PART 2
In part 1 of this series, we dove right into a discussion about content marketing strategy, clearly defining the term and looking at specific examples about how live events can feed the creation of content marketing, as well as how your digital asset management (DAM) system plays a critical role in the process.
Here, in part 2, we’ll be examining an internal live event, Widen’s Summit, while exploring the four phases of the content marketing process, which include:
- Planning
- Creation
- Experiencing
- Reusing and repurposing
We’ll also look at how DAM is an important part of each of these phases individually and collectively.
An example of an internal event and use of a DAM system
Let’s take a look at Widen’s internal event, our annual Widen Summit, to see exactly how a DAM system helps streamline all of the content marketing efforts that go into a three-day event exclusively for our customers. The Summit is purely an educational event that’s attended by customers from around the world.
To follow is an overview of our content marketing strategy for the event and beyond.
1. PLAN
In order to have successful content marketing, you’ve got to start with a clear plan. We’ll often refer to this as our content marketing campaign, which essentially guides us through our journey every step of the way. With a plan, we’re able to ensure brand consistency with our efforts and our message. Without it, we’d essentially be lost at sea.
How can DAM software help manage all the major milestones in the planning phase?
- Our DAM solution, the Media Collective, is where we take stock of the digital assets we currently have, and where we look at analytics to see what assets have worked best. With analytics, we’re looking to see what’s popular with customers and potential customers. In other words, of the assets we’ve presented to them, which are viewed or downloaded most frequently?
- Within the Media Collective, we continue to use and build upon what worked well before — improving, iterating and repurposing our most valuable assets. At times we’ll also try something new by reimagining old content and ideas.
- Since all of our assets are organized well and tagged with relevant metadata, we’re able to access specific types of assets efficiently, making it easier for our team to plan the creation of new or modified assets for the Summit or any other initiative that requires content creation.
Things to ask yourself when planning the creation of content for an event
Here are a few high-level questions you can ask yourself in the planning stage to ensure your content is relevant:
- What materials or information do we need to provide attendees at our event?
- What materials should we bring with us when we attend events?
- How do we create content that is helpful and not hypeful?
2. CREATE
Keeping on topic with the Summit, content creation includes a wide array of materials, like signage, banners, name tags, table tents, presentation templates, videos, social media, blog posts, web pages, and the list goes on and on.
What does all of this content look like in the Media Collective?
On the left in the image below, you can see we use a combination of categories and collections to manage the taxonomy of all of our event assets. We have a top-level category for events and a subcategory for the Widen Summit, with multiple subcategories for each year of the Summit.
Inside our DAM system, creation of content marketing also involves:
- The use/repurposing of existing assets, revising (versioning) assets as necessary
- Organizing all materials using collections and/or categories (as mentioned above)
- Converting files to other formats instantly and easily
- Streamlining the creative process with plugins for InDesign, WordPress, Drupal and more
- Using comments to share projects for review
- Embedding images and videos in websites and emails
- Using analytics to see what people click on
- Setting automated workflows to capture user-generated content at the event
Integrations
Integrations play an important role in the content creation process. For creatives, these integrations are real time savers — and a pleasure to use.
Media Collective integrations include:
- InDesign, which allows users to drag and drop digital assets from the Media Collective directly into InDesign.
- Dropbox, which is built right into the Media Collective and makes it easy to share files with those who need to see them before they becomes official assets in the Media Collective. Quite often, this occurs when a small team is working on a project that is not yet ready to be shared through the Media Collective. The Dropbox integration also allows users to load files directly from Dropbox into the Media Collective through the use of a “hot folder.”
- WordPress and Drupal, which allow users to add digital assets from the Media Collective directly into web page or blog posts. What’s great about this integration is that users can pull assets from the Media Collective while they’re in the editor side of WordPress or Drupal, streamlining the process considerably. Use of embed codes assures that if an asset is ever updated in the Media Collective, it’s automatically updated wherever it’s been embedded online.
There are many more integrations to explore within the Media Collective.
3. EXPERIENCE
Some things to determine about the experience of an event include:
- What are the best ways to engage with others at the event?
- What kind of experience do we want attendees to have?
- What kind of content will drive the desired experience?
Although we’re listing these questions under the experience section, they’ll need to be considered in some way, shape or form in the planning stage, which of course will lead to content creation that delivers the intended experience.
It’s important that the answers to these questions are as specific and customer-centric as possible. There may be a need for a team or committee to discuss and knock around ideas before determining what’s best. Remember, it’s always a good idea to give your audience an experience that’s all about them, addressing their pain points and offering relevant solutions.
At a live event, there are some obvious goals regarding the experience. You want it to be positive, memorable and relevant, right? But, what about the people who aren’t able to attend the event? When we hold a Summit, we want to be able to capture and share the experience in real time with everyone that was there and an even larger audience that isn’t there in-person.
There are various ways to do this through social media channels like Twitter or Seen, which is a tool that automatically collects and ranks the best media for any event. Of course, a live video stream also works, too. It’s all about being as inclusive as possible with the people who find value in what you do. These are just a handful of additional ways to curate and share information at an event while it’s happening.
Your DAM system can also help you run, enhance and share the experience of the event. Some examples of how to do this include:
- Using collections to present and share materials
- Capturing user-generated materials, encouraging customers to share their experience
- Using the Media Collective mobile app to instantly upload photos
- The capture and immediate upload of video interviews
- Use of metadata to note key time codes, quotes or highlights
- And the list goes on …
4. AFTER: reuse and repurpose
Perhaps the most important stage is sharing the experience through reusing and repurposing content. In order to do this, you’ll have to have recorded the event so you can mine all of the nuggets of knowledge and insight out of it.
After your event is over and you begin to plan how you’re going to repurpose the content, there are a handful of good questions to contemplate:
- How do we want to share content from these live events?
- Based on our business and audience, what are the best channels to share our content?
- What content can we repurpose to maximize its potency?
- How many different ways can we reuse and share content?
When the Summit is done, we do a number of things to share our content. All of our presentation videos, event photos and session slide decks go on WidenSummit.com/archives, and you can even access all of the content from our previous Summits as well. This becomes a treasure trove of knowledge for our customers and potential customers — available in an organized way, 24/7, to be viewed when it’s convenient for them.
As we do this, we also access Google Analytics for web traffic and the Media Collective’s asset analytics for individual content metrics to better understand what people are most interested in and how they’re engaging with our content.
Ways in which your DAM system helps you reuse and repurpose content from live events
- Your DAM system allows you to use collections to present and share media and materials
- You can also review and store all pro photographer photos and session videos in one place
- Your system makes it easy to mix and match all presentation videos and slide decks — all from one source, so there’s no fishing around for that one elusive piece of footage
- You can even clip videos within the Media Collective, making it possible to pair down videos into snippets for dissemination via social media, email, your blog, etc.
- You can embed all content to archives, blog posts and other key pages
These features, as well as many we haven’t mentioned here, make it easy for an organization to reuse, repurpose and reimagine content in new ways, keeping multiple versions of assets organized, easy to find and easy to disseminate in the proper format. The creation of good metadata is a must in order for this process to be successful.
Before we wrap up, we’d like to share the following chart that details all of the ways we’ve shared the content from the Widen Summit to give you an idea of the expansiveness of how content from a live event can ultimately be applied with the help of a robust DAM system like the Media Collective.
In conclusion
This article has shared some of the major ways Widen integrates content marketing, live events and our DAM system which, when combined, makes for a stronger experience for customers and potential customers, as well as improves our ability to expand, share and repurpose all of the great content that we’ve collected and assembled for the Widen Summit.
Learn more about how it all connects together in this recorded webinar.
Questions or comments? Feel free to contact Widen anytime.