How much engagement are you really getting at your events?

When you need meaningful engagement, you turn to events. They’re one of the most impactful forms of marketing, offering a shortcut to intense prospect and customer engagement with your brand and the community around it.

But let’s ask the tough question: are event attendees really engaging with your brand? Or are they there for the free food and networking opportunities? And if it’s the latter, what can you do about it to turn your events into meaningful brand engagement that lasts?

The event engagement problem

Not every event is about engagement. Sometimes, the brand exposure of putting your logo on a big banner above a venue is enough. But what happens when engaging prospects and customers is your main goal?

I’d argue that, for the majority of attendees, the value at events is the chance to meet their peers and a day away from their usual office routine. In these cases, they’re not really engaging with your brand.

Of course, there will be some who are all-in on your organisation and are paying rapt attention to any presentations and product demos you’re offering. But the thing about this audience is that they’re already engaged. You don’t need an event to get this group invested.

You need a way to make your event part of something bigger, and spread the potential engagement over a longer period for those who aren’t already hanging on your every word.

Make your event the hero piece for your content campaign

Events are really good at drumming up interest quickly. Content doesn’t always get such immediate results, but it does have a much longer tail. So what happens when you combine both?

I know, I know. Trust the content marketing types to say content is the answer. But hear me out. You can get more genuine engagement with your event and extend its value beyond the big day itself by tying it to a broader theme or campaign.

The best bit is that you already have key themes from your marketing strategy to pull on. Your content can set the stage months before the event to hammer home the importance of your theme, build interest in the topic, and culminate with a big event where prospects can hear from your experts and network to discuss the theme further.

Then, after the event, you have an engine for follow-up content. Did your teams have interesting conversations with attendees? Follow those up with specific webinars to dive deeper. Did you hear about common challenges? Turn those into helpful how-to guides or blog posts.

A good example of this is HubSpot’s UNBOUND event (formerly known as INBOUND, but I guess that sounded too restrictive.) Not only does UNBOUND get its own series of blogs related to the event, speakers, and nearby places of interest, but it also fits in with HubSpot’s podcasts. Both the podcasts and the event feature senior leaders from all kinds of organisations discussing the most pressing trends in marketing and offering top tips for fine-tuning your craft.

While you can pair events with the usual array of promotional content, the beauty is none of it needs to explicitly be about your event. You’ll want the standard promo emails and teaser videos to create pre-event hype, but even with loosely related content, you can still build interest and engagement in your theme – and generate more interest in your event.

Events build your brand. Content handles the engagement.

Marketing is at its best when everyone works together. But there’s always that risk that things start to drift into their own corners of the marketing team over time.

And even when event and content marketing minds meet, it’s often in a one-sided relationship where content promotes the event and little else. But that would be a real shame, and a major limiting factor in how much engagement you can build and how many leads you can generate.

Instead, build these two marketing disciplines up with a shared theme and watch as prospects come for the free food and engage with your brand in a meaningful way.

Want some help planning or producing content to support your event themes?

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