How to use a business roundtable event to make a year’s worth of content
Key takeaways
With the right processes in place, one roundtable event can generate enough marketing and PR materials to last a year. This article explains how. We look at planning your event, choosing the right topics, creating a content distribution strategy and repurposing content into various formats: videos, social posts, reels, whitepapers, Q&As, mentions and more.
Any roundtable event will finish its “day in the sun” and you’ll be left with a ton of unpublishable content in raw form. Once processed, that content could provide your company with a year’s worth of marketing and PR materials.
You gain control over the narrative by hosting roundtable events on your platforms. You can maximise promotional opportunities across various media channels, as well as how you record and utilise the content during and after the roundtable.
This is why we hold business roundtable events, and it’s a huge part of their purpose! The content you generate in one day makes all the hard work organising and hosting more than worth it — because this content will be fresher and more unique than anything you can produce by purely relying on your in-house team resources.
What processes do you need to make the most of roundtable events?
Using your roundtable takeaways to drive a year’s worth of content begins with recording everything and completing a thorough debrief afterwards. Then, you must process the material intelligently to highlight the truly unique perspectives shared at your business roundtable event.
Here are the 3 steps to making a year’s worth of content from one media roundtable by implementing the right processes:
1. Plan topics and publishing routes that few companies are covering
Preparing for an event as big as a roundtable takes months. The logistics of any event requires diligent planning, and this is the time at which you should devise a content distribution strategy.
Content from the roundtable doesn’t happen after the cameras are turned off and your guests return to their respective homes. That content begins during the planning stage:
Make the event promotion easy with standout topics.
Truly unique roundtable event topics require some brainpower and research. To make this comprehensive list of potential topics, look at everything from your customer research and interactions to conversations on Quora and anonymous forums, where people ask questions without pretense.
When our team chooses topics, take that comprehensive list and slash it down, brutally, to only the best themes using the following criteria:
- Are our competitors talking about this?
- Are our customers talking about this?
- Have any large media outlets covered this topic?
If the answer is “no” to those three questions, then the theme makes the cut. If you’re reading this, we want — and so do you, to stand out as bold, not a re-run channel of an already popular topic.
In 2023, EC-PR hosted a to show executives how to grow on LinkedIn. While the overarching topic is one that many PR and marketing professionals have discussed, we made sure it was unique through our choice of panellists. Selecting speakers with strong opinions is one way to ensure your post-event content never falls flat.
Standout with your distribution channels too.
Next, consider unusual distribution channels for the content — really push the figurative boat out.
Is your competition relying on business posts on LinkedIn? Do the same, but also post on Reddit. Are similar companies posting their content as articles and newsletters? Excellent, do that, but also leverage other platforms such as Medium. If leaders in competitive companies talk about their upcoming events in podcasts, you should do the same. Also, make sure your team mention your event in every email and business meeting to maximise reach.
However, as with all your marketing activity, make sure that you’re focusing efforts only on the channels your target audience spend their time.
The above means that content for the roundtable is already being produced. As your leadership promotes the event, they’re indirectly preparing to talk about the unique topics you chose. Inevitably, their peers will plant interesting seeds in their minds, and this macro-to-micro strategy builds intrigue for journalists, attendees, and panellists.
2. Plan your content for owned media
Now that you’re hosting business roundtable events on your own platforms, you can plan an entire promotional campaign around them.
- Post teasers on your social media
- Extend invitations to your loyal subscribers
- Build anticipation with mentions in blog posts
- Funnel new leads to sign-up with email marketing
- Boost your digital media with ad spend to reach new audiences
- Mention the next roundtable at other speaking events
- Control the narrative through news management that cites your roundtable event.
Once the roundtable event is complete and you’ve debriefed the team, you can start to repurpose and build on your campaign. Break the live recording into video shorts for LinkedIn, tweet out the best quotes on X add them as Reels and to Instagram Stories, and upload the full version to YouTube or your website. You can make the video unlisted or gated if you prefer only to send the link to attendees or if there’s value in charging for access to the replay.
Use subsets of the discussion to write whitepapers that address pain points and interests to which your target audience relate. Choose only the most unique soundbites as inspiration for long-form whitepapers. You can also use the standout insights to propose Q&As with your leadership team for podcasts and video content.
Lastly, surveys with newsletter signups should be sent to get feedback on the event and lock in attendees as long-term subscribers.
3. Expect earned media as a reward
Are we being cute by telling you to “expect” earned media? A little, but if you did steps 1 and 2 well you can genuinely wait until the mentions in other media sources start trickling in.
Roundtable events include collaboration by default, so owned media isn’t your only way to generate a year’s worth of content. The simple fact that business roundtable events are not monologues puts you in touch with a range of speakers, all of whom will want to boost their online image by resharing your content. You may need to prompt them, but guests and panellists should also write up their experience at the roundtable — they invested time, energy, and insights, so they should use the experience to expand their professional brand.
Your array of invitees and speakers can follow up with your audience, reshare any content you offer them, and expand on parts of the subject the event didn’t allow time for. As long as they link to your recording or articles, this expands your reach and audience impact.
As a bonus, just as you hosted those speakers on your platforms, you might later be invited to your guests’ platforms, which will further your exposure!
Business roundtable events that yield benefits all year
Roundtable events are invaluable resources if you plan to generate a year’s worth of content from the start. In summary, plan topics that stand out in the crowded landscape and strategically leverage distribution channels to extend the life expectancy of your content.
The collaborative nature of roundtable events opens doors to earned media opportunities as speakers and attendees contribute to its dissemination, further enhancing your credibility within your industry. If you want to make the most of that single day for your year-long PR strategy and lack an internal PR team to lead the initiative, we’d love to help.
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