Events are important, and everyone involved in an event – attendees, coordinators, speakers, presenters, and vendors- want the event to be as successful as possible. 70% of B2B marketers consider event marketing to be the most effective content strategy.

Event success is defined by increased sales, packed attendance, a full slate of sales appointments, longer booth dwell times, and more and better quality leads. Video marketing has a huge impact on event success – before, during and after the events.

Planning to incorporate video into all three phases of your event enables you to create an audience, perpetuate success, and exponentially grow your impact through effective post-event video usage. Regardless of the event type, the audience type, or the topic at hand, using video guarantees an increase in desired outcomes.

Remember that your event is, at its root, a narrative – you are telling a story about your brand. While there are so many components of an event that you really don’t have any control over, you do have control over the story you tell. It is through your video usage and media connection- before, during, and after the event- that you have the opportunity to shape your attendees’ (and speakers’ and vendors’) experiences in such a way as to tell a very particular and meaningful story.

The Importance of Planning in Advance

At first glean, it really might seem like events can be filmed on the fly or with limited pre-planning – bare bones skeletal outlines. However, as we can see, there are so many places in which planning ahead is truly essential for the best possible outcome. Creating a checklist of content to be created and having a clear and linear plan for how you are going to get, create, and disseminate your videos can make a world of difference in all three stages of the event.

Before:

• Identify outcomes: the stories you want to tell and the speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, attendees who will best contribute to each story that would ideally emanate from your event. Make a plan and then work the plan.
• A huge benefit to event pre-planning described above is that it ensures an extraordinary content baseline and leaves room on the day to be creative and respond to unforeseen but interesting stories provided by attendees.
• Craft your narrative, ensuring that the story you are telling is on point, attracts and engages the audience you are pitching to, and is in line with what sponsors, attendees, and organizers want out of the event. The more in depth your storyboarding is in the before phase, the easier it will be to plan and structure the rest of the event.
• Plan your save-the-date and countdown content. Have a clear publishing calendar that not only and simply lists dates but also spells out what each regularly posted video is to accomplish.
• Create anticipation. Ideally, each sneak-peek video should be build on the previous video, creating that “can’t-wait” feeling amongst your attendees, speakers, and sponsors.
• Less is more. Use the planning phase as a time to downwardly edit, synthesize your messages and maintain a laser focus on your key points and ideas.
• Event video marketing planning significantly contributes to overall event planning whether you’re producing, sponsoring and, or exhibiting.

During:

• Be flexible and ready to capture the unexpected and yet wonderfully educational, entertaining or informative stories that without fail surface during most gatherings of humans.
• The main event – All of your planning culminates in what goes on during your event. Your foresight here enables you to know what equipment you need, and then do spot checks, and troubleshoot for the smoothest possible presentation. More than anything, anticipating and planning allows you to have minimal stress and maximum productivity.
• Knowing what stories to capture. The majority of event photo and video capture occurs during the event. Having a game plan of who and what to capture, what to look out for, and what to curate allows you to create the feeling of spontaneity without the stress of your event image and video capture actually being completely ad hoc.
• Engaging and involving your participants. At MediaMobz we refer to this element of capture as AGC or Attendee Generated Content and it represents many opportunities. It involves your participants in capturing and telling the event story from their eyes and provides an even greater pool of content for your pop-up video and other storytelling and distribution consideration. And let’s not forget the Andy Warhol moment albeit 15 minutes of fame.

After:

• The gift that keeps on giving. Event video marketing is just that: the gift that keeps on giving to the same future event, other events whether live or

  

  virtual, social media, testimonials and many more applications.

• Retaining attendee attention.  You invested much time in pre-planning every aspect – before, during and after – to your event. Subject to new information that may have been collected at event itself, stick to that gameplan manifested in your publishing calendar to ensure your event is not a simple “one-and-done” exercise forgotten when venue doors close.

Properly done, event video marketing can make a difference in your event by an order of magnitude and significantly contribute to overall event outcome whether you’re the event producer, attendee, exhibitor and, or sponsor. We acknowledge that event video marketing can be a daunting and overwhelming experience for anyone, whether experienced or a newbie.

However, event video marketing need not be troublesome if you consider all that has been written above and pay special attention to the “before” stage to our “before, during and after” event video marketing prescription. Dedicating the hours and legwork ahead of time enables you to create the best event video marketing plan that will not only contribute to but improve your event’s desired outcomes. Event video marketing can and should be one of the most essential tools in your event planning kit.

Your use of Event Video Marketing throughout your event engages participants on an audiovisual level, presents your event story in a format (video) that is quite possibly the best suited for the human brain and enables you to really create the best event – and the best story – possible.