Badge scans and a tote bag are the standard souvenir from sponsoring an event. Jillian Hoefer walked away with six months of content instead.

Jillian is Director of Content at UserEvidence, the platform built for customer evidence, advocacy, and references. She's the entire in-house content team, supported by a lean bench of freelance and agency partners. We'd been connected on LinkedIn for a while, and when she shared how one event sponsorship had turned into six months of content, I knew I wanted to get her on the podcast.

On the surface, the idea sounds almost simple: sponsor a podcast booth at someone else's industry event, record six conversations, then repurpose them into months of content. But as Jillian explains, that's only part of it. The real work starts long before anyone presses record, and it carries on long after the event is over.

In this episode, Jillian walks us through her four-step approach to repurposing event content, from choosing the right guests and preparing for short interviews to building a content pipeline that keeps delivering long after the event has finished.

CyberMarketingCon had a podcast booth up for grabs as a sponsorship perk. The most logical way to use it would’ve been to record a few episodes between sessions and call it a win. UserEvidence built the entire sponsorship around it instead, with first right of refusal over the booking calendar, and walked in with a number already fixed in their heads: six months of content, from one day.

Jillian calls it a content marketer's dream, and it's easy to see why.

Six interviews.

One podcast booth.

A branded step-and-repeat behind every conversation. She'd spent years on the agency side helping other B2B brands get more out of their podcast content, so she knew exactly what it takes to leave an event with more than a folder of footage nobody opens again. The same thinking applies to interview-based content more broadly, which is why we put together our ultimate guide to expert interviews. 

Running your own event still buys you things sponsorship can't, full control of the attendee list, the agenda, the room. What that costs in time and budget is easy for B2B marketing teams to underestimate, and it's exactly what sponsoring someone else's event lets you skip.

Trust is the hard part in cybersecurity marketing… and marketing as a whole. Buyers don't exactly arrive expecting to believe what you're about to tell them, so that's where Jillian started. Before there was a guest list or an interview schedule, there was a single question: how do you, as a marketing leader, build trust with people who are naturally skeptical of you?

That question ended up doing far more work than you'd expect.

It gave the team a way to decide who belonged in the studio and what each conversation should explore. It also made the outreach much easier. Jillian admits that asking someone if they'd be interested in a 20-minute podcast interview can feel like a pretty big ask, especially if they've never done one before. But asking whether they'd be open to sharing their perspective on a topic they care deeply about? That's a completely different conversation.

The thesis also saved them from a problem that often shows up after the event. Six interviews can easily become six unrelated pieces of content, with someone trying to stitch them together afterwards. Because the theme was decided up front, every conversation was already pulling in the same direction.

There's something useful in that beyond event marketing. A good thesis shapes the content your audience sees. A great thesis shapes dozens of decisions behind the scenes, from the people you invite to the questions you ask, and eventually, the stories you're able to tell.

Jillian called it "light stalking," and honestly, it’s probably the only way to be intentional about who you ask to be part of the content. Once the thesis was set, the team was looking for two things in the same person: a right fit for UserEvidence's ideal customer profile, and someone with a distinct point of view worth putting on tape.

They couldn't pick one and let the other slide. A perfect-fit account with nothing interesting to say made for a dud interview, and Jillian was blunt about the tradeoff: they couldn't have six dud interviews just because they were good-fit accounts. Six months of content needed six real conversations, not six names that looked good on an attendee list.

So the research got specific.

Who was keynoting. Who was leading a roundtable or a smaller breakout session. Who had a LinkedIn post sharp enough to stop the scroll and make a case for itself.

The people running the biggest sessions were often too busy to pull aside, since owning the whole show left no time to sit in a podcast studio between slots. Speakers on smaller panels and breakout sessions turned out to be a better bet: real authority on the topic, with more room in their schedule to say yes.

It took longer than grabbing whoever was standing nearest the booth when the mic was free. Six months of content was the return on that time.

Don't word vomit.

That's Jillian's whole rule for the ask, so no list of seven questions up front, no full itinerary laid out before someone's even said hello, and no asking a stranger to commit to an unknown. There should be enough effort to make the invitation feel considered, not mass-sent… even if it is.

Wording matters more than most people give it credit for. Where there's a mutual connection, use it. Where there isn't, anchor the message to the event itself. Jillian referenced CyberMarketingCon by name in her outreach, so it read as an ask about something specific instead of another cold pitch landing in an inbox already drowning in AI-written outreach.

The other piece is giving people a reason to say yes. That might be a strong point of view, a session they're leading, or a post that made you want to hear more. The invitation can then stay light, with questions coming later, once they've agreed to the conversation. Nobody needs to prepare seven answers just to decide whether they want to be part of it.

It’s worth noting that not every one of Jillian’s messages landed the first time. For the ones that didn't respond, she followed up on LinkedIn rather than letting the conversation die in their inbox.

The result held across all six invitations: six yeses, and nobody ghosted them entirely.

Once someone says yes, that’s where the real prep work starts. Great prep equals great content, and that means giving every guest what they need before they ever walk into the studio.

A prep doc covers the practical stuff, where to find the studio, who to look for, phone numbers to make everyone feel comfortable, alongside the questions you're thinking of asking and a sense of how the conversation will flow. The aim is to make it feel conversational, not like a rigid Q&A.

A 15-minute pre-call can help too. It doesn't need to be mandatory, but it gives the host and guest a chance to get comfortable before the cameras and microphones are on. With six guests, one studio, tight time slots, and people trying to get to other sessions, there isn't much room for that on the day itself. You don't want to be barking questions and explaining the flow while someone is getting mic'd up in a studio they've never seen before.

Three days before the event, send one final email with the time slot, a contact number, a map to the studio, and a quick invitation to flag any changes. Afterward, send a thank-you that week with a definitive go-live date and a note about when you'll follow up with content they can share. It keeps the relationship moving while making sure nobody is left wondering whether the interview ever happened.

Past Jillian did the work. Future Jillian gets to ride easy.

Jillian likes an 80/20 rule here. About 80% of the content is planned before anyone starts recording, which meant she already knew what those six conversations were going to give her. Six full podcast episodes, two or three shorts from each for YouTube Shorts, Reels and LinkedIn, thought leadership posts for the host, and a couple of aggregate blog posts pulling together what six cyber leaders had to say on the same topic.

That last part is where having the thesis matters again.

When all your conversations are built around the same question, it’s a lot easier to look across them for the bigger story. You might have three people saying something similar, or one answer that completely changes the angle. Those are the pieces you couldn't have written before the interviews, but you can plan to look for them.

Then there's the other 20%.

Jillian deliberately leaves that space open because conversations don't always present themselves neatly. Someone says something unexpected, a question takes the discussion somewhere interesting, or a completely different thread starts to emerge. If you've already planned the bulk of the output, then you’ll have the bandwidth to follow it.

The same thinking applies to the production team. Whether you have a video partner or an in-house editing team, they should already know what they were making before the interviews happened. So once the cameras stop, they can get straight into post-production rather than sitting down to work out what to do with a pile of raw footage.

Six interviews with people in the same industry also give you six interviews' worth of sales intelligence, and Jillian nearly forgot they'd done anything with it.

After the event, she pulled together what six cyber marketing leaders had said about their pain points and the plays that were working for them, then turned it into a document for sales and customer success. Pairing those insights with UserEvidence's own research gave her a much more useful starting point for a sales conversation: here's what your peers are dealing with, and here's what our research says too. Does this sound familiar?

People will often talk more freely when you're not actively trying to sell them anything. That gives the content team a useful view of what buyers are struggling with, what they're trying, and what's working. Those insights can be useful well beyond the content itself. For another look at how content can support sales, see our conversation with Freya Ward on building content that sales teams can work with. 

The other asset came from the host's own conversations. Mark Huber, UserEvidence's VP of Marketing, and previous client of Content 10x, was already driving a lot of the company's inbound through LinkedIn. After the interviews, Jillian started feeding him things he'd said during the conversations that he might have forgotten by the time the mic was off. A comment could become a post, and sometimes the person he'd been talking to could be tagged too, giving the conversation another reason to continue.  

That’s the kind of thinking we also explore when we talk about in Why Content Repurposing and Distribution Should Be Built Into Your B2B Content Strategy.  

When Jillian talks about the content she gets the most out of, she keeps coming back to the same combination: original research and real conversations with people in the industry.

Research gives you the data. The interviews give you the context around it, what people are actually seeing, dealing with, and thinking about. When you have both, you can show the numbers and then hear from the people living with the problem.

It also takes work. Original research takes time to run, and booking, prepping, and recording six interviews is hardly a quick afternoon project.

But that work is part of what makes the content harder to replicate. The research gives you something original to say, and the conversations give you real people to say it with.

It's a model Amy has used on the podcast too, particularly when an episode is built around original research. We’ve also covered how to create and repurpose B2B research reports, and how to get more from the work once the research is done. Jillian didn't start leaning into this kind of content until she joined UserEvidence, but she now considers it some of the highest-yield work she's done in content marketing. It's also something she plans to keep building into her content programs. 

Thanks for reading. We hope you found this helpful, let us know on LinkedIn.

Content 10x is the world’s leading authority on content repurposing. Specializing in transforming your content into multiple formats and distributing it across various platforms, Content 10x helps maximize your reach and impact. Our expert team takes your core content and creates a diverse array of high-quality, engaging assets, including videos, podcasts, social media posts, and more. Trust Content 10x to enhance your content strategy and ensure your message is seen and heard by the right audience.

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