How small companies make a big splash with event content

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

Those event teams are rock stars, for sure. Their large teams mean more choices and more channels. But you can be tiny and still achieve mighty results with your events. We brought the receipts to prove it.

The two companies below have used event content across multiple channels for sales enablement, community building and more. They don’t have huge teams or budgets, but they’ve learned how to strategically use their resources. The first is a young company that had a plan for event content strategy from the beginning. The other, more established, launched its first user conference this year and is still discovering new ways to extend the value of that event. Take a look at what they’re creating.

Creating brand awareness and pipeline: Goldcast.io

Goldcast.io was founded in 2020 as a virtual events platform for B2B field and event marketers to host interactive virtual and hybrid events. Influenced by their space, the company baked in a post-event strategy from the beginning. With 50 to 60 digital events planned per year — monthly webinars, quarterly summits, weeklong conferences, master classes and field events — strategy needs to be tight.

“We are a video-first strategy that is event-led,” explained Lindsay McGuire, associate director of content and campaigns. “And I think that is the future of a go-to-market strategy for very smart companies, especially as I don’t think we see our budgets expanding anytime soon. And the way the economy is, we’re still going to have to be very scrappy, very resourceful and do better with less,” she added.

Experienced teams understand that maximizing return on virtual events requires longer lead times. At Goldcast, planning starts three to four months out for events like October’s AI Summit, which featured five sessions and 12 speakers, while webinars and digital events get planned month-to-month. The secret sauce is determining the right team for each event, including McGuire or Goldcast’s head of events, the head of marketing or the associate community manager.

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

For larger-scale events, she always plans an ebook or a guide that will be used as gated content to capture leads. With AI Summit, McGuire noted, “We had five sessions, so we also did five individual blog posts that then would push to that bigger asset and then of course were integrated into email comms.”

Compared to the effort involved in creating each piece of net-new content — creative briefs, subject matter experts, writers, editors, designers and sign-off from executive staff — a limited event series is an easier lift 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 integrates moments of engagement into each event, either through chats or polls, which enables sales to have more authentic conversations post-event. Events then become content generators, lead producers and organic community builders.

“For a lot of people, it feels very overwhelming to do all of this and if you haven’t done it, it just seems like something you can’t do, you can’t achieve or you need a massive team or massive budget,” McGuire said. 

If you don’t feel like you have the resources or time, you’re not alone. “You just need to know how to actually execute it and what you can handle with what you have,” McGuire said.

Dig deeper: 4 keys to digital events planning

Creating community and sales enablement: commercetools

If you’ve shopped online, you’ve benefited from commercetools’ platform, which powers ecommerce for well-known B2B and B2C brands. Though it always had a robust event presence, from partner summits to customer events, the company launched its inaugural global commerce event only this year. They limited the number of recorded sessions to reinforce the value of in-person attendance.

After the event, they were taken by surprise when they saw how much the content resonated, with sales and prospects clamoring for video clips and news along with internal teams and customers who were not on-site.

“I think we had an idea — building the agenda, seeing the caliber of speakers — but we didn’t really know how great the content would be,” said Katrina Spadaro, director of event marketing. “Next year we’ll do a bigger strategy around it and even promote the content more. But I just don’t think we understood the level of what it could be and how engaging it was.”

Commercetools sales teams are now leveraging event content to enhance their conversations with prospects. Sharing relevant videos or insights from the event provides valuable context and enables them to demonstrate expertise. “We decided to gate some of the content because we kept hearing from the sales team, [saying] ‘Hey, I’ve heard about this from my customer. Can I see it or can I share it with them?’” she said. 

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

“The three main focuses I would work on would be our customer team getting all that information out to customer marketers and CSMs,” she said. Another audience is field marketers, enabling them to host roundtables on those topics and push them out to AEs to use as talking points. “And then probably product marketing. How do we take all those themes [from the event] and produce some new messaging for us to put into the market?” 

One team can’t manage the creation of all of the content, so success in those campaigns will involve the entire marketing stack. The event team goes into it with a plan and once the event is done, they’re moving on to the next one. However, since they’re the ones who were closest to the content, in order to leverage that knowledge, there has to be a plan in place. Not many organizations are thinking about that in advance because it spans so many departments.

Ultimately, Spadaro sees post-event messaging owned by the product marketing team. “They owned the agenda, they owned the booth, so I think that’s the right team to think through the post-event journey along with the content team,” she explained. 

“I think a lot of that content would help CSMs, AEs, BDRs and even pre-sales. It will help them in their outreach and messaging, but it’s also going to help them in their pitches because the stories that were shared on site were so powerful.” Sales telling a prospect that a customer flew to Miami to discuss their use of commercetools is strong social proof. “That alone just shows the relationship and partnership we have with our customers.”

The best part about all the great content from their first event? “I think people who weren’t there were hearing from our customers more than they were hearing from us. Which is crazy!” 

5 strategies for post-event content 

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

• Create lead-generating assets: Plan ebooks or guides from event content to use as gated materials that capture leads effectively.
• Enhance sales conversations: Leverage video clips and insights from your event to provide valuable context and demonstrate expertise during sales conversations.
• Build community with interactive engagement: Integrate chats and polls during events to enable community building and foster more authentic post-event conversations.
• Align your teams: Plan workstream meetings that involve marketing, sales, product, events and customer success to create and distribute event content for maximum impact.
• Drive awareness with innovative activations: Use on-site activations like LinkedIn Live interviews that generate buzz and interest among new prospects.

Dig deeper: How to repurpose marketing event content