How to use content marketing for event promotion

You must have heard by now, content marketing is the new SEO, so how can you use content marketing to promote your event and what is this content marketing all about anyway?

What is content marketing?

The old cliche “content is king” is back with a vengeance, over the last year or two Google has gone to war on those people attempting to manipulate their search results and as such great quality content has become far more important in digital marketing.

Content marketing is about producing great quality content that adds something to a discussion and that people want to read and engage with. The blogging community have been doing it for years, but this is now a strategy that’s being implemented not only by lonely bloggers in their back bedrooms but also by big corporate operations.

The thing is it’s not just about creating content on your own blog, it’s about seeking out those blogs and news websites that will consider allowing you add content to their site in order to get a link back to your own website – remember in the world of Google links are an important factor in getting your site to rank.

By adding content to their site they are getting the benefit of attracting more people to their site without going to the trouble of writing the content, your link is your payment. Guest blogs is also a great way to position yourself as an expert in your sector’s community – and this is becoming increasingly important.

At the end of 2011 Google announced they would be encouraging web owners to include publisher and/or author tags on their blog content. Basically this means that you’re telling Google who you are and what content out there is yours, it’s not massively complicated, however the thing is it enables Google to build up a profile of authorship about you, so it can work out what you should rank highly for when you talk about something that is highly competitive all based on the previous content you’ve created (read more here).

They can also work out how much of an authority you are in a certain sector based on the people you engage with, who they engage with and what they talk about.

How can I promote my event using content marketing?

Think of websites related to your event that you regularly read, do they have a blog, if they do get in touch and see if they’d be willing for you to take a slot as a guest contributor, if they are happy for you to add the content be sure to get them to agree to add a link back to your site and if possible get the author tag pointing to your own Google+ account.

You also want to reach out to those people that could add some value by contributing to your website – don’t worry about referencing them and their business or even linking back to their website – this will make your brand look stronger in the long run as it will appear that other brands and other authorities in your sector what to be involved with what you are doing.

The thing about writing content is you are optimising your website for so much more than you could possibly do with a 10 page website, the more posts you add in (or add to other people’s sites) the more chance there is for your content to be found by others.

What should I write about when content marketing for events?

The thing about content marketing is you’ve got to consistently put out content and then means writing a lot of content! You might think: “how am I going to think of things to write about?” the thing is you’ve got to put yourself in the mind of your event goers and your suppliers, write things to them and for them.

Whenever you come across something when you’re organizing things that makes you sit back and think for more than a minute, think about how you can write some content that will be useful for other people – it could just be an explanation. You might think that you’re not an expert or an authority, however you are an expert in putting your event on, because you’re the only one doing it!

Write about it, get it out there and promote it! If anyone out there wants their content included on the Skiddle Blog get in touch – as long as it’s got something that contributes to the sector we’ll be happy to include it.