Posted by

Barry Siskind

Community Manager

Joe Pulizzi, founder of US based Content management Institute recently facilitated a webinar for the International Center for Exhibitor and Event Marketing called, “If Content marketing is the New B;ack, How Can You Turn It Into green (Revenue for your Show).

Pulizzi’s premise is that we are all publishers of valuable and reliable

Information that will ultimately attract and retain customers.

Pulizzi stated, “People don’t want to be marketed to. I’m hoping that [our customers] never get a whiff that we’re marketing to them. Instead, provide them with valuable, relevant content that helps them. Then you’ll have a captive audience who relies on you as an expert source and will buy in to your event.”

According to Pulizzi nearly 90 percent of all companies use content marketing in some form.

One of the big problems Pulizzi identified is when organizers tie their marketing into event related timetables; that is marketing starts X number of months before the show, and ends abruptly when the show is over.

In order to provide year-round content Pulizzi suggests the following:

The exhibition website becomes the focal point for year-round content. One suggestion is to ask conference speakers to contribute content which will help engage audiences in advance of the exhibition.

Pulizzi suggests using Pop-ups on the website as a method of building a data base.

Pulizzi believes that his number one strategy is e-mail. He stated that, “E-mail marketing is not dead; it’s more alive than ever before. I want them to like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, but I don’t own any of that. I own our e-mail database.”

Publishing daily updates with content that is valuable and relevant helps maintain his data base. In addition he also advocates the use of a weekly e-newsletter.

His social media strategy is based on his concept called “Social Media 4-1-1. Four times we want to share influencer content (such as from speakers); one time would be our own piece of informational content; and one time would be our sales pitch.” (For example, “Two weeks left to register ….”)

Avoid the tendency to create a specific hashtag for your event, opting for one that you can use all year long.

It was a well presented and thoughtful webinar with lots of valuable marketing information for us all.