Highly effective event marketing on a budget

Companies spend millions of dollars each year attending, taking part in, or putting on events. Unfortunately most of these same companies miss a golden opportunity to leverage the confluence of really smart people (clients, suppliers, industry experts, media, staff, etc) who attend these events, trade shows and conferences to create lasting value by capturing the knowledge (the collective IP) at these events. It’s cheap, it’s easy and very few companies do it. What should you do? Conduct video interviews.

Hire a good video production company and choose someone familiar with the industry (either an employee or a third party) to interview attendees. You’ll also need one of your event coordinators to help you juggle interview schedules. Most attendees are primed for the event and are usually in the right frame of mind to be interviewed. (Asking for an interview outside the confines of the event is usually problematic and certainly a lot more expensive.) You obviously need to prioritize what questions will be asked during the interviews and take care in keeping the interview lively and relevant but considering the benefit, it’s surprising that more companies don’t allocate a small fraction of their event budget to develop these hugely valuable assets. This video content can be used in many different ways:

1. To send out on a regular basis to attendees to remind them and inform them of who was at the event and what was said.

2. To drive ongoing traffic to your event website.

3. To inform the media and industry influencers as to what is going on in the industry and how important your event is.

4. To promote the event for next year.

5. To get other people to attend and participate in the event so they may be seen as thought leaders next year.

6. The real benefit of these interviews is that the collective intelligence and thought leadership in these videos accrues to you.

The above image is a screen capture taken from a series of 30 interviews we shot for Rebel Voice at the Mobile Innovation Week in Toronto.