Many companies in marketing, media, or communications rely on freelance contributors, yet brands don’t always know how to effectively integrate these new teammates.

Whether you’re looking to find new freelancers or already have external contributors helping out, you’ll benefit from a freelance onboarding process. Providing freelancers the right resources from the beginning will help them create better work and ultimately make your job easier.

How to ace freelancer onboarding

To help you along the way, we’ve compiled a six-step freelancer onboarding checklist, a cheat sheet of sorts that you can use to onboard freelancers now and into the future.

1. Explain the company and business objectives

Full-time employees have a tendency to take company messaging for granted. They’re around it so often that it becomes second nature. When you work with freelancers, you can’t assume they’ll instantly know the nuances of your business. The first part of your freelancer onboarding process should focus on educating them on these core details.

Marketers typically think about lobbing their pitch at prospective clients, but the same exercise could help you onboard freelancers. To create and maintain a productive relationship, you need to be clear about what the company sells, who it wants to reach, and how it wants to accomplish its business goals.

You can repurpose existing HR content—brand videos, welcome packets, training quizzes, FAQs—to get freelancers thinking the way you do. But keep in mind that you should pay freelancers for this time.

2. Introduce the team

Be thoughtful about how you introduce freelancers to full-timers. Just because they won’t physically be in the office doesn’t mean you should rattle off names of people on a group email. If you anticipate freelancers working repeatedly with full-timers, set up brief one-on-one calls between those individuals as part of the freelancer onboarding process. If you have a content management platform like Contently, make sure they know how to use it.

3. Set rules for communication

Before you hire and onboard freelancers, decide on a system that includes how you’re going to communicate with them.

One option is to divide your freelancer team into tiers. I’m on several editors’ email lists where they blast out editorial calendars, but others message me directly to ask about my availability. A couple simply forward me press releases and offers for interviews, and I can choose whether to bite or not.

Of course, there’s also the question of instant messaging and communicating with your full-time creators. In some cases, brands give full Slack privileges to freelancers. In other cases, the part-time creators are confined to certain channels. Either way, I’ve seen enough evidence to know that it’s helpful when freelancers join company culture. They pick up on brand messaging faster if they can see internal discussions.

4. Style guide and pitch guide

What’s your stance on the Oxford comma? Are there any words or phrases that employees can’t use? Do visual assets need to include certain colors, or are there any off-limits shots a freelance photographer should know about? Sending a style guide to freelancers will give them answers to all the little creative questions that you already know in the back of your head. As your brand evolves, you should also update the style guide occasionally, answering any new inquiries received from freelancers as they go through their onboarding process.

Along with the style guide, you should also send your freelancers a pitch or brief guide, which can live as a PDF, Powerpoint deck, or Google doc. Format doesn’t matter as much as content. A freelancer can’t pitch you ideas effectively without knowing at a high-level what you’re looking for. Do you want to approve their intended sources ahead of time? Should the pitch be in narrative format or are bullet points okay? Do you want pitches delivered to you the same day each week, via email, or do you accept them on a rolling basis?

Tell them exactly how you prefer to be pitched, including the communication channel they should use and the structure their pitches should take.

5. Gather a portfolio of past success

There are a ton of reasons to file your biggest successes together, but onboarding freelancers is one of the biggest. If you tell 10 new freelance hires to “read the archives,” expect maybe two or three to walk away with the same vision you have in your head.

On the other hand, if you have a directory of standout articles, infographics, white papers, and case studies to choose from, they’ll have an easier time seeing things your way. If, for instance, you’re asking them to write a new version of a piece of content that always works for you, show them the original! Tell them why it worked, what you’d like them to repurpose, and where you’d like them to add in new material.

6. Ask for feedback

Routinely interview your freelancers the way you interview your clients and seek feedback from full-timers. If you’ve been working with a freelancer for a few months, ask them to reflect on the freelancer onboarding process. Did they understand the brand when they began? What do they know now that they wish you had told them back then?

Once you have the answers to some of those questions, make sure to update your internal freelancer onboarding checklist to address any adjustments you’ve made to the process. The goal here is to internalize feedback and adjust your system to better serve freelancers who join in the future.

The better you are at freelancer onboarding, the faster your team will benefit from their contributions.

To learn more ways to improve your working relationships with creatives, subscribe to The Content Strategist.

The post How A Checklist Can Improve Your Freelancer Onboarding Process appeared first on Contently.

Brands are creating more content than ever before. According to CMI’s 2019 benchmark report, a majority of both B2B and B2C marketers increased content creation budgets from 2018. Roughly two-thirds of marketers created more written, audio, and visual content year over year.

However, despite bigger budgets and outputs, content teams remain relatively small. In 2018, Forrester reported that “most in-house creative teams are small; 54% of those teams have between one and 10 people. So being able to scale content with limited resources is key.”

Content marketing is still a fairly new practice, but brands don’t have to settle for limited resources. As companies mature, they’re finding ways to show the value of content and use that evidence to grow accordingly. They’re balancing quality and quantity, and you can too by following these steps.

Review your existing content strategy

In 2019, most people understand the importance of a content strategy (even if only a little more than half have one.) What’s not as obvious is how they should adjust their plan when scaling.

A content strategy is a living document. Like any plan, it needs to evolve. Just think about how much marketing has changed over the last few years. If you’re trying to scale, that’s a great time to take a step back and review your strategy.

Now, you don’t have to reassess everything. Your company mission usually doesn’t fluctuate. But other aspects of your strategy need to be reevaluated, especially if new teams are going to create content from scratch. Think of it this way: RBC’s personal and commercial banking division will care about different topics than the insurance division.

Specifically to scale, you’ll definitely need to assess a few parts: new goals and KPIs (more on this in a few pages), SEO keywords, and an updated gap analysis. How you’ll refresh those parts depends on which way you’re trying to scale.

Let’s use setting goals and KPIs for now. If you’re expanding to an international LOB, your new goal could be to build a loyal audience in the UK. A good KPI for that might be reaching 10,000 returning visitors to your content after a year. Those are standard brand awareness goals.

However, if you’re growing to a different part of the funnel, your goal could be to start a lead generation program with a KPI of generating 1,000 marketing qualified leads.

(We covered building a content strategy in the first playbook, so consult that to review all the steps.)

Don’t be afraid to use the review period as a chance to make a big adjustment. You have to test assumptions that get taken for granted. An approach or tone that makes sense in the United States may not work as well in another part of the world.

In the first playbook, we revealed how athenahealth recently reset the voice and tone of its content, even after years of successful thought leadership. Working with the help of an agency, the content team made the tough choice to try a different course of action in the hopes of growing its audience.

“We did a whole reboot on our brand voice,” said John Fox, executive director of content. “That was an evolution for us. In previous years we’ve had campaigns that are very focused on the pain, and we’re now pointing the way out of the pain and pointing toward a bright future for healthcare.”

Get key stakeholders on board

Scaling requires you to make the case for content marketing all over again. Even if creating more content and collaborating with other teams makes sense to you, that won’t mean much if executives don’t see the value.

It’s your job to show them the value, communicating why content can make a difference for your companies. Margaret Magnarelli, executive director of growth marketing at Morgan Stanley, took a reporter’s approach in her last role at Monster.com to get people aligned. “I interviewed all the people who would be stakeholders in our work,” she told us. “I said, ‘What do you want to get out of what we do?’ Just like that, people told me what they did and their understanding of [content].”

Having served as the executive editor at Money Magazine, Magnarelli’s journalism experience gave her an advantage. But you don’t need to be a seasoned reporter to get executive support. You just have to learn what makes them tick, and the easiest way to do that is to ask them questions that make them feel heard. Find out what they think of your brand messaging, see if a particular piece of content resonated with them, and dig into any problems keeping them up at night.

The common mistake people make here is assuming that stakeholders view content marketing the same way they do. Editors and strategists tend to focus their attention on quality, productivity, and audience building, while executives prioritize control and tying content to revenue. When you’re asking for more resources, find common ground.

If scaling is the goal, consider efficiency from an exec’s perspective. Manulife, a former Contently client, wanted to institute a better process for sharing content and repurposing assets. The insurance company developed a system that tracked savings, and over a six-month span, it avoided $1.2 million in content costs. That data point illustrated the clear value of content to everyone.

Set new goals and objectives

When first documenting a strategy, your initial goals are more like educated guesses. After a year, though, you should have real benchmarks to analyze. Forecasting growth will never be an exact science, but any time you’re increasing content production with the same team or creating content with a new team, your goals should change. And you’ll be in prime position to pull the right levers.

In 2017, Joe Lazauskas, Contently’s head of marketing, elaborated on the importance of collecting good data:

Block quote: Raw data that you have about your audience—think audience demographics, persona research, and first-and-third party data about what content they like to consume or tends to drive sales—should translate to insights. For a finance brand, this might result in something like: “High-income millennials in the northeast are more likely to watch financial advice videos on Facebook than any other network, and engage disproportionately with content that triggers nostalgia.”

Let these trends influence your latest goals. Last year, for instance, we cut back on media stories when we saw their average performance had slipped, but we set a new goal to launch a pilot video series because our audience told us they were interested in more multimedia. The five-part series brought in close to 10,000 views on YouTube plus thousands more with social clips. That engagement sparked discussion for a bigger video budget. And in 2019, we’re hiring a video producer to help us reach our new goal for the second half of the year: creating one video per week.

As you scale, the number of stories you publish will jump up. That archive sets off a snowball effect. Over time, content that supports longtail keywords should lead to a steady increase in the size of your audience, and your goals should reflect that. Redpoint venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz referred to this as “the compounding returns of content marketing.”

Update your workflow

Bolstering your content program is an opportunity to explore new areas. If you used to publish one article per week, now you can try two. If you only produced blog posts before, maybe scaling means starting to create visual content like infographics and video.

You’ll also have to adjust your workflow to incorporate news teams and stakeholders. When we’re producing a top-funnel infographic for The Content Strategist, our workflow includes two rounds for copy, two rounds for design, and one final approval step. But when we’re creating a mid-funnel case study that involves a client, we broaden the workflow to include three rounds for copy, two rounds for design, one round for client approval, and one final step for internal approval.

Some projects call for more steps than others, but the point is you’ll need to customize workflows as you scale. When athenahealth committed to producing more visuals to show off its original research, the content team baked more time into the workflow for design. “Infographics are much more time-consuming and take more rounds of design and iteration,” Fox said. “That influences how many we’re able to produce.”

Fox’s team consists of three full-time writers and editors, plus freelance contributors. For visual content, though, they rely on information designers who have other responsibilities within the company. So they spend some of their time helping on the infographics for athenaInsight, the company’s digital publication, but they also work on projects for the rest of the marketing team. Since Fox only gets a portion of the designers’ time, he had to be realistic about what his team could create without full-time resources. The solution was to build out a longer workflow for visual assets. The team still runs three posts per week with a standard workflow, but they periodically add in visual content to give the site an engaging wrinkle.

Simplify communication across the organization

If you’ve ever played a game of telephone, you know what happens to a simple message when dozens of people get involved. When scaling a content program, you have to be vigilant about consistency and efficiency, otherwise, your creative efforts will get lost or sidetracked in endless email threads.

People work differently, but there are ways to minimize the confusion throughout the company. We recommend investing in a product that brings all stakeholders and practitioners together. Doing so will free up time and money that can be better spent producing content. At Contently, we use our own platform to manage pitches, share assets, create content, and analyze results. We also chat on Slack for quicker conversations about news, trends, and updates.

These platforms will cost money, but they shouldn’t break your budget. The commenting feature is one part of Contently’s larger offering. Aside from Slack, other popular tools in this space include Asana, Trello, and Wrike. Regardless of which one you choose, ensure that everyone is on it and knows how to communicate. Marketing stacks can get messy, so limit the tools in your arsenal to strengthen brand governance.

Consolidate your review process

Lawyers are like referees—the less you notice them, the better. Content creators may not enjoy legal review, but it’s still a necessary piece of the puzzle for most brands. We’ve heard too many horror stories about 800-word blog posts that get stuck in purgatory for three months. This headache is one of the biggest obstacles to scaling your content program.

Getting around that obstacle calls for creative thinking. RBC devised a simplified review process that only needed a single member of the legal team to review all content. The legal and marketing teams joined forces to outline a system that helped eliminate hours of gridlock for each individual piece of content. They created a document full of key “watch-outs” and best practices that the content creators could reference regardless of the subject matter, thus making life easier on the person reviewing.

“Each group that we work with has a customized workflow,” Paxton said. “However, when we initially launched, we centralized the legal review. Because we weren’t going too deep into product information, we thought it would be much simpler.”

Streamlining the process can also work if you’re pushing timely content out into the news cycle. Tangerine, a digital bank based in Canada, covers breaking financial news a few times per year, so the content team found a way to reduce the red tape for those unique situations. If there’s an interest rate announcement by the government, the team can create a new story or update an old one the same day.

“There are certain rules that we’ve worked on with legal,” said Darin Diehl, Tangerine’s director of content marketing and corporate communications. “When we know we’re going to need a fast turnaround from legal, we give them a heads up. It wouldn’t work if we had to do it every week, but we’re selective about it.”

The common thread between these two examples is clear communication upfront. If you can anticipate certain situations, the legal team will be better prepared to give you the greenlight before too much time passes.

Explore new distribution channels

Content distribution is a world split in two. There’s organic distro, the flashy side full of clever, funny, eye-catching posts going viral. Then there’s paid distribution, where the social platforms make their money charging publishers and brands to reach all of their users.

Scaling could give you new access to both sides. The upside of expanding to a new part of the organization is you now have the ability to sync with other channel marketing teams. Walmart’s top-funnel content team was able to place blog posts in different email marketing efforts as its program grew. This collaboration between teams distributed their content right to the screens of a huge new audience.

When content programs evolve, they could also tap into existing media budgets for paid distribution. Like casinos on steroids, social platforms rig the game in their favor. Organic social has submarined over the years on Facebook and other networks. Optimizing content for search combats some of the organic social losses, but one of the only ways to predictably build an audience is to pay. Smaller content teams don’t always have the resources to compete.

When it comes to paid social, quality still matters. You can’t just spend a bag of money and expect millions to click. The research on personas that went into your content strategy is essential here. The major platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have developed advanced targeting features, so you can reach people based on factors like company, job titles, location, interests, and more.

Your best bet is to selectively invest in your top-performing pieces of content. They’ll likely land you the lowest cost-per-click and bring the most people onto your site. On The Content Strategist, we wait until a new article collects data for a week or two. If we notice a strong response, we put $100 behind it on Facebook while testing different headlines, images, and call-to-action copy to find the most effective combination before investing any more.

As Lazauskas wrote: “Acquiring new readers in your target audience is what allows a content marketing program to grow. Content only matters if people see it.”

This is an excerpt from The Content Marketer’s Playbook: Grow Your Content Program. Click here to read the entire e-book.

The post Content Scale & Alignment: 7 Steps for Building a Better Content Program appeared first on Contently.

The takeaways from Aesop’s fables are just as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago—things are not always what they seem, appearances can be deceiving, slow and steady wins the race. Most of his lessons concern life in general, but some apply neatly to business and marketing. If you’ll humor me, I’d like to focus on one fable in particular, called The Boy and the Filberts.

In the story, a boy sticks his hand in a pitcher to grab some filberts. He scoops as many as he can into his fist. But when he tries to get them out, his hand gets stuck. He refuses to let go of any filberts or find a compromise until he gets frustrated and begins to cry.

I know what you’re thinking. What the hell is a filbert? It sounds like an off-brand Dilbert that Xerox created in the ’90s to connect with Gen X. (It’s actually an antiquated term for hazelnuts.) But weird names aside, this fable has a lot to do with what’s to come in this playbook. Marketers care about growth. They want bigger budgets, more content, another hire, better results. Standing still isn’t part of their job descriptions, and patience isn’t always easy—especially when your CFO is holding your budget hostage.

The moral here: Do not attempt too much at once.

Growing your content marketing program across the org is just as much about efficiency as it is about expansion. Producing more content without clear goals or objectives isn’t an accomplishment. If anything, it’ll give executives a reason to doubt your entire content program.

As Caroline Paxton, senior director of social media, content & strategic initiatives for RBC, told us, “Quality and quantity are equally important.”

A growth mindset

Most marketing tasks start with “how” questions. How do I create a content strategy? How should I staff my team? How do I know what my audience wants? When thinking about growth, though, it’s best to start with a simpler question: What is scale?

Once you’ve established a content program that drives brand awareness and lead generation for one area, scale is how you expand that model to other departments or lines of business. It’s the way you can replicate success without starting from scratch.

When you should scale depends on so many factors, like company size, content budget, team size, internal skills, and content maturity. In the first playbook in this series, we shared our Content Marketing Maturity Model to show what different phases of success look like:

The first playbook explained how to get out of content chaos by using a documented strategy, competitive analysis, and a content calendar. But as the Maturity Model illustrates, there’s still plenty of room to grow once the chaos disappears. To take another leap forward, marketers have to balance what worked in the past with a new set of priorities. As more people get involved, you’ll need to incorporate their objectives, goals, and expertise.

Scale is a business buzzword that gets tossed around all the time. But like most trendy topics, there’s a meaningful concept buried beneath the hype and bluster. There are a few meaningful ways to scale. You can expand content to a new line of business or a new department within an existing line of business. Expanding to a new LOB, for instance, could mean a team in another city or country. Growing within the same LOB could mean teams that handle different parts of the funnel get involved. So if your team handles top-funnel content on a blog, maybe the group responsible for sales enablement content gets involved.

Based on what we’ve seen from the industry over the last decade, we mapped out the three common operating models that successful companies use to grow:

As you’re going through the rest of this playbook, keep this in mind: One model is not necessarily better than the others.

Look at it this way: a fintech startup with 50 employees should have a different mindset than a Fortune 500 bank that has 25,000 employees spread across 40 countries. We’ve seen clients thrive with all three models. We’ve also seen brands grow on different timelines. The key is to scale based on the resources you have instead of comparing yourself to everyone else. Setting realistic expectations and scaling gradually will make it so much easier to align your content teams.

Take RBC, which is a huge company. It serves millions of customers, employs roughly 80,000 employees, and earns billions in revenue every year. However, when RBC first partnered with Contently in 2016, it made the smart decision to prove its content program on a small scale before ramping up to include other teams.

The personal and commercial banking division started first. Then, over time, other groups like wealth management and insurance joined. By 2018, RBC had 22 teams creating content on the Contently platform. It’s a prime example of what happens when a global company gets different lines of business to come together behind one cohesive voice.

“When we embarked on this journey … we needed to make sure there was going to a consistent flow of content,” Paxton said. “That was the first hurdle we focused on, ensuring that we had a machine that could create the quantity of content for our readers.”

Whether your company is large or small, you’ll eventually have to clear that hurdle. In the next section, let’s go over what you can do to scale your content program and align your teams.

This is an excerpt from The Content Marketer’s Playbook: Grow Your Content Program. Click here to read the entire e-book.

The post How to Grow Your Content Marketing Program appeared first on Contently.

To a marketer writing all day, event marketing might sound like a glorified series of networking happy hours, but in reality, the job requires a lot of collaboration. Event and experiential marketers oversee happy hours, sure, but they also plan and execute presentations at trade shows, client dinners, product demos, Jeffersonian discussions, and award ceremonies. For these investments to bring in ROI, they need support from content.

In 2016, the Event Marketing Institute and Mosaic partnered to study trade show and experiential program attendees and exhibitors, and they discovered a surprising sense of optimism on both sides. According to their study, 75 percent of companies with event budgets between $50-100 million say they expect an ROI of more than 5:1 for live events.

The key to showing up well at a successful marketing event is preparation. More often than not, the lead-in process can’t all fall on a single employee, which means event marketers need to convince their colleagues to roll up their sleeves and get involved.

With all that in mind, here’s a list of useful content formats for supporting your company’s event marketing.

Brand messaging

Before you take the stage or host a dinner, your brand needs to know who your customers are and what to say to them. Without that, any event spend will just be total guesswork.

Good messaging requires a lot of research and legwork—and it should all be documented. Your messaging should cover a brand’s story, pillars, taglines, ideal client profiles, and key messages. Because when your team is on the floor at a crowded convention, they won’t discuss industry analysis at length with everyone they meet. They need their messaging in short bites, and everyone should be able to deliver an elevator pitch at a moment’s notice. If you’re marketing a product that can support mid-level managers at Fortune 1000 finance companies, all the content you use, from the presentations to the menu, should be optimized for what you know about that demographic—how your consumer base speaks, what their pain points are, what they’re into when they’re not at work.

Pre-event coverage

Covering your events on a blog is tricky. It all depends on how many people are involved. If you’re going to workshop with 50 people, that audience is probably too small to warrant dedicated solely dedicated to the event. For a conference with 5,000 people, it’s a different story.

Either way, you can always create something to ramp up to an event. Let your team explain what they’re excited about. Discuss the major themes with your own spin. To differentiate this writing from a press release, don’t just talk about your own presentations. Who are you excited to meet? What other sessions look intriguing?

Lastly, if someone wants to find out more about the event, make sure all content links to a landing page.

Email

Event promotion is like content distribution—if you’re going to spend a lot of money on programming, you need to make sure people know where you’re going and how they can get involved. Given that our inboxes get flooded with reminder emails, your content team should take a long look at what they can do to stand out from everyone else, whether that means going with a bold subject line, getting a little something extra from the design team, or focusing on an exclusive giveaway or piece of content. (We raffle off Beats headphones to people who register for certain things before our events.)

You don’t have to throw out your entire email strategy while an event approaches—keep your regular newsletters going, but consider placing a nice little widget to register for your brand’s presentation somewhere in the body. If an upcoming event is focused on a certain theme, your email newsletter in the preceding weeks might include a round-up of evergreen blog posts on that same idea.

Presentation decks

A great slide deck and a great article call for a lot of the same things: research, interviews, narrative, editing, and proofing. But too many presenters stuff their slides with super granular information about their companies and read it right off the screen. That’s how you lose the audience.

Easily my favorite #CMWorld yet. An amazing week geeking out with @jayacunzo @AmandaChanguris @mmagnarelli @johnhall @marcgraser and many other brilliant content geeks. Thanks to everyone who packed the ballroom for my talk. It was unreal. pic.twitter.com/B7vRxVyU6l

— Joe Lazer (FKA Lazauskas) (@JoeLazauskas) September 7, 2018

Your speech needs to be more interesting than the prospect of networking with whoever else is at the table. A good content team should help flesh out the story ahead of time and cut out the narrative fat. An effective Powerpoint deck, for instance, will immediately communicate a brand’s aesthetic while keeping a speaker focused on high-level information. Use as little explanatory text as possible (save that for your speaker) and focus on simple sentences, images, and data visualizations.

One-sheeters

Even if your employees are fluent in your brand messaging and know how to make a good impression, it helps to have a physical handout that people can take home. If you’re at an industry conference, attendees are going to hear dozens of spiels and product pitches. The more they hear, the more likely they are to forget whatever your sales team said to them four hours ago.

One-sheeters should be concise rundowns of whatever you want people to remember from your brand. Think of them as a hybrid of a Powerpoint slide, a case study, and an infographic. One-sheeters tend to focus on product marketing materials, but they can also work well for new announcements, product launches, and rebrands.

Swag

I’ve waded through an infinite cornucopia of free objects at trade shows over the years, and most have ended up in the drawer where I keep silverware. I’ve been handed beer koozies, pocket protectors, pens, tote bags, stress balls, plastic water bottles, Livestrong-knock-off bracelets, bookmarks, and those little rubber pockets designed for your credit card.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnZTcIZF995/?utm_source=ig_embed

Instead of trying to draw everyone into your brand’s booth by bringing plastic trash with universal appeal, decide who your target audience might be at an event. If you’re hoping to nab women who work in marketing, bring insoles for high heels, oil-blotting sheets, and mints. And make sure whatever you bring is clearly associated with your brand. Effective branding doesn’t just happen on the fly, which means a marketing team needs to brainstorm, solidify, and execute ideas long before anyone from events takes the stage. All of the giveaways have to tie back to a central brand purpose, and that unity has as much to do with ideology and rhetoric as it does color and font.

Social copy + multimedia

Even if your social media manager isn’t on site for an event, your brand should make its presence at a trade show or awards ceremony known with a mixture of scheduled posts and live updates.

"Neurons that fire together, wire together." We hope you got plenty out of @JoeLazauskas demonstrating why great stories make our brains want to buy! #EVATL #DigitalSummit #thestorytellingedge pic.twitter.com/pYWckOjjtV

— Contently (@contently) October 23, 2018

Don’t just shout these announcements into the void, either. Have the employees working an event report back to the social media team in real-time with photos and key takeaways as they’re watching presentations. Did your VP of finance sit on a panel? Post a photo of the panel from the audience, get the panel members together afterward for a quick pic, and tag everybody who’s involved with a salient quote from the proceedings.

Product demo

This will apply more to larger events with booth space. When you’re plotting out your product demo, consider the possibility that new listeners might walk up in the middle. Your presentation needs to be as well-rehearsed and concise as it can be, especially because your captive audience might grow and shrink in size as you deliver it. An easy way to do this is to document a demo script that employees can reference, whether at the event or their desks.

Don’t be afraid to keep your demo super specific. If you’re going after a certain demographic, walk everyone on the floor through the steps your target user might take. Most people will be willing to extend the limits of their imagination and figure out how they might use your product to their advantage.

Post-event coverage

Similar to pre-event coverage, how you follow up with content after an event depends on how many people were there. Encourage your brand leaders to weigh in on events after they’re returned to the office, but don’t just list all the handshakes and lectures they attended. What were the break-out themes? Did they learn anything new? How will your executives use what they learned? Answer any and all of these questions in a blog post, and embed all the lovely social-friendly images you captured on the show floor.

For readers who weren’t able to attend, consider uploading a copy of your presenter’s deck onto your website. Bonus points if you were able to record the presentation!

Video

Video content from an event doesn’t suffer from the same limitations as written content. As long as you focus on the themes, topics, and recognizable names from an event, a clip can still bring in engagement long after it ends.

A great, recent example of a brand covering its own projects is the SYFY network’s live-feed at New York Comic Con, on which SYFY staff reporters and video hosts interviewed celebrities from the geek entertainment industry. The event, held in the Javits Center in midtown Manhattan, was a chaotic maze packed with geeks, but SYFY’s new green-and-black branding was visible nearly every direction you turned.

Even if you only choose to invest in certain formats on this list, you’ll benefit from letting your event marketing get more content support. Just as your regular content follows customers on their journey or guides potential clients through the sales pipeline, your event marketing should be accessible to attendees from the moment they register to the moment they’re back at their desk, holding a branded stress ball.

The post 10 Types of Content That’ll Make Your Event Marketing More Effective appeared first on Contently.