The Most Underrated Content Channels Are IRL

The first year I worked at Contently, we decided to do something strange for a SaaS company—we started a print magazine.

I wrote half of the first edition while running around Austin telling stories about SXSW’s content marketing craze and trying to get drunk Amex execs to introduce me to Jay-Z. We slapped together the magazine in a week and mailed it to top marketing execs nationwide.

The goal was to either trigger FoMo if they didn’t attend or catch them up to speed if they did but spent all day getting hammered at the Fast Company Grill.?

It worked. Sales ops came pouring in. We took a channel everyone said was dead (print) and used it to stand out to CMOs drowning in a sea of digital content.??

Afterward, Contently Quarterly became a bedrock of our marketing program, typically driving between 3-10x ROI as the thick, glossy mag became a cheat code for getting the attention of Fortune 500 execs.

While others zigged—going all in on digital content—we zagged, choosing a distribution channel (print and direct mail) where we could stand out.?

We took a channel everyone said was dead (print) and used it to stand out to CMOs drowning in a sea of digital content.??

Marketing is all about finding an unfair advantage to gain your customers' attention and earn their trust. Right now, there's another old-school content channel that being greatly underutilized following the pandemic: events.

Events aren’t back, but they should be

I love events. And I don’t get marketers who feel the same way.

The easiest way to build relationships with prospects is to spend time with them in person. Humans are social animals.?

We’re also storytelling animals, so the thing we love the most is experiencing content together. We’ve been doing that for 150,000 years, ever since we developed the capacity for language and started telling stories around the campfire. And we’ve been doing it more formally since at least 2,000 B.C. when the ancient Egyptians gathered for the passion plays, the first recorded theatre performance in history.?

Side Note: That play was NUTS. It’s about Osirus, who marries his sister and gets murdered by his brother — who scatters his 14 appendages all over Egypt. This leads his sister/wife on an epic quest across Egypt to gather all his body parts, like infinity stones, to bring him back to life. Put that sh*t on Netflix!

You can feel the desire to return to live events pulsating through New York. Broadway box office receipts are popping. People want to experience things together.

We’ve made a big bet on events this year at A.Team with our Generative AI Salon series, I’ve been awed by the quality of potential customers we’ve attracted with thought-provoking talks and debates about AI and the future of work from industry leaders like Juliette Powell.

These events work because we have three key content strategy factors working in our favor:

1) A topic (AI and the future of work) that our audience is hungry to learn about.

2) Thought leaders that people want to learn from.

3) A medium where we have little competition, as most companies have been slow to reinvest in events post-pandemic.

Resonance with reach

Excuse me while I bring back everyone’s favorite 2021 marketing buzzword: HYBRID EVENTS.

If you want to maximize the impact of your event content, investing in a high-quality hybrid setup is a no-brainer.?

While we can only fit about 150 people in our Clubhouse without pissing off the fire department, hundreds can join us via livestream. We’ve DIY’d a multi-cam setup in our office and found a streaming secret weapon in Welcome, our virtual events platform.?

Welcome’s design and controls are incredible — with lower thirds, polls, and overlays that make your stream look broadcast-quality and keep virtual attendees engaged.??

This also gives us a ton of high-quality original thought leadership to share on social and in our newsletter the next day. A big help on this front is Welcome's Clips feature, which is similar to Descript. Just highlight text from the transcript of your event and instantly turn it into a ready-to-post social clip. Welcome's AI even automatically creates clips for you (like this one here).

The result is the best of both worlds: We can build deep relationships with customers IRL and deliver high-quality, original thought leadership content to folks who couldn’t make it. And instead of spending weeks slicing all the footage, we can do it in minutes.?

As you think about your content strategy for 2024, don’t sleep on events. AI will only make most search and social content commoditized and bleh. Real thought leadership from real people, in real life, will become one of the easiest ways to stand out.?