If you’re like most meeting and event planners determined to outpace your efforts in 2024, you’ll want to favorite and share this guide to our top 25 conference content marketing ideas. Wondering which ideas made the list and why? Simply put: these are the strategies we know work.
Successful conference content marketing matters because it empowers event planners to:
- Establish the event as an industry authority
- Provide attendees with valuable information
- Promote ongoing engagement before, during, and after the conference
- Polish the event’s reputation in the process.
Content creation is critical to increasing attendee engagement by inspiring interest, sharing event highlights, facilitating better networking, and tracking successes, start to finish. All of which can result in increased attendee registration, enhanced satisfaction, and sustained success.
With your conference goals and objectives clearly established, you can expect to invest a considerable amount of time on content development… and that’s where our event technology solutions and strategies have got you covered.
Developing your conference content marketing strategy
To reach your destination, in other words, realize your conference goals, you need a clearly mapped out plan for your arrival. Along the way, you need to ensure that every point of your content plan points in the same direction.
A well-defined content plan and strategy for your conference is no different than a map on a journey. You need to know you’re going to reach your destination and the actual steps you’ll need to take to arrive.
Let’s start with your speakers and the speaker selection process…
Speakers are an integral part of your content marketing strategy, which means your team needs to check the following boxes in order to make the most of every speaker who lends their voice to your event.
1. Feature a diverse roster of speakers — always! Diversity and inclusion apply to all industries and should be reinforced at events, regardless of size, scope or theme.
2. Establish a clear speaker evaluation and selection process. Your team will thank you and you will undoubtedly source stronger speakers because of it.
3. Create a speaker selection committee to identify key criteria for speakers and recruit them with greater precision, relative to your event’s goals and budget realities.
4. Capitalize on technology to call for speakers. We consider this the no-brainer box to check because enlisting software support will, in fact, take many of these tasks off your list almost immediately.
5. Leverage software from Attendee Interactive to collect session and abstract submissions, review the content, organize, and accept all on a simple and customizable step-by-step interface. In other words, no more manually reviewing, compiling, and scoring speaker submissions.
6. Attract a larger pool of speakers using event technology software and assign your team to rate the sessions so you can decide which ones to feature at your conference, faster.
7. Rely on speakers to help market your event. Offer attendees a photo-op with a celebrity speaker as an incentive to register early.
8. Sell raffle tickets for VIP opportunities to interact with your keynote speaker. Offer cheaper prices for those who register before a certain date to drive interest, increase registration, and give your budget a little boost.
Tech Tips that streamline, support, and strengthen your speaker selection process…
→ Attendee Interactive allows event planners to access prior year speaker and/or session evaluations to better evaluate who to include and feature in future events.
→ Assign different roles to reviewers based on submission type and give them access to their own portal where they can easily view and manage submissions.
With a solid speaker strategy in place, you need to turn your attention to creating a content calendar complete with deadlines for submissions and targeted publishing dates.
Crush your event’s conference content marketing calendar
Even the most sought-after speakers will only get you so far. You need to build content that will engage your audience from start to finish and inspire your attendees to register… and register again.
9. Create content that pulls its own weight. In other words, your content should do some serious heavy lifting on your behalf by connecting with your attendees and then motivating them to do something; in this case, register. Once registered, however, you want them to engage with your content, which is why you need the right content and lots of it.
10. Present a variety of content types to satisfy ever-shortening attention spans and the reality of disparate learning styles. Your content calendar should include, email, blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, videos, and webinars.
11. Repurpose your content. This is another plea to make your content work for you and all it takes is just a little imagination. Once you get the hang of it, there will be no stopping you. For instance, excerpt a quote or statistic from a blog post, use an intuitive design platform, like Canva, and create a social post that can be pushed to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X. The same goes for video, which can be shared on social media as a live feed or highlight reel.
Incorporating Educational Content in Your Content Calendar
Once you feel confident in managing and maximizing your content calendar, it’s time to integrate educational content to establish industry authority, increase excitement about your event, and drive registrations. The more educational content you include, the better you demonstrate credibility, which engenders trust among your attendees.
While educational content encourages attendees to register, it also has the potential to maintain and strengthen connections, post-event, as a source of valuable learning materials.
Curate the right educational content for your next event by considering the following tasks to help succeed.
12. Demonstrate expertise by establishing the event as an authoritative source within a field or industry.
13. Connect with the audience by focusing on their interests, challenges, and questions, thereby increasing event registrations.
14. Evidence value: Highlight the tangible benefits and takeaways that attendees can expect, emphasizing the educational opportunities at the conference.
15. Empower anticipation: Generate excitement and anticipation among the target audience, encouraging attendance and participation in the event.
16. Encourage sustained engagement: Serve as a resource post-conference, offering valuable content that attendees can reference and share, keeping them engaged with the conference brand and community.
17. Highlight speaker expertise by conducting interviews with your speakers, encouraging them to share, not only their wisdom, but also human-factor anecdotes about their personal and professional path.
18. Package these highlights into easily digestible content bites, like social media posts, infographics, blog posts, newsletter highlights, and short emails.
Bottom line: great content, structured by a strong content calendar, results in a better event that is easier to market. And the sooner you start, the better. That’s why we’re about to add event previews to your event content marketing to-do list.
Think of the early bird getting the worm… in this case, the worm is the registered attendee.
Energize your event with powerful previews
If your event marketing goal in 2024 is to increase attendee registration, we cannot overstate the value of event previews. When done properly (we’ll show you), event previews energize your event, specifically by creating can’t-miss excitement within your audience.
Hook them with an event preview and continue harnessing their excitement by rolling out more previews in different formats.
Your objectives here are as follows:
19. Craft compelling event previews that showcase a mix of storytelling and visual elements that result in the same thing:
- Audience engagement. If you take the time to imagine event previews, each one should successfully build anticipation and excitement, increasing attendee registration well in advance of day one.
20. Roll-out a variety of event previews, including a robust blend of the following:
- Traditional teasers and teaser videos
- Countdowns
- Visual teasers
- Behind-the-scenes glimpses
- Interactive content
- Testimonials and reviews
- Speaker or performer highlights
- Interactive social media stories
- User-generated content
- Exclusive offers
- Email marketing campaigns
- Community building
With all the focus on how to drive engagement before your event, we would be remiss if we didn’t emphasize the flipside of that coin, which is marketing your event and connecting with attendees after it’s done.
Power up your post-event marketing efforts
Effective content marketing at your event includes significant effort after everyone has gone home and all is said and done. (Spoiler alert: it’s not actually done).
Here, we offer the final five checks on your 2024 conference content marketing list.
21. Commit to engagement: Do not let your engagement efforts end just because the event is over. Content must still be created, attendees communicated with, and a buzz created well before upcoming opportunities. Keep your attendees connected after the event to see them at the next one.
Pull from this list (as many as possible) and load up your content calendar with as much post-event content as pre-event:
- Event recap videos
- Detailed event highlights blog post
- Speaker and performer interviews
- Attendee testimonials
- Interactive webinars or Q&A sessions
- Photo galleries
- Infographics and visual summaries
- White papers and reports
- Thank-you messages
- Feedback surveys
- Teasers for upcoming events
- Community building
22. Remind attendees of the event’s key takeaways: Use your content to summarize key information that attendees will associate with value from your event.
23. Celebrate success: Showcase everything that rocked about the event to clarify its impact and value to anyone who was unable to attend. They will be there next time!
24. Announce upcoming events: There is nothing wrong with post event content that promotes your next event. Your attendees will want to be updated on future opportunities and this also allows you to tap into new audiences who have not yet experienced your events.
25. Ask for and accept criticism: To know where and how to improve, you have to ask your attendees for their honest feedback, which you can easily do via survey, questionnaire, or online poll.
This list of top 25 ideas for conference content marketing should start you on your way, but if you need more information on marketing topics like SEO, download our Ultimate Conference Planner’s Guide: How to Capitalize on Content Marketing for Your Event.
