I’m convinced the impact of content marketing comes down to 2 simple, yet essential conditions.
The content shows real people connecting with your brand or your product through a use case that resonates with prospects.
You make sure your team members and the people willing to be part of your content find the experience enjoyable.
And this is exactly why I, and I’m sure many of you, believe events are the perfect storm for content opportunities.
In this month’s newsletter, the TentCraft content team is going to walk you through:
Why these conditions work
3 types of event content we create that nail these conditions
Practical photography and videography tips
Before we jump into the specifics, I want to talk about why we’re finding initial success by distilling content creation objectives into those two conditions.
*Side note: A single content type does not need to satisfy both conditions, but your strategy should feature a mix of content types that do.
The first condition's value hopefully feels most obvious. Any media you have that shows your company solving problems or creating a product that gives real people the solution or image they want is always a valuable asset.
It’s distributable, embeddable, and the sales team can use it with anyone who is looking to buy.
The second condition’s value, in my professional opinion, is where the hard work and success of content comes into play.
Creating with others is a unique opportunity for deeper relationship building. If you make others look good, make the content fun to create, and make the process easy on the people who are volunteering their time and expertise, you inevitably unlock a whole host of opportunities you otherwise could not.
You’re creating distribution channels that are not algorithm-dependent - if people like you and the content, they’ll share it, collaborate on it, and DM it to their networks.
Having a good time with people you create with also gives them a sincere reason to mention you via word-of-mouth referrals to people for months if not years, even if they never watch or support the content itself. Yeah, sometimes the value of making the content is greater than the final asset.
Content is often only successful if there’s an internal content culture being built with your co-workers. Win over the people in the company, they’ll start to volunteer to be a part of it and suggest content they think would be useful. Hype it with an internal marketing campaign, shout people out, share bloopers, etc. You’ll be well on your way.
Take the following with a grain of salt.
We sell event infrastructure products to other companies. The B2B marketing strategy that works for us will need to be modified to fit your brand’s sales model and product type.
Want to meet a few hundred new people and make a bigger splash at an event than your footprint can do alone? Put your brave face on and plan a way to engage with the show floor.
You can do this with one or two people, a camera, and a lav mic.
Create several prompts around a unified theme, then start looking for volunteers to answer on camera.
And remember, you not only have event attendees as a captive audience, you have other booths filled with marketers at the event that’ll gladly be a part of your content if they think they’ll get a mention or a collab.
We did this this year at the 2026 Experiential Marketing Summit. Here we asked a whole host of attendees to share their hot takes, trends, and insights about the event industry overall.
We were able to create a long-form YouTube video, multiple vertical videos that tagged collaborators and their brands on social media, a post-event email & landing page, and even a survey-style report as a newsletter and LinkedIn article.
Bring Talent Release Forms. Having printed or digital release forms available will give you peace of mind when using photos and videos of attendees or customers in future marketing content.
Be Prepared for Challenging Lighting. Trade shows and events often have dim or mixed lighting. If you're using a camera, bring fast lenses (f1.2, f/1.4 or f/2.8) or lighting if possible. If you're shooting on a phone, look for well-lit areas and avoid backlighting whenever possible.
Arrive Early and Capture the Setup. Get clean shots of your booth, signage, displays and products before crowds and distractions appear.
Watch Your Backgrounds. It’s easy to miss things while you’re shooting, but then you’re sitting down editing and notice the water bottle in the background or another distracting element. Before pressing the record button, take a quick look around the frame and remove any distractions you can.
Shoot With Multiple Content Formats in Mind. Before you start shooting, think about where the content will live. That will help you decide whether to capture horizontal or vertical content, or both.
Horizontal (16:9) Linkedin, Youtube, Websites, Sales materials,
Vertical (9:16) Instagram, Reels, Youtube Shorts, TikTok
If you’re at an event where your customers will be in attendance and using your product, try capturing more than just their opinion of you and an image of them with your product. The idea is to make content that isn’t simply the obvious testimonial you would, of course, share about how great you are.
It might catch your customers off guard, and it might take some prompting on your part, but ask them to walk you and your audience through their thought process about approaching their problems, how they’re perceiving things, and why they’re making the choices they are. You’re turning them into a thought leader for others in their industry while they point out how they’re using your products as a part of their bigger strategy.
We did this at Life Time’s Sea Otter Classic this year. This is a massive cycling event where we have a booth presence because a lot of the brands at the show are our customers who are activating with our tent and truss structures. It’s like having a built-in outdoor showroom featuring our best work where other cycling companies can reference seeing our customers and wanting something similar.
Watch the Wove Explainer Example
We decided to do cribs-style videos where we asked our customers if they’d take us on a tour of their booth, but instead of solely focusing on their products, we asked if they’d talk about why their booth is designed the way it is. That meant talking about unique problems they were solving for whether it was product size, education for customers, being more media friendly, etc.
The results paid off as we now have testimonial videos and case studies (see Waterloo Example) for the website around specific use cases that sales reps can directly reference. And because we asked customers to be introspective, these also act as a form of thought leadership content that many of them are happy to accept tags and collabs on, which helps with social distribution and trust building.
Plan Your Shot List Before the Event. At events, many things can feel like they're out of your control, but coming in with a shot list will help you stay focused on what needs to be captured. Some things that should be included on every shot list:
Booth/Setup
Team members
Customer interactions
Event Highlights
Wide shots of Event to establish where you are
Product Demos
Capture the Brand. Make sure the logos and branding you want are visible. Whether it’s a logo on a uniform, signage, or a branded element in the background, look for opportunities to capture the brand throughout the event.
Capture Authentic Moments. Great event content isn't just photos of the booth. Look for real interactions like conversations, product demos, customer reactions, handshakes, laughter, and behind-the-scenes moments that tell the story of the event.
For both of the above events, we focused on making wrap-up assets that capitalized on the sum of all the parts.
For the Experiential Marketing Summit, we took all the responses from people and distilled them into a mini, anecdotal data report about the state of the experiential industry. That meant charts and percentages around takeaways, quotes from interviewees, and our perspectives on why these trends are emerging from our point of view.
You can see one of these resources here:
7 Experiential Marketing Trends That Event Industry Pros Shared At EMS 2026
For Sea Otter, we created a sales asset/inspo guide that sales can reference when cycling brands and other action sports brands ask about their future options. We produced what is essentially an article that features 15 activations across 4 of our primary product types. It includes the walkthrough videos as well as photographs of each setup so prospects can explore what their competitors have done and what our capability range is.
You can see some of these resources here:
15 TentCraft-Built Brand Activations That Turned Heads at the 2026 Sea Otter Classic
Capture a Variety of shots. Make post-production easier by capturing a mix of shots throughout the event. Get a combination of wide, medium, and close-up shots, along with both static tripod shots and gimbal shots. Having a variety of footage gives you much more flexibility when editing.
Think in Photo and Video. I don’t know how many times I’ve grabbed a photo of something, but later wished I had a video clip of it, or vice versa. Try to grab both whenever possible. You’ll thank me later.
Experiential Marketing Trend of the Week: Commiseration Activations by Kait Shea
See how content from social and video platforms perform on Google Search by Google Search Central