Content marketing: An essential tool for your event

Content marketing is particularly important in the event industry as it will entice people into attending events. By providing consistent and reliable information, companies aim to reach a particular target audience for their events. This enables event planners to create customer loyalty and build a long term relationship through a high quality level of information.   

These information are disseminated via various means: traditional medium - paper press, radio, TV - and new technologies - blogs, newsletters, social media, forums etc.-. Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, takes full advantage of both by managing a blog, sending emailings and weekly newsletters, uploading podcasts, using social media, hosting webinars, online training and master classes, writing e-books and magazines. The example of Joe Pulizzi perfectly highlights that content marketing should be done to promote events but also to bring event topics-related knowledge all year long.

Nevertheless to be fully efficient, these new technological tools should not be used independently. Implementing call to action such as “follow us on Facebook” or “register right now on the event website” can be a solution to link them to each other. Call to action is very useful for events as it encourages attendees to start acting by getting involved in the information process. It also enables event planners to collect potential attendees’ data for data mining.

Not only can content marketing be done on a larger scale by using the right means of communication for the content to be spread but also on a  smaller scale by identifying the target market and stakeholders for the event in order to target the right information to spread. This is why event planner’s goal and saying is to “try to reach the right people with the right message at the right time”.    

Unfortunately, event planners and companies often neglect the importance of content marketing. For instance, Joe Pulizzi estimated that 90% of the conferences were not recorded whereas their content could be reused later to bring more value to the companies and their events. Will they finally catch up with the web 2.0 revolution for the greater good?

CASANOVA Margaux & SIMON-VILLET Anne-Sophie

Source:

http://www.bizbash.com/how-to-use-content-marketing-to-drive-success-for-your-next-event/new-york/story/28897#.VL0DItKG-Co