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We’ve all attended high-production industry events that feel like festivals and spawn their own YouTube channels filled with more content than you could ever consume.

These event teams are definitely rockstars. Their big teams mean more choice and more channels. But you can be small and still get great results from your events. We’ve brought the evidence to prove it.

The two companies below have leveraged event content across multiple channels to drive sales, build communities, and more. While they don’t have huge teams or budgets, they’ve learned to use their resources strategically. The first is a young company that had a plan for an event content strategy from the start. The other, more established company, held its first user conference this year and is still discovering new ways to increase the value of this event. Check out what they’re creating.

Create brand awareness and pipeline: Goldcast.io

Goldcast.io was founded in 2020 as a virtual event platform for B2B trade and event marketers to host interactive virtual and hybrid events. Influenced by their industry, the company developed a post-event strategy from the start. With 50 to 60 digital events planned per year – monthly webinars, quarterly summits, week-long conferences, masterclasses and field events – the strategy needs to be tight.

“We’re pursuing a video-first strategy that’s event-driven,” explained Lindsay McGuire, vice president of content and campaigns. “And I think that’s the future of a go-to-market strategy for very smart companies, especially since I don’t think our budgets are going to go up any time soon. And the way the economy is, we’re going to have to continue to be very aggressive and resourceful and do more with less,” she added.

Experienced teams know that maximizing the return on virtual events requires longer lead times. At Goldcast, planning for events like the AI ​​Summit in October, which had five sessions and 12 speakers, begins three to four months in advance, while webinars and digital events are planned month-to-month. The secret is to identify the right team for each event, including McGuire or Goldcast’s head of events, the head of marketing or the assistant community manager.

“We would never do an event without a post-event distribution strategy,” McGuire said. “It’s about how I’m going to use the content I just shot.”

For larger events, she always plans an e-book or guide that is used as gated content for lead capture. At the AI ​​Summit, McGuire noted, “We had five sessions, so we also wrote five individual blog posts that were then pushed out to this larger resource and then of course integrated into the email communications.”

Compared to the effort involved in creating each new piece of content—creative briefs, subject matter experts, writers, editors, designers, and executive approval—a limited series of events is an easier undertaking that produces a goldmine of content. Now, instead of taking three months to create three eBooks and 20 blog posts, she can run one live event and generate half that content, which is more scalable, especially with a smaller team.

Goldcast also builds moments of interaction into each event, either through chats or polls, allowing sales to have more authentic conversations after the event. Events then become content generators, lead producers and organic community builders.

“For a lot of people, it’s a huge overwhelm to do all of this, and if you’ve never done it before, it just seems like you can’t do it or you can’t achieve it or you need a huge team or a huge budget to do it,” McGuire said.

If you feel like you lack the resources or time, you’re not alone. “You just have to know how to actually make it happen and what you can do with what you have,” McGuire said.

Go deeper: 4 keys to planning digital events

If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ve benefited from commercetools’ platform, which enables e-commerce for well-known B2B and B2C brands. While the company has always had a strong event presence, from partner summits to customer events, it only launched its first global commerce event this year. They’ve limited the number of recorded sessions to emphasize the value of in-person attendance.

After the event, they were surprised by the response to the content. Sales reps and prospects, as well as internal teams and customers who weren’t there, were all clamoring for video clips and updates.

“I think we had an idea — creating the agenda, seeing the caliber of speakers — but we didn’t really know how great the content was going to be,” said Katrina Spadaro, director of event marketing. “Next year we’ll develop a bigger strategy for it and promote the content even more. But I just don’t think we understood the magnitude of what it could be and how exciting it was.”

Commercetools’ sales teams now use event content to enhance their conversations with prospects. Sharing relevant videos or insights from the event provides valuable context and allows them to demonstrate their expertise. “We decided to lock down some of the content because we kept hearing from the sales team, ‘Hey, I heard about this from my customer. Can I see it or share it with them?'” she said.

The company tested some innovative on-site activities, including a Vibe Lounge where attendees could share their experiences and the brand and social teams could conduct LinkedIn Live interviews with customers. Looking ahead, Spadaro sees an opportunity to target brand new prospects earlier in the sales cycle by using event content and experiences to generate awareness and interest.

“The three main areas of focus I would work on would be for our account team to get all of that information out to account marketers and CSMs,” she said. Another audience is field marketers, allowing them to host roundtables on these topics and give them to AEs to use as discussion points. “And then probably product marketing. How do we take all of those topics (from the event) and develop new messages from them that we can bring to market?”

One team can’t handle all the content creation, so the entire marketing stack is needed for these campaigns to be successful. The events team goes in with a plan and moves on to the next one once the event is over. But because they’re the ones who were closest to the content, a plan needs to be in place to leverage that knowledge. Not many organizations think about this in advance because it spans so many departments.

Ultimately, Spadaro believes post-event messaging belongs to the product marketing team. “They were responsible for the agenda, they were responsible for the booth, so I think this is the right team to have thinking about the post-event journey alongside the content team,” she explained.

“I think a lot of this content would help CSMs, AEs, BDRs and even pre-sales. It helps them with outreach and messaging, but also with their sales conversations because the stories that were told on the ground were so compelling.” When a sales rep tells a prospect that a customer flew to Miami to talk about using Commercetools, that’s strong social proof. “That alone shows the relationship and partnership we have with our customers.”

And the best part about all the great content from their first event? “I think the people who weren’t there heard more from our customers than they did from us. It’s crazy!”

5 strategies for post-event content

Use these tips from Goldcast and commercetools to get more out of the content at your next event:

• Create lead-generating assets: Plan eBooks or guides based on event content to use as gated material to effectively capture leads.
• Improve sales conversations: Use video clips and insights from your event to provide valuable context and demonstrate your expertise in sales conversations.
• Build a community through interactive engagement: Integrate chats and polls during events to enable community building and encourage more authentic post-event conversations.
• Align your teams: Schedule workstream meetings that involve marketing, sales, product, events, and customer success to create and distribute event content for maximum impact.
• Raise awareness through innovative activations: Use on-site activation measures such as LinkedIn Live interviews to generate excitement and interest among new prospects.

Learn more: How to reuse content for marketing events