How Vendelux Built a Content Engine Around Event Marketing Intelligence

Creating content for a new category presents a unique challenge: you’re not just competing for attention, you’re educating the market about a problem they might not know they have. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Alex Reynolds shared how Vendelux approaches this challenge in the event intelligence space.

Understanding the Event Marketer’s Journey

Before building their content engine, Vendelux needed to deeply understand their audience. “We call these marketers the unsung heroes,” Alex explains, “because if everything goes right at an event, then you’re nothing. But if the coffee is cold or the booth isn’t set up on time, then they get all of the blame.”

This insight led to content that addressed both strategic and tactical needs – from ROI measurement to event execution details.

Building Content Around Event Intelligence

“We do content marketing largely around events,” Alex shares. “We have event guides, we have content around industries. So the best AI events, the best tech events that performs well for SEO and it’s really valuable information.”

Their content strategy focuses on answering real questions that event marketers face. “We see that two to four weeks before any show, people want basic information, even something as simple as what’s the dress code for this event? And so we’ve looked at the most commonly asked questions around events and we’ve created guides around that.”

Creating a Community Through Content

The content strategy serves multiple purposes. As Alex notes, their content “drives lead generation as well as free user signups.” They’ve built a community of “roughly 7000 event marketers who are in that community who are able to access basic functionality.”

This approach creates a virtuous cycle: content attracts users to the free tier, which builds credibility for the category, which in turn makes the content more authoritative.

Addressing the Full Event Lifecycle

Vendelux’s content strategy mirrors their product vision. “Today, we focus very much on the pre-event, everything with planning, but there’s roughly a 40 month end-to-end journey that our customers are going through,” Alex explains.

This journey spans “planning for next year’s events, a year of events, pre-event, during event, post-event, and then the ROI measurement, which can take anywhere from six to 18 months per event.” Their content map covers this entire journey, providing value at each stage.

Educational Content as Category Creation

The content strategy supports Vendelux’s larger mission of transforming event marketing from a cost center to a strategic function. When Alex explains that “event marketers tend to have a large budget… 24% to 40% of the B2B marketing budget is in events,” it highlights why educational content about maximizing this investment is so valuable.

Their content helps validate the need for event intelligence by highlighting both the scale of event investment and the current lack of tools to optimize it.

From Tactical to Strategic

The content journey mirrors the transformation they want to create in the industry. Starting with tactical needs – like event dress codes and basic logistics – they progressively introduce more strategic concepts about measuring and maximizing event ROI.

This progression helps event marketers envision a more strategic role for themselves, similar to how “Gainsight took the account management function and essentially turned that into customer success,” as Alex describes.

Key Lessons for Category Creators

Vendelux’s content strategy offers several insights for founders creating new categories:

1. Start with immediate pain points before introducing category vision
2. Create content that serves both tactical and strategic needs
3. Use free content to build community and credibility
4. Map content to the full customer journey
5. Progressive education from tactical to strategic topics

The goal isn’t just to attract readers – it’s to create a new way of thinking about the problem you’re solving. Sometimes, that starts with something as simple as answering what to wear to an event.