The Definitive Guide to a B2B Event Content Marketing

As an event planner or marketer, you are likely aware that your pre- and post-event content strategy is integral to your overall success.

To drive registrations, satisfy attendees, and boost your brand’s exposure, you must produce thorough and engaging content to support and surround your event marketing efforts.

If you’ve never hosted a B2B event, or if you simply want to improve your event content strategy, today’s blog post is for you. Keep reading as we teach you how to plan and execute the perfect event content strategy!

Event Content Creation Best Practices

Live events require extensive planning and preparation– and your event content strategy does as well. You must be prepared to publish content leading up to your event, during the event itself, and in the days and weeks following the event.

For this reason, it’s important to map out your content plans long before your event kicks off. Figure out what types of content you want to create, what resources you need to do so, and which members of your team will be held responsible for event content creation. The secret to nailing your event content strategy lies in your ability to plan, assign, and delegate.

Here’s what we recommend you plan for—broken down into pre-event content, day-of-event content, and post-event content. Let’s get into it:

Pre-Event Content Creation

Your pre-event content must accomplish several goals. It must generate registrants, build anticipation, set expectations, and offer value to your audience. Some examples of pre-event content are as follows:

• Event Themed-Content: Most events have a unifying theme tying together each session, talk, or speech. For this reason, we recommend that you create blog posts, infographics, or videos, to explore the theme or topic of your event from every angle. This is a great way to offer value without getting too promotional.

• Speaker-Driven Content: People often attend events to hear from a specific speaker. Plan to collaborate with your speakers to create original content. Or, curate and distribute content speakers created in the past.

• Event Previews or Promotions: Here’s where you can get a bit more promotional and show people what to expect at your event. Use short videos and images to showcase the event hall, location, and specific sessions, and speeches. Try to think like an attendee and do your best to highlight the major selling points of your event.

Day-Of-Event Content Creation

Your day-of content should engage attendees while also appealing to your followers who aren’t at the actual event. Keep in mind, any content collected during your event will be critical to the promotion of your future events—especially if they are held on a regular basis. So remember to take pictures, interview attendees, chat with speakers, and build up your content library so you’re not left scrambling when it comes time to promote your next event.

Here are a few types of content to consider:

• Live Video: Capture live video content to stream on social media platforms. Think quick speaker interviews, live Q&As, and tours of the event hall. Record memorable moments from social functions like happy hours, book signings, and so on to capture the complete event experience.

• Live Tweets: Tweet exciting moments like compelling quotes or event announcements. Create an event hashtag and use it to respond to attendees, retweet positive comments about the event, and pose questions to encourage conversation surrounding your event.

• User-Generated Content: Incentivize attendees to share event content across their personal profiles and networks. For example, we created an Instagram cut out for Growth Acceleration Summit attendees to take pictures with and subsequently share. This drastically increased social engagement and garnered more exposure for our event.

Post-Event Content Creation

Post-event content is critical to your event marketing strategy. This type of content helps generate buzz around your event and allows you to build on the momentum and increased brand awareness your event has already generated. Check out some examples of post-event content:

• Wrap-Up Blog Posts: Collect the best moments or highlights from your event or organize attendee tweets into a blog that tells the story of your event from the attendee’s point of view. Doing so will provide a valuable resource to attendees looking to remind themselves of important takeaways and will help include those who were unable to attend—potentially increasing their interest in attending your next event.

• Highlight Videos: Use b-roll footage and excerpts from day-of event videos to create a highlight reel. Put together a short video featuring attendee testimonials – when people hear firsthand how great your event was, they’ll be likelier to sign up for your next one.

• Press Releases: Did you unveil a new product or service at your event? Draft press releases to send to mass media publications and establish your brand as a key player in your industry.

Schedule Your Event Content

In the lead-up to the event, your team will be busy with a number of different tasks. As a result, you’re susceptible to falling behind on your event content. Avoid this problem by scheduling all of your event-related content in advance.

We’ll assume you already use a calendar to schedule content throughout the year. Once you’ve identified the content you’ll create for the event, examine your calendar and strategically schedule your event content among the other content you produce. This way, you can hit all your deadlines for your event-specific content without losing sight of your other content marketing goals.

Promote Your Content

As with any content strategy, you can’t expect your audience to find and engage with your content on their own. You must guide them to it. If you only use one or two channels to promote your event content, you’ll fail to reach a large segment of potential attendees.

Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

Final Thoughts

B2B events present an important opportunity to promote your brand and interact with potential customers. But, the success of your event relies heavily on the quality of your content strategy. Content draws people to your event and engages your audience– whether they are in attendance or following along from home.

If there’s one rule to follow when creating event content, it’s this: always prioritize value over promotion. Your goal may be to generate registrants, but it’s also important to provide meaningful content your audience can apply to their own work. Don’t just tell people your event is worth attending – show them, by delivering high-quality, engaging content.

Contact our sales team today to learn how our go-to-market platform can help you achieve your most important marketing goals. What are you waiting for?