Plan for success

How marketers can get more value from their 2027 event programme

As marketers review 2026 and begin planning for 2027 they’re probably thinking ‘How do we get more value from the activities we're already investing in?’

For many organisations, events are one of the largest investments in their marketing budget. Exhibition stands, sponsorships, travel, accommodation, speaking opportunities, customer hospitality, and staff time quickly add up. Yet after the event ends, much of that investment disappears with it.

The meetings happen. The conversations happen. The expertise is shared. Relationships are strengthened. And then everyone goes home.

Organisations achieving greater ROI from their event programmes are taking a different approach. They’re treating events not just as opportunities to meet people, but as opportunities to create content that continues building relationships long after the event ends.

This is why I advocate for the content engine approach, where you deliberately plan to capture long-term content during short-term events.

Your next event is probably your biggest untapped content opportunity.

Hosting an event?

If you’re hosting a conference or trade show, think about the expertise gathered in one place during the event:

·       Your leadership team

·       Industry experts

·       Customers

·       Partners

·       Technical specialists

·       Subject matter experts

For a few days, they're all together and that combination is incredibly difficult and expensive to recreate. Yet many organisations leave events with little more than a few photographs and a short blurb for their LinkedIn page. What the comms and marketing team could be doing is capturing:

·       Thought leadership videos from executives

·       Customer success interviews

·       Industry trend discussions

·       Speaker insights

·       Behind-the-scenes content

·       Recruitment content

·       Sales enablement content

Suddenly, a three-day event can fuel months of marketing activity.

Sponsoring an event?

If you’re sponsoring or exhibiting at an event or trade show, you’ve got one chance to capture your team in action. If you plan to capture it, you could come away with:

·       Customer feedback

·       Product demonstrations

·       Delegates interacting with your team

·       Sector leaders’ insights and observations

Basically a raft of sales and marketing material you can share with customers (and prospective customers) who weren’t able to attend.

Better ROI doesn't always require a bigger budget

So as you think ahead to 2027, consider what tangible assets you collected at this years events and think what you could do differently next year. In these tight economic times many of us are under pressure to deliver more with the same (or smaller) budget.

The good news is that increasing ROI doesn't necessarily mean adding more events. Sometimes it means extracting more value from the events you're already attending.

If you're already investing thousands to bring your people and customers together, capturing content can help extend the impact of that investment across LinkedIn, your website, email marketing, sales conversations and future campaigns.

I’m a fan of video because it’s memorable and gets cut-through, but in reality the opportunities are endless. You just have to plan to capture them.

Destination or launch pad?

Some thoughts for conference hosts

In my experience, having worked at conferences and spoken with many delegates, organisers and hosts, it is common for conferences to be seen as the final ‘destination’. Sure, speakers may talk about new trends and technologies, but conferences often look backwards, celebrating the success of the previous year’s work with awards and graduations. They can also incorporate AGMs and other ‘once a year’ business activities. So perhaps it’s not surprising that people start focusing on their conference as the ‘goal’ they’re aiming for.

They’ve become a destination - an expensive one - for everyone who goes there.

Of course, it takes a lot of effort to host a conference (organising, promoting, selling registrations and exhibitor stands, and attracting sponsors, not to mention managing every detail on the day). It’s easy to see why most of your effort goes into getting to your destination (conference) and surviving it. Unfortunately, that’s often where the story ends.

Following a constant stream of promotions, and an intense day or two of in-person events, your attendees pack their bags and head home. Delegates take away good memories, a bag of swag, and 20 slide decks to wade through in their own time. There may be some social posts reminding them of everything they saw and heard… there may even be a follow-up survey and some thank you emails. But that’s usually it. In short, after arriving at the destination you’ve worked so hard to get to, you find yourself dropping off a cliff, into an information desert.

The re-frame

If you stop thinking of your conference as the end of something and start thinking of it as the beginning of something, you can add much more value to your attendees, future customers, sponsors and exhibitors. Most successful conferences generate energy and inspiration, but excellent conferences also focus on the future. They purposefully use the event as a launch pad to build future engagement and learning opportunities and keep key issues top of mind.

The seeds of inspiration and excitement planted at the conference need to be nurtured. If you start thinking of your conference as the foundation for future interactions and education, you’ll have months of material to work with.

As opposed to distant memories of peppermints and pens.

Let’s talk it through

In this presentation I introduce the content flywheel model that you can use to re-purpose your conference sessions. This gives you a continual source of information, education and engagement to share with attendees.