Your Content Using AI -

Generative AI models have changed the way event marketers approach content strategy.

When it comes to marketing your conference to prospective attendees, it’s about focusing less on the call to action and more on demonstrating how the event will address their specific pain points.

For most, the annual conference is where the best and most thought-provoking content is shared. Before generative AI, executing on a content marketing strategy for your conference was too heavy of a lift for most. That’s all about to change in 2026.

A number of years ago, Velvet Chainsaw developed a framework for crafting your conference narrative. The framework aligns with a conference’s attendee journey and can be helpful for developing your content marketing plan — phase 1: awareness/consideration; phase 2: optimizing the experience; phase 3: capture/amplify; phase 4: memories/learning prompts.

For the first two phases— awareness/consideration and optimizing the experience — focus a session’s content marketing on the WIIFM (what’s in it for me). The messaging should briefly and clearly articulate how a particular session is important, urgent, and helpful for improving business outcomes or an individual’s career. When properly executed, it can be used to encourage both registration and session attendance. It also provides tools that can be helpful for attendees to map out their schedule. Here’s an AI prompt: I am uploading a session outline for [session name]. Act as a conference marketing expert. Create three bite-sized insights that clearly articulate how this session improves business out-comes or an individual’s career. Write these for a short LinkedIn post that targets prospective attendees who are facing [specific pain point]. Ensure the tone is practical and urgent … no fluff.

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For the last two phases — capture/amplify and memories/learning — leverage AI’s ability to help generate short session summaries and key learnings. Professional infographics and even short videos can be generated to help make learning stick and to share beyond those who attended the session. Upload your session transcript or slide deck into your generative AI tool and ask it to synthesize the three most compelling insights, organize them into clear headlines with supporting proof points, and format them for visual storytelling — optimized for a one-page infographic or a 60-second social video. Think: boardroom clarity meets social-media speed.

Leverage Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Most marketers agree that word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful means of conversion. Today, people trust other people more than brands. Content that is posted from a personal profile of an influencer usually has higher engagement and trust than content posted by a conference organizer.

To leverage the power of word-of-mouth, consider helping your speakers co-create content marketing elements around one idea — the elements should include your conference brand along with their authentic voice and thought leadership. Encourage them to share with their network on LinkedIn. Visuals and graphics are easily digestible and most likely to be shared.

Visual Storytelling

Over the years, one of the most effective visual learning prompts has come from graphic facilitators. With the rapid advances of generative AI, similar visuals can be created and shared, using prompts like this:

Act as a graphic facilitator. Review the attached session highlights and design a graphic recording–style visual
Requirements: hand-drawn look and feel; three main ideas connected with arrows; simple icons (lightbulb, chart, people, checklist); minimal text — short phrases only
Layout: title at the top; ideas flow left to right like a storyboard
Style: energetic, professional, conference-ready
Goal: Make someone who missed the session think, “I should have been in that room.”

Dave Lutz, CMP, is managing director of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting.