Content Marketing for Events: 10 Content Types You Need in Your 2023 Strategy
Marketing an event, whether it’s a small local gathering or a huge international affair, can be quite a daunting task. And sure, it’s easy to come up with a couple of announcements and teaser social media posts. But coming up with enough content ideas to feed several months of promotion can be quite the challenge.
Here are ten content types that you need to populate your 2023 event content marketing strategy, which will keep your audience interested and engaged.
Quality Landing Pages
The first piece of content you ideally want to create for your event is a high-quality landing page. This is the central information hub for your potential attendees and everyone who wants to learn more about the event. It should provide all the relevant data, naturally, but also feature some incentive to attend.
Let’s look at what a good landing page looks like, in any industry. This page on cheap flights ticks all the important boxes you need to keep an eye on:
- It has a clear value proposition above the fold.
- It has a visually appealing and easy-to-spot CTA.
- It has plenty of negative space, focusing the reader’s attention on the important sections.
- It has great visuals.
- It’s broken up into distinct sections.
- It highlights the benefits and expected outcomes.
- It is information-heavy, more and more so as you scroll further down the page.
Work through this formula and aim to replicate it as much as possible. Ensure that you clearly spell out the following:
- data and venue
- the speakers (especially the keynote ones)
- ticket prices
- a compelling reason to attend the event
Keep this information as high on the page as possible, and pepper it with more and more appeal as you scroll down. Most people won’t want to read the entire page, so make sure they can get the gist of it at a glance.
Interactive Content
Another great content format you can use to promote your event is interactive content. It will boost time-on-page and engagement, but more importantly, it’s very sharable and you can use it in your social media and email campaigns.
Most events will be able to come up with some sort of interactive content idea. A simple quiz is often a great choice, especially if you make the results easily shareable to socials and if they directly tie into the theme or topic of the event.
Relevance is key. You don’t want to create something that is lots of fun but in no way relates to the reason you’re trying to get all these people together.
Take a look at this protein calculator. The brand behind it sells supplements, so it’s completely natural (or organic, if you will) for them to have an interactive tool like this that provides genuine value to their audience.
That’s your goal as well: make sure the content can be used for more than just hype generation.
Long-Form Guides
This is a content format that is likely to be the most time-consuming to create. The long-form guide will only be worth it if you want to promote more than just an event. It’s a great marketing tool when promoting a brand event, an annual event, or anything other than a one-off gathering. Plus, implementing content modeling can aid in structuring and organizing your long-form content effectively, ensuring it aligns strategically with the event’s marketing goals.
The main benefit of long-form content is that it tends to rank better. You can garner a lot of passive promotion year-round if you:
- choose an evergreen topic
- invest a lot of effort into creating it
- keep updating it with relevant information
- tie it in with your event
Let’s look at a good example of this format, this guide on the best mattresses. It’s something that never gets old or becomes outdated. People will keep searching for this type of guide, and it has a huge potential for all kinds of promotion.
This is your aim, too. Find a topic that your audience and event attendees will show interest in at all times of the year and that you can cover with confidence and expertise. Turn it into a compelling guide, and make sure to keep refreshing it, even if it’s just to tidy it up a bit, as search engines love updated content.
Posts with Lots of Visuals
Now that you have a firm grasp of the type of written content you’re aiming to create, let’s touch upon the other important element: visuals.
First, you need to ensure that your content is enriched with plenty of images. These can be stock photos, photos you’ve taken yourself, charts, create infographics, tables — anything that will both enhance the post and visually break it up into smaller sections.
People don’t like to read long walls of text. Long gone are the days of newspaper-style content. Today, your goal is to chunk it up as much as possible, using bullet points, shorter paragraphs, and visuals.
A good example of a post brimming with visuals is this Lightroom portrait presets page. Note how each preset is accompanied by an image showing readers what they can expect from.
This is not necessarily your goal. It’s merely a demonstration of how the use of images can improve and visually enhance a post. You can, of course, use much fewer photos, just as long as there is at least one in sight wherever the user scrolls.
Shareable Video Content
The other type of visual content you should aim to create (and perhaps incorporate on your pages) is video.
You can go for something short and promotion-oriented that you can incorporate into your social media posts and email campaigns. Or, you can also shoot short videos with the speakers, with confirmed attendees, and with those who have attended one of your events in the past.
Your goal here is to keep the video short, as you don’t want people to have to spend more than roughly a minute engaging. It’s a teaser, after all — something to convey the atmosphere, get them excited, and convince them to RSVP.
Here’s an event promo template video for you that sums up the gist of video content formats for events. It:
- shows the speakers
- gives you the important data
- has great transitions
- shows the atmosphere
Ideally, you want to shoot something completely your own, but you can use plenty of templated animations, transitions, fonts, and other add-ons that will make the video more stunning.
Speaker-Created Content
Getting the speaker(s) to join your content marketing efforts is very important. The more engaged they are and the more of their own audience they are able to attract, the better.
How you choose to leverage the content they create is up to you. You should always share their posts on your own socials, tag them and shout them out. You can also create content that is unique for your online presence and that they will, in turn, reshare.
The essential goal is to shine a light on them and to highlight why someone would want to hear them speak about that particular subject. You can focus on their experiences and expertise, or you can just let their personality shine and do most of the talking.
Alfie Deyes, the man behind Future Self, often shares information about the brand with his own massive social media following. He takes the time to highlight every event they host, like their pop-up shop in Brighton a couple of years ago.
Buzz-Generating Email Content
Email is an often underestimated but incredibly valuable content marketing asset your event simply needs to utilize. It gives you the chance to speak directly to your audience, and it can help you keep your attendees engaged, interested, and buzzing for the date.
Teaser emails are a great choice. Aim to reveal details about the event in stages. Maybe you give the date and venue away right up front but keep one speaker secret. Maybe you have some features or topics you don’t advertise immediately.
Generating interest in stages will ensure more people show up on the actual day. Here’s a great example of a teaser from Hotel Management, who have alerted their audience that something exciting is coming, without giving away too much.
Aim to provide some exclusive content to your email subscribers and those who have already RSVPd. It will help them feel more valued and special, enhancing their chances of signing up for another one of your events or your general newsletter.
Bite-Sized Social Media Content
Your social media content marketing plan needs to be filled with snippets of information. Maximize the use of AI in content marketing to enhance your promotional results. Take some time to sit down and use ChatGPT apps to brainstorm about all the different posts you could be creating, and make sure they really are tiny.
Don’t go for one post, whether it is a tweet or an Instagram reel, that gives away a lot. Try to come up with as many different questions and conversation starters that are likely to get a conversation going. When you need to save these inspiring videos, explore our article featuring top Instagram Reel downloader options.
You can, of course, share posts from others, especially from your audience and your speakers. Follow relevant hashtags and join relevant conversations. Pepper your posts with links back to your landing pages and blog content, and get some more traffic that way.
The New York Comic Con does a great job keeping attendees interested throughout the year, posting about everything they are likely to be interested in, even when the actual event is months away. Take a leaf out of their book, and stay active, as opposed to posting only when the date is near. It will help you stay on the radar of your audience, and the algorithm won’t punish you for inactivity.
Live Conversations
Speaking of your social media presence, you can also go the extra mile and host pre-event social media events (i.e., live chats and Instagram lives) and engage with your audience directly.
Probably the best way to do this is to get one of your speakers, or someone who won’t be able to speak at the event itself but who would love to join the conversation, to participate. It’s very important that you select a topic to talk about; otherwise, it won’t go down as well.
You’ll need to promote this mini online event as well, but you can pepper it in with the rest of the promotion. Aim to have as many interested people as possible, and ask your audience what they want to talk about.
The more engaged people feel and the more they know you value their opinions and ideas, the better your overall image will be.
Content Marketing World is famous for their Twitter chats, which always have great guests, are very well attended, and raise so many interesting topics in the space. Running a similar online conversation will certainly help you boost your credibility and event awareness, especially if you attract a couple of attendees with larger followings.
User-Generated Content
Finally, you can also aim to take user-generated content to the next level. This means asking your users to generate a certain type of content that you will later use for marketing purposes, and that can even perhaps earn them a space in the event itself.
If you’ve been around for a while, you probably remember #flathandley, the cardboard cutout of Ann Handley (the CCO of Marketing Profs), which was used to promote one of their events.
It always reminds me of the movie “Up in the Air,” where George Clooney lugs a cutout of his sister and her soon-to-be husband around wherever he flies.
You don’t have to make a physical item, but using props or even doing a semi-virtual treasure hunt can be exceptional fun. More importantly, it’s an amazing way to show your human side and foster that all-important community spirit with your attendees.
There is also the simpler option of creating a hashtag and reposting content that is featured under it, with a shout-out to the content creator. That would be much less time-consuming, and while it’s not as effective as going the whole nine yards, it’s still a good tactic to employ.
Wrapping Up
When looking to promote your next event, aim to incorporate at least some of these content types on your promotion calendar. Some of them will be more resource-consuming to create, and you can leave them off your list if you are running on a tight budget or have run out of time to shoot a video. Others, however, are super-simple and highly effective. So, go ahead and brainstorm how you can best use them to boost your attendee numbers.
About the Author / Ana Almeida
