to leverage event tools that can track revenue.
The metrics that matter
Post-event success just looks different, said Melanie Reid, event marketing manager at Riskified. “It’s pipeline, it’s influenced ARR, influenced MRR.” She and Lena Stahlschmidt of Fivetran presented at CEMA Summit, exploring the link between post-event strategy and proving the ROI of events.
They understand that event marketers who know how to align events with revenue and who can show the measurable impact of their program on the bottom line will get more support.
Reid partners closely with sales in her role, using session data, surveys and an understanding of where attendees are in the buyer’s journey to qualify leads and route them properly.
“Segmentation from sales, the automations from marketing, they all have to work together so that it’s one kind of cohesive message coming from the company, but a two-prong approach,” she explained.
Original content is king
Bill Gates famously said content is king, but today it’s original content. Marketers know that research, surveys and interviews are becoming more valuable because they give people something they can’t get anywhere else — and AI can’t reproduce them.
Event content sessions are a hidden source of original content and will join those other valuable sources as a cornerstone of content strategy.
To get the most value, you’ll need to focus on building relationships across event marketing, content marketing and brand marketing.
It’s a collaborative effort, which may be why more companies aren’t activating more event content. It requires focus, relationship building and a deep understanding of how your event content can support the work of other business units’ programs.
As Bochicchio says, it’s “80% partnering with other people and establishing relationships and putting together project plans and processes and 20% really just figuring out tactically, how am I going to repurpose this stuff.”
The time is now
Budgets for in-person events have finally exceeded pre-pandemic numbers, according to a March 2023 Exhibitor study. The global event industry will be valued at $2.19 trillion by 2028, per Verified Market Research’s estimates.
Now is the best time to consider who will take ownership of your content and work cross-functionally to be sure it’s getting in front of the right prospects. The field is evolving, but savvy marketers are already making the connection between events, brand and content marketing.
Events are a company’s most critical marketing tools, so if anything required team play, if anything demanded unsiloing, it’s this. The greater the cooperation across departments, the greater the returns on your event content investment.
Dig deeper: How to tackle the challenges of running successful hybrid events
