The Conference Circuit Is a Content Strategy

I'm about to spend the next few months living out of a suitcase. Shoptalk in Vegas. The EAG US Summit in Austin. Vervaunt Pulse in London. And a handful of other industry events that I'll inevitably say yes to because I have no self-control when it comes to a lanyard and a free espresso.

But here's the thing; I'm not going to these events to network. I mean, I will network, obviously, because I'm not a sociopath. But networking isn't the point. I'm going to get content. Mainly for my clients, but also for Waye. Because that's what we do, we help ecommerce agencies and SaaS companies create marketing that actually cuts through. And conferences are, pound for pound, the single most underused content source in the entire ecommerce ecosystem.

I've done the other version. We all have. You go to the event. You have great conversations. You take a photo at the booth. You post something on LinkedIn that starts with "What an incredible few days at [event]!" and get fourteen likes, eleven of which are from your own team. Then you fly home, do nothing with any of it, and three weeks later you can't remember a single interesting thing anyone said.

That's not a content strategy. That's an expensive holiday with a wristband.

The ecommerce conference circuit is enormous. Everyone shows up, SaaS companies, agencies, platforms, consultants, that one guy who's been "in stealth mode" for three years. And virtually all of them produce the same content afterwards. The team photo. The carousel. The panel recap written by someone who was clearly on their phone for most of it.

If you swapped the logos on ninety percent of post-event LinkedIn content, nobody would notice. You could run a blind taste test and the entire industry would fail it.

The problem isn't talent or effort. It's that nobody planned for content before the event happened. Content gets treated as a byproduct of attendance, the thing the marketing person cobbles together on the flight home, half-asleep, trying to remember who said that interesting thing about retention before the third glass of conference wine obliterated the specifics.

Events are full of interesting material. People say things on stage they'd never commit to in a blog post. Arguments break out on panels. Someone drops a stat at dinner that rewires your thinking. The raw material is everywhere. Nobody's capturing it because nobody turned up with the intention to.

Here's what I'm doing differently this year, and what I'm doing for clients: treating every event not as a networking opportunity that might produce content, but as a content opportunity that happens to involve networking.

When I'm at Shoptalk or Pulse, I'm not just there as Will from Waye having a nice time. I'm there with a brief, a shot list, and a publishing schedule for each client I'm producing content for. The agency client who needs hallway interviews with merchants. The SaaS client who needs a trend report based on what their partner ecosystem is actually worried about. The client who just needs someone on the ground capturing the raw material they'd never get from behind a desk.

It's a subtle shift but it changes how you move through the entire event. You stop doing the glazed wander past booth after booth. You start working with purpose. You leave with assets, not just business cards and a bag of branded tat you'll never use.

This works whether you're a SaaS company sponsoring a booth or an agency walking the floor. If you're an agency, the content positions you as the people who actually pay attention, who process the same information your prospective clients are consuming, but do it better. If you're a SaaS company, you're generating partner-friendly material that extends your reach into audiences you'd never hit through your own channels.

Either way, the maths gets very attractive very quickly.

The best content at any conference is never on the main stage. It's at the coffee bar. It's in the corridor between sessions. It's the thing someone says while you're both pretending to read the event app.

So go and capture it. One person, one phone, one lapel mic. Ask everyone the same question, something with a bit of edge. "What's the most overrated trend in ecommerce right now?" or "What's the one thing your clients get wrong every single time?"

One question. Twenty answers. Each one is a standalone clip for LinkedIn or short-form video. Five together make a compilation. Transcribe them and you've got a roundup post. If you're an agency, you're suddenly the people who talked to everyone. If you're a SaaS company, you're the brand that facilitated the conversation. Both are strong positions.

I'm planning to do exactly this at Shoptalk, for clients and for Waye. Same question to everyone I can grab for sixty seconds. Different clients get different edits, different angles, different packaging. By the time I land back in sunny Harrogate, multiple content calendars are loaded with material from one afternoon's work. That's the leverage.

Conferences are where people's filters come off. A keynote speaker makes a claim that's either brilliant or deranged. A panellist contradicts the person sitting next to them. Someone on the expo floor casually mentions a number that makes your eyes widen.

Don't just note it. React to it. Write 500 words the same day. Agree, disagree, add the context the speaker left out. The point isn't to quote people, it's to use what they said as a springboard for your own perspective.

Timing is everything. A hot take published on the day carries ten times the weight of one published the following week. By then, everyone's moved on and you're essentially writing a love letter to a party that's already ended.

Conference sessions range from genuinely excellent to "that was a 30-minute product demo disguised as a thought leadership talk." So write reviews that acknowledge this reality. Not nasty, honest. What was the core argument? Did the data hold up? What was missing? What does it actually mean for the people in the room?

This is the kind of content that builds a real following, because you're saying what your audience is already thinking. Half the room had the same reaction you did. Be the one who writes it down.

Smaller, more focused events where the sessions tend to be meatier and the audience is paying closer attention. A thoughtful review of a talk at Vervaunt Pulse carries weight because the people who were there will recognise whether you actually got it right.

After every event, synthesise what you actually heard, not the keynote highlights, those are already plastered across everyone's LinkedIn, but the undercurrent. What kept coming up in conversations? What are agencies worried about that they're not saying publicly? What did you notice merchants asking about for the first time?

A "What We Actually Heard at Shoptalk 2026" report, based on corridor conversations and dinner debates rather than press releases, is the kind of thing people will genuinely hand over their email for. Because it's qualitative intelligence you can't get from a Google search. It's the stuff that was in the room but never made it onto the record.

Events are the one time your ecosystem is physically in the same place. Use it. Sit down with someone, SaaS to agency, agency to agency, doesn't matter, and have a proper conversation on camera. Not a joint sales pitch. An actual discussion about what you're both seeing.

This does the work twice. You get the content, and the other party shares it with their audience. Suddenly you're in front of people who'd never have found you through your own channels. And because it's a conversation rather than a testimonial, it doesn't feel like marketing. Even though, obviously, it is.

I've got a hit list for each event, partly for Waye, mainly for clients. People I want to sit down with, questions tailored to what each client needs. One client might need conversations with agency partners to fuel their channel strategy. Another might need merchant perspectives for a research piece. The event is the same; the briefs are different. If you're going to be at Shoptalk, Pulse, or the EAG Summit and you fancy being part of this, you know where to find me (at the nearest bar).

Everyone writes an event recap. Most of them are so interchangeable they could be generated by feeding the event agenda into a blender and pouring the result onto a Canva template.

So don't write one. Write about what the event didn't cover. What was conspicuously absent? What should have been on stage but wasn't? What's the elephant in the room that everyone discussed at the bar but nobody mentioned from the podium?

"Three Things Nobody Mentioned at eTail West" is a better headline than "Our Top Takeaways from eTail West" and everybody knows it. More importantly, it gives your audience something they can't get from the fourteen other recap posts already clogging up their feed.

None of this happens by accident. The difference between companies that extract real content value from events and companies that come home with nothing but a dead phone battery is a single document: a pre-event content brief.

It doesn't need to be fancy. It needs to answer five questions.

What are we making? Be specific. "Three hallway interviews, two hot take posts published same-day, one trend radar published within a week." Not "some social content."

Who's doing what? One person films. One person writes. If it's the same person, accept that you're getting half the output and plan accordingly. If it's just you, as it often is for smaller agencies, pick two formats and do them well rather than five formats badly.

Who do we want to talk to? Name ten people. Research them beforehand. Know what you want to ask. Winging it at conferences produces content that sounds like it was winged.

What's the publishing schedule? Some things go live during the event. Some go live the week after. The trend radar might take a fortnight. Write it down so nobody's guessing.

What equipment do we need? You don't need a film crew. A decent phone, a £20 lapel mic from Amazon, and a tripod will get you ninety percent of the way there. If you're spending more on kit than on the flights, you've overcomplicated it.

Here's where this gets properly interesting. One event, treated this way, fuels a content calendar for two to three months. I'm doing three major events in the coming weeks, producing content across multiple client accounts and Waye's own channels. If I execute this properly, that's several businesses' worth of content strategy sorted through to summer, built entirely on material that's original, timely, credible, and impossible for anyone else to replicate.

That last bit is what makes this a genuine service, not just a nice idea. Your competitor can write the same blog posts as you. They can target the same keywords. They can produce the same style of gated report. But they can't replicate the conversation captured on the floor at Shoptalk, because they weren't the ones holding the mic. They can't recreate the reaction piece published while the session was still fresh, because they didn't have someone there whose job it was to capture it. They can't manufacture the credibility that comes from having been in the room.

This is the difference between content that ranks and content that resonates. Between content people find and content people share. Between a marketing function that's publishing to fill a calendar and one that's building an actual perspective over time.

Events aren't just networking with better catering. They're the richest content source in your entire mix. But only if you stop treating the lanyard as the point and start treating it as the press pass.

I'm Will, founder of Waye. We help ecommerce agencies and SaaS companies create marketing that doesn't blend into the beige, including turning your event presence into a proper content strategy. If you're heading to any of the events above and want someone there who'll actually come home with something useful, let's talk.