#95: Maximize Event Success with Strategic Content Marketing with Gina Clarke

Speaker A: I was going to say you've also got the exclusivity problem as well. Right. Because most people will want to put their event online and that's absolutely fine. But then we're time poor at the end of the day. So having 20, 30 minutes to go back and watch something just doesn't always exist. So being able to provide summaries or put things together in terms of topic, I just think they're sometimes a little bit more engaging than having a strategy of pushing out a 30 second clip and then go watch it online or et cetera, et cetera. If you can always do the job for the audience, then I think they'll value that and that kind of trust and brand authenticity will come through a little bit more.

Speaker B: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Eventscast. Uh, I am Francesca here and that clip that you have just heard, it's one from Gina Clark, former Global content director, Money20 20. And, um, that was inspiring, wasn't it? If you thought so. Well, keep tuned because we've got a lot more from where that came from. Today's episode, we are talking all about content marketing and we're talking about maximizing the success of content marketing at, uh, your event. We really just go into the nitty gritty here of data, uh, of creating long term strategies for your content, of really getting to know your audience and getting to know the content they want out of your event. And this was a fascinating conversation I had with Gina. It really took a different turn than what I expected, but in a good way. I am feeling super buzzed right now after the conversation and I'm sure you will do too. So make sure to tune in right into the end. Just before we get started here today, my friends, I do want to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed, wherever you are listening to this one, I'm sure there is a button that says subscribe and I really encourage you to go click that button right now to make sure that you get some of the future episodes that we have lined up here for you. And that way you can make sure you don't miss anything. And as you are there, as you're on the platform already subscribing like I know you're going to do, take the link of this episode and share it with someone who you think might enjoy it too. Take it and share it with someone directly. A, uh, colleague, a friend, someone who you know will really benefit from listening to this episode. They will really appreciate you for it and I will too. And if you are feeling super Generous. Here, take and post it directly on your social profiles. Post it on your LinkedIn, on your ex, on your Tik Tok or your Instagram. Wherever you are, listen, wherever you do, hang out online and share it with your whole network so anyone can go find it. Tune in. That's my only ask for you. And I did say we've got a lot to cover so I'm not going to delay you any further. We are just going to clip the music here, the intro and we will get started. Welcome to the eventscast, a podcast to help event professionals attract more attendees and grow their events. Through weekly interviews with event professionals and solo episodes with myself, you'll learn practical tips and strategies to better market your events. I'm your host, Francesca Bolit and I'm the co founder of BBR Web Design and a marketing coach, helping event producers achieve their marketing goals with a conversion optimized event website. If you need support with your event websites or marketing, visit theeventscast.com to check out how we can work together. And while you're there, explore some of the freebies made just for you. And now for today's episode. Hello, Gina and um, welcome to the eventscast. How are you doing today?

Speaker A: I'm really good, yeah, it's nice and sunny here, so feeling a lot better than having the rain over the last week or so.

Speaker B: How nice. Yeah, it is really. The sun's finally shining, which I'm very glad about too. I um, am a sun catcher, so really appreciate in it too. Thank you so much for joining me. I know, um, it's Friday, nice day, nice weather, so I appreciate it double. Um, I know you're so. Got a nice longer weekend to rush off to, so I extra appreciate you finding this time to join me here today and I'm really excited to be talking to you about content, Content marketing. Um, it's a topic which I myself love as a content creator, as you may know and I've been following you on LinkedIn for a while. I see quite a lot of what you do. I've also been following Money 2020 for years on end actually. And um, I see all the content that they put out, which I imagine you're responsible for a great deal of it. So I'm really, really excited to be talking with you, get into, really dive into content marketing. But just before we do go into it, before we talk about the nitty gritty, I would love to just get to know you a bit better, understand a bit your background story and how you got into this Lovely world of events.

Speaker A: Sure, yeah, absolutely. Great to be here. Um, to give you a bit of background, I went to university to study journalism and it was kind of whilst I was there I realized that there wasn't really any out of hours activities. It was kind of, you know, and I really respect my lecturers now for checking me in at the deep end and saying, off you go and do yourself. But at the same time you do want a little bit of support, whether peer support or from, you know, some mentoring, um, opportunities, et cetera. And I just thought I'll do it myself, um, because I was that way inclined when you're young and you've got energy. So I created a journalism society and my aim was just literally I would scrape enough money together each once a month to have a visiting editor to come meet us and I would buy them a beer and I'd maybe do like a student, um, buy one, get one free deal from Domino's or something and put some pizza out. And it just, it just grew and grew and grew. And um, actually what we found was that the visiting speakers were just really grateful to give something back. It was kind of like, oh yeah, okay, on a Thursday after work, they're local when they popped in. And I got so much lovely feedback from both the students and the lecturers that I actually joined a, um, a society overseas, uh, for journalism students. And um, in final year I hosted an event with, I think we had over 200 people from 80 different countries and I found the sponsorship and uh, you know, went down to London and knocked on the door and got all the funding for it, um, had all these people flown in, went to the BBC, the Guardian, begged them for speakers, went to Coca Cola, begged them for sponsor sponsorship and um, before you know it, you've got a three day event put on. So that was kind of my first introduction to events. Realized I was, you know, a bit of a jack of all trades, um, getting the speakers, getting the funding and then also doing the publicity as well. So that's where we are from here really.

Speaker B: I love how crazy everyone's entry stories are to the events world. Especially like I think when we were younger it wasn't like that. You going to study events. Well, I think there is like, it's a bit more common nowadays, but I love how crazy it is and it's actually a lovely introduction for you to the word like. Like you said, doing everything really got you to get the foot into trying everything, trying the promotion, trying to sales, uh, trying out the logistics organization, part of it, but then you got stuck with the marketing, the promotion and nowadays especially the content side. But what made you choose then to stick into the marketing side of it? What was it that made you choose this path?

Speaker A: So it's funny actually my, my first job out of university was for an innovation lab, um, on the university campus. And we had some funding and it wasn't my responsibility who got it, but I was there to kind of help support. Once a student had received funding and they'd set up a company, there was a number of kind of steps and hoops they had to jump through. I would then sort of help them understand how to promote themselves and appeal to different audiences, etc. And that kind of startup mentality has always really stuck with me. And uh, you know, no matter what, I've been uh, helping to publicized, you know, I've worked with people who have golf instructors and help them with their social media and putting together campaign plans to massive financial companies, Amazon etc. So I think it doesn't really matter who you are from a marketing perspective. And this translates into events as well. There's always those similarities along the way, the ability to understand your audience, the um, you know, appreciating the hook, which is what you learn in journalism and then the deadlines that come with that and the strategies along the way. So you know, it was kind of a really good throwing in at the deep end of some of the skill sets that people hone over years and years and years. And it was just felt like a lot I guess at the time to kind of have in my mind, okay, this company's doing this and I need to help them with that and this person's doing that. But um, somehow I was able to kind of connect the dots between them and link. Sometimes that throws up a link together and we've got a partnership building and hey, have you met this person? Have you tried that? And I brought back the pizza on a monthly basis and got everyone together. And I think that's just where I saw that events are really the catalyst for a great um, marketing strategy.

Speaker B: Fantastic. And how does that all draw back into content then? Like nowadays I know you work more off the content side and we get to hear a bit what you're doing nowadays also how, where did the content side of things fall into place for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, so after um, after my short span um, with university, I actually moved to Germany to go uh, back into reporter full time, um, working over there for newspapers and um, the British Broadcasting Service. And that I guess just gave me back that who is the audience, uh, was there at the forefront of my mind all the time. And um, when I came back to the uk, I did a variety of jobs where I sort of realized if I wasn't thinking about the audience, I wasn't happy. Um, you know, I could take a product and I can market the product, but if I haven't got an inkling who's at the other end of it, there was no real satisfaction in what I was doing. So I had a set of circumstances allowed me to go freelance and I took on a mixture. I, you know, I was an editor, uh, I got back into journalism. Um, I worked on a variety of projects, mainly kind of women's health and community based. And then in 2006, uh, we had the referendum here in the UK and I was commissioned to write a series of, I think it was 50 interviews of business leaders and you know, having those conversations, asking what their pain points were, asking what they were kind of most worried about. It was always, how do I trade internationally? And um, the one sort of recourse when I was looking into it was this emergence of financial technology. Um, you know, if you were looking at how to um, not just trade and exchange products, goods and services, but also money, then um, you know, UK being what the UK is for, the Great British Pound, you were going to come across some conversion rate. So you know, the amount of fintechs that kind of came out, we had new banking licenses being issued for the first time ever with Stalin and Monzo. So it was at that point that I really thought I'm into this, um, you know, you add, uh, new technologies. Crypto obviously was making the rounds then as the great investment and all of a sudden you had a really rich, diverse ecosystem that I was just sort of happy to get my teeth into. So I became the European fintech correspondent for Forbes. I became editor in chief of the Fintech Times. And then I got wooed back to my events love, my first love with Money 2020, which kind of brought all those skills. That was where I was for a number of years. And then recently, um, I've gone back to working uh, for myself again and I now um, I'm employed with the Abu Dhabi Finance Week. I'm um, in charge of their uh, Fintech Day and the Blockchain Summit. And I'm working on speakers ready for the event in December. And I'm also working with Open Banking Excellence with their uh, Transatlantic Index which will be released later in Q3. So busy, busy but enjoying it.

Speaker B: Such a great story and it's so great to see that events, that passion always comes back. But um, something that has really stuck for me from the beginning of what you've mentioned so much is that of the audience getting to know your audience, really focusing everything you do, whatever you are from the generous inside of writing for them or it's always stuck there in your mind. So that is something that I love to talk about, love to uh, love to focus on too. So just like now that we are start drawing into that content marketing conversation, I would just like to start there talking of it. Like how do you then when you are preparing, you know, when you are planning your content marketing, um, schedule maybe for the year, maybe for the month, however you plan it, how do you do to focus on your target audience? What is the step of really making sure that you understand your audience the best way possible to create the best content for them? What does that look like for you? How do you really get to know your target audience?

Speaker A: So I always try and start with what's gone previously. Um, you know, if you don't have a good baseline, then you've not really to benchmark um, across and, and I know in events people, they get really deep into NPS scores and you know, what was the feedback on the survey and um, what were the numbers on the seats, etc. And I guess when I first really started digging deep into events, I, I wanted another marker as well. I wanted anecdotal feedback because I can't always be in the room. I'd love to, believe me. I've been in the pre briefings and you know, they're all conversations I would want to see live, but I'm not always there. Uh, so I think you have to start off with a really good understanding of, of what was good and what worked in the, in the previous time. And a great example of this was um, in money 2020, in 22, I really pushed for a smaller stage. And you know, usually it's the opposite, right? Everybody wants to talk on the big stage. And I was like, no, I think actually I kept seeing in the feedback deep dives, deep dives, deep dives. And you know, you really have to when you've got eight and a half thousand people coming to an event trying to, um, you know, put yourself in their shoes. Not everybody has the same level of knowledge. And like we were having a conversation earlier about, you know, oh, I've so many acronyms and I've kind of lost my way as to what's happened in the last Couple of years. I think there's a real degree of the imposter syndrome that kind of haunts the financial ecosystem. So what I wanted to do was to kind of put one speaker in a room and give them a little bit more time than we would usually give them and really kind of allow that expertise to come across and have that, you know, there's no silly question sort of mode. You know, if you're in that room, you get a chance to ask a question and there's no judgment on that. And it can be as, as deep or as, or shallow as you like. So we tried that in 22. It was a bit of a risk, but we had cues to get into that. It wasn't a room, it wasn't pushed off, it was a fully. You know, and I can't recommend the creative team that we have enough. You know, they, they really always get over enthusiastic about what I present to them. And you know, from a small space that was on the show floor, what we then had in it must have been 23 because we've just had it in 24. What we then produced this year in 24, we elevated that was a beautiful space. Like I could have spent all day in there. And we gave it some sort of, um, we gave it a food and drink element. So there was dedicated space, expert speaker and then networking with your peers, um, after that. And as I say to, to be able to understand your audience, no matter whether they want that keynote speaker or they want that one on one time with an expert, it just gives you more of a relaxed feeling. I think that you're putting together something that has value and once everybody is behind that, uh, then it just goes forward at an incredible speed.

Speaker B: I do know that you, well especially at money, uh, 2020, that they're quite experts. Like you said, the team are building amazing stages. But it's so actually interesting to hear that I've like really taken it small. And sometimes like when you do, as you mentioned, when you get to the audience, sometimes that is the step taking a step back. But I'm thinking now how do you back up the idea like to the stakeholders, to your, when you're saying like everyone's planning going bigger, uh, how do you say no, let's go smaller and let's go smaller, whatever that decision is. I'm assuming that there's a lot of data that's maybe back here backing you up both data, uh, to um, that you obviously finding before when you're getting to know your audience to say this is what they want, but data, uh, to also back up after and say, look how well that works. I know data is one of uh, one of those things on your line. So how do you back this up? How do you get that data? What Data is important. I know nowadays there's so much around there, what comes into the piece for you.

Speaker A: It's really hard, right, because everything's got some form of ROI attached to it. And um, previously it would be our kind of research phase that we would go through. We would be on the phone and you know, I'd be having 50 to 100 phone calls in a month just to kind of make sure that we were in the right direction for our research. But lately we've, you know, everyone's talking about AI and the um, you know, where the industry's going. Lately we've been able to work with some partners. Um, and again, you know, this, this all needs funding, right? So you have to kind of go cap in hand and you need good leadership to be able to kind of, for them to understand why you need it. Um, so I really do thank you, um, the management for that. But one of the tools that we've had is something that we embedded into our app to allow people to segment from the immense agenda that we had. Uh, you know, fill in a couple of questions and you'll have a tailored agenda come to you, add it to your phone and then there you go. There's a tailor made content agenda ready for you with just a few clicks. There's no need to scroll, don't need to search, etc. Etc. So we turned on kind of this AI recommendation tool and that went down pretty well. We could then segment it and kind of look and say, who have we got in the room? Who's adding that to their calendar? Okay, this is something the senior leadership likes. This is what we need when we need to think about those. This is something our startup community is engaged in. This is what we think when we're thinking about those. So that really gave us that, I'm not going to say it gave us new information, it cemented what we knew already and it gave us that ability to, to present it to the higher up and say, look, this is why you need this information, because of X, Y and Z. Off the back of that, we went one step further this year and we implemented a new technology that gave us facial uh, recognition tracking to track engagement. So you know, of course we know some people rock up and they get their laptops out and they sit and they absorb. I Do it. I'm bad myself for just we're able to implement this and it's fully, you know, GDPR signed off. We haven't seen any of the um, of the videos. It's just the data that we've seen. What we did see was that there were some sections where everybody would look up and they were really engaged with the speaker. And then there were some sections where you know, there was no real um, back and forth. There was no, not very often, I have to say. Um, but you know, from the marketeer's perspective, you always think, what do I put out on social media from an event? What is the clip that I need to show? Now you've got a dashboard with a big spike, let's say is at this part everybody was looking and it just gives you that extra bit of information that you didn't have before. So I definitely say there's lots of really interesting technologies out there that marketers should be making use of in their events. Definitely.

Speaker B: That's incredible. And I wish I actually had uh, some data like that backing me up, like really to say, yeah, uh, what is that moment? What's the key moment? What is the piece that we should be taking it? I mean even from recording these podcasts here, I take top m, uh, moments, clips. But that is just, yeah, a lot of time. As a marketer, you are thinking of your base, of your knowledge of them, um, of the, of the audience. And obviously you're backed up with all that of saying behind you. Yes, it's what you know, you know your audience is what you think your audience will want because of your research, which you've previously done. But really having something that can tell you, yes, this was actually what your audience was interested. That's so interesting. And you um, can't get any better than that. Any closer to really knowing what your audience wants. And it really brings us back to that initial thing we were talking about of get to know your audience. So tell me, you obviously talk about here, engagement, about this data. You've got this data, it's picking all this up. What do you do then with this afterwards? Like when you are planning, uh, maybe a whole year round content calendar, how do you then take all these pieces that you have and um, plan out your. Well, I'm not sure if you do it yearly, quarterly or um, you can obviously touch a bit on that, how you do it. But, but what is your next step then? Really to do this and to create really like long term, um, content that your audience really does want and is going to engage with. And that's interesting for them.

Speaker A: Next step is just exactly that is to kind of go, okay, why was this really popular? Was there a, a key speaker in there that's got a great following? Was it super timely? And therefore, you know, it was like AI for instance, you know, RAI Summit this year was completely oversubscribed and that's because it was led by Nvidia. And so, you know, is it just that you've ticked all the right boxes or is there something that's launching this year that might not be next year? And so what is the new trend or you know, how far in advance you have to kind of get your crystal ball out? Quite a lot. Definitely when you know, for, for money, 2020, the call for content that happens. I don't think people understand how important that is because that once you've gone through the research phase and you've distilled the thoughts, you're looking a year in advance at the time and you kind of want to see who is on that journey with you. So who else is looking ahead of the curve who's, you know, got that finger on the pulse versus who just wants to sell their product and um, just talk about why they're in the market right now. Because the, right now is not four or five months time down the line when the event is taking place. So I think just being able to kind of dig into that data a little bit more and kind of understand the why just helps you. And again, all this data is doing, I wouldn't say it's mind blowing. It's not giving us what we didn't know. It's cementing that we do know what we know. And you know, it's giving you the thumbs up that you've got the right experts in the room. Really, you know, that's, that's maybe one way I'd look at it. It's not going to replace having a content person there. Um, it's just going to give you that maybe this didn't work this time because as I say, you didn't have the hook right or it was aimed at a, uh, larger audience. Naturally it should have been on a smaller stage or there was something conflicting at the same time that was on the same topic. You know, there's all that, that we have to take into, into the details. And this is just one tool that can help you evaluate.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And yeah, like AI always does sound scary, isn't it? Especially nowadays. And I know there's a lot of, a lot of Opinions, a lot of thoughts, a lot of different people having different feelings of it. But yeah it does, it's scary. But I mean personally I'm also in the content world too and I do appreciate the benefits uh, it really does bring us and uh, how it can really help still create better content and uh, really just be there to support us. But I'm just thinking that we talked about quite a lot about the content actually at the event, during the event, but just all year round and what happens like um, let's say that we're taking this content post event. What do you do with really the content post event to keep maybe a strategy going on all year round and um, to keep that content then relevant. Like you said what the content that is produced or that you're agreeing to come on an event five months afterwards. It's not the same as relevancy as the content that five months later when your event's to going happen and it's not as relevant as five months after when you're then probably using that content to promote your next show round. Like a whole year, more than a year goes by with uh, in industries that uh, a lot of the topics will be more relevant than others in a world that we're also all about creating snappy content now for the moment, something that you're going to use one time around but you've got all this really, really good content. They're sitting long term content. What do you do with this then the rest of the year to keep it relevant all year round to make it long lasting. What type of content do you use all year round?

Speaker A: I think it's a battle right with, with any, any company that has 250 hours plus of content sat in an archive from one three day event. What we try and do is you have to evaluate the longevity of that content and that comes from creating stories. And you know, maybe it's a story of a company that started off on your stages five years ago and now they're heading towards ipo and you know, you can pull into the archives and you can dig that footage up. Maybe it's a controversial moment that happened. Maybe it's um, looking back at a kind of a keynote speaker and why. And I think some of that can't be planned. Uh, you know, fine, have a content calendar, have a rough idea of how many posts you're going to do each week for you know, 6, 8, 12 months out. Fine. But some of the best content comes from reacting and I think if, if team members don't have the ability to react and to talk and create, then you just lose momentum so much. Um, one of the best things I think we did with our marketing department was in the run up to the event, about three months out, we had like a, every week a keynote speaker, um, catch up. And, you know, as a global team, it's so hard to get everybody in the same room. And this was like a. You cannot miss this. Like, we're going to go through the keynote speakers and the content team is going to talk to the marketing team and they're going to tell them why they're so excited about it. And I think where we lose traction slightly is that it goes from a content voice to a marketing voice. And the audience that the marketing team have and the audience at the content team is slightly different because the audience team is talking to the people that are in the room and the marketing team is trying to get those people in the room. You know, come on, here we go. So, you know, they're trying to use lots of buzzwords. They're trying to use short, snappy sentences. They're trying to, you know, you're always like, how do I hook on the speaker? Uh, the, the, you know, who's, uh, the customer and who's watching, et cetera. And, and we're like, no, this, this needs thought. It's got nuance, it's got depth to it. So there would be like this constant kind of tug of war. But those meetings made so much happen, um, because you were able to get the two voices in the room and then you got the marketing. Oh, wow, that's. That's really cool. That's really interesting. And you're like, yeah, we know. But it just. The enthusiasm, I think, comes across a bit more. And I think if you only plan to have. That's going to happen at this time and this person is going to get that document over to this team, this team's going to rewrite that, and this person is going to sign that off. You just lose some of the excitement that you want the end customer to feel. So can't happen all the time. I know team's big, but what I'd really recommend is when you've got. Because you'll go through the calendar, you'll know which times are important for your deadlines. Right. And what parts of the year you're going to need more impetus than others. And I think when it's coming up to those kind of crunch times, you need all eyes on it. And if you don't have that mindset then it's just, it's going to fall through the cracks. Something always will. And if you don't have key owners, um, then it just won't get to the finish line, unfortunately, which I've seen happen. Um, but you know, my one piece of advice would be make sure that someone owns it, otherwise it's not going to get done.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean like you said there, it's so difficult like to really also take that when you have so much content. I think like many times in the events industry we obviously we play the content game, but um, yeah, when we want to take it from marketing perspective, it's like a, you have so much that sometimes it just becomes also too overwhelming. And then being able to translate that, like you said, like translate it from um, contents as something that was spoken to someone in the moment that then transmit the same feeling somewhere outside of it and use it to promote it. It is, it is like a lovely thing to have so much but difficult to take and really to be able to embrace it and go more from saying, yeah, from each piece of content, uh, it's easy to put a plan ahead of time. As event professionals as we are, you like to have a plan like, okay, for each session we're going to get free clips or we're going to get this and actually saying, well, there isn't three clips to get from this session because it wasn't good enough and this one is actually worth this, other one's worth 10 clips. But being able to be flexible and change it, um, I, I really like how you mentioned some of those bits there.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: And just as we are dinner, I

Speaker A: was gonna say you've also got the exclusivity problem as well. Right. Because most people will want to put their event online and, and that's um, that's, you know, that's absolutely fine. But then we're time poor at the end of the day so you know, having 20, 30 minutes to go back and watch something just, just doesn't always exist. So, you know, being able to provide summaries or you know, put things together in terms of topic, I just think they're sometimes a little bit more engaging than having a strategy of pushing out a 30 second clip and then go and watch it online or etc. Etc. If you can always do the job for the audience, then I think they'll value that and that kind of trust and brand authenticity will come through a little bit more.

Speaker B: I love that you just mentioned that because that's actually, just drawing into like, actually the last question that I was going to ask you actually, and I'm gonna ask anyway because you might have some more things, um, to add to that list. But yeah, I was gonna actually just ask you, like, what type of content you thought, like, just perform better afterwards of like, what type of. Yeah, the format. Because there is so many different formats and I guess it is going to be a bit different. You know, I don't think there's a standard like for every event because every event, different industry, they're going to have a different audience. Like going back to, I think, like, depending the audience, their audience will prefer to consume content in a different way. There'll be ones. I prefer more video or more, um, audio, um, or uh, written content. I guess it does depend a bit of your audience. But I was just wondering if you have, you know, like, from your experience really up to now, if there is like a better type of content for format that you've seen works a bit across the industry for everyone to take that content that you have and share with your audience.

Speaker A: I think you always have to include the why, um, and that can be in any format that can be, you know, multimedia, video, um, gif, meme, whatever. But if you don't include why this person is the best person to talk about this topic, then you're sort of losing people along the way a little bit. And as I say, those, those buzzwords come out, you know, inspiring. This, uh, takeaways. Like what takeaways? Um, you know, we had this with, uh, with, with Francois M. Uh, Francois Hollande, who came to Money 2020 this year. Many people were like, why is the next president coming to a fintech gig? And then actually the reason was when we did all of our, uh, kind of research, well, France, um, the economy, the fintech economy was slightly up that year compared to Germany and the UK and everything else. And it was swings and roundabouts for a time, went back down as well. But when we looked at why, it was actually the kind of the fruits that had been laid down in his government, the support that he'd had. He was the first leader to go to Silicon Valley in the Europe world. It was like, yeah, let's get this person back and saying, so what do you think? Having that ability to have that conversation doesn't occur from a graphic. Um, and so I'd always give the why and how to tell the story if you can fit it into a, as I say, a JPEG or something.

Speaker B: Amazing. Yeah, I mean, like, it's the why coming, um, as you said before, sort of like making it easier for your audience to consume. Um, like I always think when I talk about content I always go back to a lot of times like two typical TED talks and how they also like, like really take up their content. And um, I personally don't go back and listen to like, I mean their talks are short, a short. But I generally don't listen to that 15 minute one. But they did do a little bit of like little podcasts that they pick out the free top moments and they just like give you a summary of what the person spoke about. Sharing also those minutes that for me it's just in the end you put it in seven, eight minutes and um, they tell you the takeaways which I personally always love too. But it just came to mind when you mentioned also that thing of making it easy for your audience to, to consume and to be able to take away to their busy lives, incorporate into their day to days.

Speaker A: See we know it works because it works for us too. So I guess, yeah to end on that really uh, do what you would like to see or to be involved in. Um, I think too often the audience just is like a faceless figure. Um, in fact I used to work for the BBC at a time in local radio where we had these uh, two figures that whatever we did, we had them in mind. Um, Joan and uh, oh, I've forgotten her husband's name. But you know they were middle aged, um, semi retired, he played golf, she was um, a doctor's receptionist. They had grown up kids, blended marriage and they were white people who lived by the, you know, lived by the sea. And then you have BBC Birmingham that had to have these same people in mind as BBC Radio Kent. And um, you realize that having you know, one or two people visualize doesn't work. You have to understand the layers and nuances within your audience.

Speaker B: Keep going back to the know your audience.

Speaker A: Exactly. It's an oldie but a goodie.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I always do focus like even just the length of this podcast too. It's like it's 30 minutes and every time I get to uh, I'm on the recording now and I say I need to extend it because like right now I have thousands more questions to ask you and I would love to uh, dive deeper into it. But that thing of having someone in reference. I always think about myself that I don't listen to podcasts that are more than 30 or 40 minutes. I'll listen to five, five hours of Dominion, uh, one after another. But if I See one at least that's my personal. I know a lot of people like longer formats. I'm not if it's an hour or two hours, I generally don't listen to them. M. So that's why we do cut it short here. But I do have so much more that I would love to cover. So we might need to, uh, jump on another one, another time. But just thank you so much for like everything you've shared with us here. For anyone who is listening, actually, and this is feeling quite inspired like me right now and does want to get to know you a bit better, wants to see a bit more what you do and maybe also now that you are back in Tudor, you freelance in self employed, uh, world and you are offering your services to more than just money 2020, uh, right now, if anyone would like actually to reach out to

Speaker A: you and get a bit of your

Speaker B: support, get some help, maybe talk about content marketing in a bit more detail. Where can people go find you? Where do you hang out Online?

Speaker A: Come find me on LinkedIn. Gina. Uh, Clark. Um, more than happy to talk. Yeah, looking forward to it.

Speaker B: Amazing. We'll include links to your LinkedIn on the show notes of this episode for anyone who wants to go grab that directly. And yeah, just once again, Gina, thank you so much for, uh, joining me today on a nice sunny Friday, which we don't get it too often in the uk, so we always appreciate it to, um, to be sitting indoors with me still. Um, but thank you so much.

Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: I told you it was going to be a good one, didn't I? I really do hope that you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Gina. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode and sharing so much gold with me and my audience. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider taking the link and sharing with someone who you think may enjoy it too. And if you aren't, um, yet subscribed, do so now. Next week we've got a review episode talking in detail about content marketing. And the week after we have some more special surprises for you. So stay tuned, stay alive. If you're not with me on social, come hang out with me on Instagram. Uh, you can find me at the Eventscast. Same on TikTok and also on LinkedIn. You can find the Eventscast page or connect with me directly. Francesca Rodriguez, I would love to hang out with you there as well. And we share a lot of content on there, so come join us. That is all for today's episode. I do really appreciate you for joining me here, wherever you are. Listening. Thank you for sparing this time to join me and Gina on today's episode. I hope to catch you really soon on another one. Enjoy the rest of your day and bye for now.