Want to maximise your investment in industry events? Then top quality content is critical

Many of you will be reading this on the way to UKREiiF 2026 – checking the event schedule, sussing out the party clashes and scrolling through a LinkedIn feed alive with ‘I will be there’ posts.

Conferences and events such as UKREiiF are a vital part of the fabric of our industry, which has always valued opportunities to get together in person and have focused time to network and drive business.

Whether you’re attending, joining a panel session, hosting an event of your own or holding the fort back at the office, it can be a real challenge for senior leaders and their marketing teams to know how to get the best return on their efforts.

Industry events require investment – both financially and in terms of time spent away from the office – and to make it worthwhile this investment needs to create a meaningful return. According to a Deloitte report published last year, companies spend anywhere between 20 to 30% of their marketing budgets on events, yet many struggle to measure and leverage this investment.

So how can that leverage be achieved? What do real estate organisations really need to think about when attending a major industry event? What does success look like?

In my experience, the thing that often falls by the wayside is the creation of high quality content that effectively captures and communicates a company’s story.

Creating great content isn’t only valuable during the event itself; the material can be used long after the exhibition has packed up and attendees have gone home. Strong content acts as a message multiplier and when done well, can remain relevant for the weeks and months to come. This is especially true in real estate, where developers have sizeable pipelines and long-term relationships to nurture.

Additionally, in our fast-moving digital age, content marketing – i.e. attracting audiences through digital content – is now understood as being as effective, if not more, as traditional marketing. Often times, it’s more cost effective too due to the fact that it continues delivering value over time.

The problem for many organisations is that content at these events is often created by people who aren’t marketers. For some companies, a quick obligatory selfie and LinkedIn post of a team member at an industry event is considered sufficient. Now this sort of post definitely has its place – not all content needs to be highly polished – but it doesn’t create strategic impact and longevity.

Naturally, for some businesses the cost of sending a specialist content creator to an industry event can be onerous, so they don’t. But by not taking content creation more seriously, organisations are failing to fully leverage the investment already made in an event and they risk missing an important trick.

If you are planning on capturing some content at an industry event, planning is hugely important to ensure it aligns with the purpose of your investment. You’ll need to think about positioning, messaging and imagery carefully – not only for the event itself, but also how content can be used afterwards to ensure it has a lasting shelf life. Good content creation is about being smart at the time while keeping one eye on the future: you create content for now and bank it for later.

Video content has proven to be particularly effective, since it’s been shown to drive significantly higher engagement with potential customers. According to a B2B benchmarking report published on LinkedIn in 2024, video content generates two to three times more engagement than text-based content across B2B platforms.

And at a time when many people question the legitimacy of what they see online and on social media in particular, organisations benefit from content that feels truly authentic.

Stripping it right back to the essentials, the key to effective marketing is ultimately communicating a clear message across multiple touch points. You’re looking for a repetition of a message, told in insightful and interesting ways, so that you can be recognised in the market for what you want to be known for.

This applies for both general brand messaging as well as more specific sales narratives. Consistency drives trust and recognition, and trust drives transactions. According to research carried out by Harvard University, B2B buyers now consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a purchasing decision – a little more than the advertising ‘Rule of 7’ marketers worked to in my early career. This clearly isn’t rocket science, but it can be so easily forgotten if not actively and strategically managed.

Though it would be easy to think that content marketing is all about the image, words still matter. Thought leadership content – used by around 70% of decision-makers – is more effective at influencing purchasing decisions than traditional marketing materials, according to Edelman’s 2024-published B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study.

So what’s my key takeaway from all this? That great businesses are great storytellers – and engaging, inspiring content is your number one tool for telling a great story.

Industry events are an incredibly effective forum for spreading word about your business and creating top quality content can do a lot of the leg work for you – provided you plan and target it appropriately. This type of content has fantastic longevity and adds authenticity to your company’s message long after an event has closed its doors.

While in-person events and networking are naturally a critical part of running a real estate business, if you’re not simultaneously telling your organisation’s story and sharing it with a wider industry audience online, you’re overlooking an important commercial opportunity. It does well to remember that while you’ve got to put in the leg work at industry events, content is very much still king.