If you attended Andy Crestodina’s excellent presentation on content marketing at yesterday’s MPI Tech Conference you saw Andy’s slide about using content marketing concepts to follow up with your community after the conclusion of the event. Andy was kind enough to make mention of how I had used a number of those techniques to follow up after a recent training class we held at 312 Digital. I thought it might be nice to write a post recapping ways we used some of those techniques and the ways those techniques helped us. As Andy said yesterday, the end of the event is not really the end of the event, at least from a content marketing perspective. In many ways, it’s just the beginning.

In January, we at 312 Digital launched a business that provides digital marketing training to marketers, bloggers, social media people and agency personnel. Our first event was held in January and we had 34 people attend. Our next training class is slated for March 20^th where we’ll be covering SEO for a whole day. Within a week or so of the event, I used some of the content marketing ideas Andy shared to continue to communicate with the people who were in attendance.

• Uploaded Slides. During the conference, we planned to provide printed copies of the classroom materials for students to be able to take notes. Unfortunately, we experienced a snag and did not have slides available on the day of the class. Instead, we provided all the slides from the day’s sessions on a password protected page on our web site. http://312digital.com/slides (The password is “slides”). I’ll pull this page down in the next week, so if you’re interested in checking out the simple format, be sure to visit soon. In the last 30 days, this page is our fourth most visited page on the site. Even though we had only 34 attendees at the event, this page has seen 174 visits – so either attendees have come pack or reloaded multiple times (possible because we had 4 main presentations uploaded to the page) or they shared the page with others. I tend to think more the former than the latter. Either way, it’s been used quite a bit.
• Email thank you. Immediately after the class concluded, I sent out a follow up email to our students thanking them for attending the event and asking them to participate in our short survey which I had created on Survey Monkey. The survey was VERY short – only 3 questions total and asked the students to rate the facility the content and each speaker  on a 1-5 ratings scale. It them concluded with a simple question – “Would you recommend 312 Digital to a friend.” Gladly, 100% of our respondents said they would recommend a future 312 Digital course to a friend.
• Pictures. I have a friend who is in the digital media who shoots events like this on the side and I invited him to attend the class. We agreed to trade a free ticket for him shooting a bunch of photos of the event. As soon as I received the file with the photos, I uploaded a number of them to our Facebook page and created an album. Unfortunately you cannot be logged into your page as the business and tag people in the photos. But, you can navigate back to that page as yourself and tag as many photos as you wish. So, be sure to tag your attendees if you know them. That will alert them to the existence of those photos and will create a very high engagement level with your Facebook page.
• Video. We had a video team on site shooting a bunch of video with the aim of producing a couple short videos for us. One that will provide basic highlights from the event and give people an overview of what they can expect at future events. We’ll soon receive a second video that blends a bunch of personal testimonials from attendees. As soon as I received the first video, I uploaded it to our landing pages for future events and shared it on twitter and on Facebook.
• Blog Post. After all of this information was assembled, I took the time to write a debrief post about the event. One of the hallmarks of our little company is an openness and integrity to what we are doing. I believe that if you do the right things while building companies you have an opportunity to rally people to your side and enlist their assistance in promoting events and building companies. Because of that philosophy, this blog post might seem a little over-inclusive to you. I felt it struck the right tone. We were not perfect. We learned some things during that event, and I wanted to share with our community – people who attended that specific class and those that might attend a future class – what we learned from that specific day. It’s not apologetic. It’s not overtly promotional. It’s real. This page is the fifth most frequently visited page over the last 30 days. Lots of visits, despite not really promoting it very heavily.

So that’s a brief roundup of some of the techniques and tactics we used to continue the discussion after the event. What about you? What have you used to keep your attendees talking about your events after the conclusion? What’s worked well for you?

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