Is it worth sending an engineer to speak at a conference?

Not on its own. Forty hours of preparation for a twenty-five minute talk in front of a hundred people, and often fewer, is negative ROI on one of the most valuable resources your company has. It turns positive when the engineer spends that energy building assets the marketing team can reuse, rather than building only a talk.

What should you ask an engineer for before they speak?

A blog post on the topic. Conference CFPs usually take an outside-in angle, explaining how you built something so the audience learns from it, which lends itself naturally to content. The blog post becomes the permanent artifact on your website, and it doubles as the engineer's preparation for the talk. From there you can record a video interview with them, treating it like a customer interview, and turn the talk into a Q&A.

Why should you pre-record a conference talk?

Because conference recordings fail in multiple ways. The quality can be terrible, or the recording never happens at all, or what the organizer promised in exchange for your engineer never arrives in a state you can use. A pre-recording is made under conditions you control, so you always have something usable for marketing.

How do you turn one conference talk into a campaign?

Split it into pre-event, during-event, and post-event. Before, publish the blog post and the interview, build a landing page with the bio and abstract, and put a form on it with a prize for anyone who tries the product. During, post prearranged quotes as if you were live posting, get someone in the audience taking good photos, and have the engineer show a CTA slide with a QR code to the landing page. After, publish the slides and email everyone who signed up.

Can you use AI to turn a talk into marketing content?

Yes, for reformatting. A pre-recorded talk gives you a transcript, and a transcript becomes blog posts and social posts in minutes. The rule is to instruct the model to reformat the words rather than modify them. The engineer already did the writing when they prepared the talk, so the machine is only moving their sentences between formats, which is why this workflow avoids the problem with generated prose.

The art of reuse: turning a conference talk into a campaign

Your engineering team is a valuable resource. Let's say an engineer wants to go speak at a conference. Is this something that is in the best interest of the company? Let's say your engineer spent 40 hours to prepare for a talk that's 25 minutes and takes place in front of 100 people. Now tell me, does that calculus turn into a positive ROI for the company?

In this post, I'm going to talk about how to turn this obviously negative ROI into something that's positive. Positive for the company, the product, and the brand.

Forty hours for a hundred people

Preparing for a conference talk is a significant effort. In particular, a lot of engineers aren't used to talking in front of other people, so there is not only the time to prepare the technical aspects of the presentation, but also all the preparation involved in rehearsing and getting ready to be on stage.

This is a large investment for your company.

On top of all of that, when you go speak at a conference, typically you are speaking to a handful of people in a room. If you're lucky, it could be hundreds of people, but in all likelihood it's fewer than a hundred.

We need to think about the economics of whether or not this makes sense. And the only way it does actually make sense is if the engineer spends all of their energy not just building a talk, but building a ton of assets that you, as the marketing team, can then reuse.

If you know me, you know that I have harped on the concept of content reuse pretty much my entire career. Any time you invest a ton of effort into something, you should find multiple ways to reuse that effort. One webinar turns into 20 social clips, a blog post, and a sales campaign. One data sheet turns into social posts, email campaigns, and case studies. One meetup tour turns into social posts and a blog post and a landing page for people who couldn't make it to the event to still participate.

Write the blog post first

When you submit a CFP for a conference, you typically don't talk about your product. You talk about an "outside-in" approach where you discuss how you built something so that you can teach everyone in the audience best practices. This is the same instinct behind the content that actually works for developers. This naturally lends itself to a content strategy.

Thus, the first thing I always mandate is that if an engineer is going to speak at a conference, then they owe me a blog post about the topic. The blog post becomes a permanent artifact that we can use on the website, and it falls in line with my content philosophy of creating "how we built it" content.

You can then turn that blog post into an interview with the engineer. Record a video interview with the engineer as if you were interviewing a customer. Turn their talk into a Q&A session. If you're using a tool like Riverside, you can even go live with the conversation. Don't miss this opportunity to use your engineer's time, energy, and effort to establish credibility with your ideal customer.

Pre-record it

The next thing I ask is that engineers pre-record their talk. I've had conference recordings go bad in multiple ways. This just happened to me two months ago, actually. We ended up negotiating two podcast appearances to make up for the error.

You never know what will happen. Either the recording quality is terrible, or sometimes the recording didn't even happen. Sometimes the things we were promised by a conference organizer in exchange for sending our engineer don't materialize in a way that we can actually use.

Under conditions that I can control, I ask that the engineer pre-record their conference talk so that we can use it for marketing purposes.

The talk is a research session

Engineers should also look at conference talks as opportunities to get product-level feedback. The Q&A after the talk offers insight into what customers find important versus what the engineer thinks is important. They're meeting with a bunch of customers and getting ideas for how to implement certain things. They can then use that feedback to improve the product.

This is perhaps the most obvious reason why engineers go to conferences, and we as marketing managers should support them in that endeavor.

Of course, sometimes engineers speak at their own capacity. They're not representing a company; they're representing themselves and their own brand. This is fairly common, especially among more prominent engineers. These are still great opportunities to drive communications and marketing. You just need to work with the engineer to find a way to mesh the two goals.

What you make afterward

Now comes the fun part. Your engineer goes and speaks at a conference. You have a reasonably good quality conference recording, and you have a postmortem from the engineer themselves, as well as a blog post they use to prepare their talk at the beginning.

You can turn all those materials into a pre-event campaign, a during-event campaign, and a post-event campaign.

Pre-event campaigns:

Social media posts about presenting at the conference.
Publish the blog post right before the conference starts.
Publish the interview with the engineer before the conference starts.
Create a landing page for the conference that displays the engineer's bio and talk title/abstract.
One fun thing I've been doing lately is offering a prize to anyone who tries the product out and fills out a form on the landing page.

During-event campaign:

Social media posts about the talk. Prearrange with the engineer a set of "quotes" that you could post as if you were live posting from the event itself.
Make sure you get someone to attend the talk with the engineer and get good quality photos from the audience perspective.
Have the engineer add a CTA slide with a QR code to the landing page you've created for the conference.

Post-event campaign:

Publish the slides from the talk on the landing page.
Run a post-event email campaign to everyone who signed up for the contest.

Everything on this list got cheap this year

The good news is that it's really easy these days to create a blog post from a transcript. You can have your engineer pre-record their talk, and then from that you can extract the transcript and turn it into blog posts, social media posts, and everything else you can imagine. This can be done in minutes, if not seconds. With a little bit of quality control, you can have a full raft of social media and marketing content from a modicum of effort from your engineer.

One rule on this, and it is not optional. Instruct your LLM to reformat the content, not to modify the words. Use the engineer's own words. I have written about why generated prose does not perform, and the reason this workflow is exempt is that the engineer already did the writing. The machine is only moving their sentences between formats.

The checklist

Ultimately, I believe that speaking sessions are 100% worth it, but only if you do everything you can to maximize the effort that's put into them. Engineers are an incredibly important asset to your company, so making sure their time is used well is critical. A few things I would make sure that you do:

Before the talk:

Get the blog post. The engineer owes you one on the topic, and it becomes the permanent artifact on your website.
Record a video interview with the engineer, as if you were interviewing a customer.
Have the engineer pre-record the talk, under conditions you control.
Build a landing page with the engineer's bio and the talk title and abstract.
Put a form on that page and offer a prize to anyone who tries the product and fills it out.
Prearrange a set of quotes you can post as if you were live posting from the event.

During the talk:

Send someone to sit in the audience and get good quality photos from the audience perspective.
Have the engineer add a CTA slide with a QR code pointing at the landing page.

After the talk:

Get the postmortem from the engineer while it is still fresh.
Publish the slides on the landing page.
Run an email campaign to everyone who signed up for the contest.
Keep the pre-recording ready, because the conference recording may never arrive in a state you can use.