Why taking photos at conferences is smart content marketing.

Nearly every company, firm, and association wants to increase their search rankings, battling to push their pages onto the first page of Google search results.

One powerful tool is Content Marketing, i.e. adding more valuable articles, blog posts, photos, videos, and other information online that Google will find of sufficient value to prioritize it over other competitors’ efforts.

But consistently generating valuable content can be quite difficult.

One powerful opportunity for those who occasionally host (or attend) conferences, seminars, or other meetings is photography.  If you will be organizing an event, shooting some posed or candid photos generates immediate useful content. Upload the photos to your blog, LinkedIn page, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google Plus, or other social media platform, clearly tagged with the people’s names, boosts everyone’s visibility and search-engine marketing.

I gave a law marketing-related speech recently at the Litigation Counsel of America’s meeting.  LCA does an excellent job of shooting photos of the presenters, candids during the event, and posed photos at the black-tie galas.

Above is an example of LCA 2018 President Rusty Hardin and LCA founder and GC Steve Henry, giving me the beautiful speaker gift, a crystal cube, engraved with my name and the event. I was happy to receive the picture.

I also speak regularly at the Construction Law Society of America (CLSA), which does a similarly good job. See the long collection of photos at http://www.constructionsociety.org/event-pics/.

One tip, the photos turn out better if you ask people to remove their name tags, although it makes captioning them more difficult later, if you don’t know everyone. Adding a caption with links to each individual’s website biography or LinkedIn profile further enhances the SEO, although it’s obviously more time-consuming.

You don’t need to be a host to take pictures with your phone.

Today, it’s not inappropriate to post professional selfies to Facebook, or slightly better photos to your professional pages. For example, I uploaded to the Fishman Marketing Facebook page 40 photos I shot in when I spoke at the Mackrell International’s Annual Global Meeting, in Santiago, Chile (click here).

Further, it gives you a legitimate reason to follow up with everyone after the conference.  Contact them to provide a helpful link to photos they would be happy to download and use in their own marketing. LCA sent me the photo above with Rusty and Steve and I used it as my Facebook photo, supporting their marketing as well.

Photos get stale quickly.

So if you shoot photos, upload and circulate them ASAP. If you make the photos immediately available, the subjects can say, “Here’s a photo of me at X Event this week.” If they don’t receive the photos for a month or more, many fewer people will bother, reducing the value of your efforts.

Examples of some of my Mackrell International photos from Santiago, posted to the Fishman Marketing Facebook page:

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Contact Ross directly at ross@fishmanmarketing.com, or 1.847.432.3546!