February has been a big month for live events. The BAFTA’s, The Brits, the Super Bowl and of course the Winter Olympics.
Every year, these events seem to get bigger and bigger in terms of scale, promotion and engagement. Those in charge of promoting live events such as these will lean on a tried and tested formula in order to use video to generate, build and maintain interest.
In the last few years, video has undergone a massive transformation led by improved technological capability, our changing media consumption habits, and our increased exposure to video content in our daily lives. It is far and away the most popular medium of communication across businesses, entertainment industries and even socially – it just delivers a much richer and fuller experience.
So, with video the number one tool for communicating to your audience, how can event promoters create and deliver engaging videos across multiple channels to generate/maintain interest – and what would that look like? Let’s look at how different types of video content can be used during the different stages of your event’s lifecycle to deliver the most appropriate message to your audience.
Pre-show
Before your event takes place, all focus is on building interest and/or, in the case of recurring events, regenerating previous interest in the occasion. Using archive footage from previous events or from moments in the history of the featured subject will captivate an audience who are reminded of something they’ve seen, remembered and enjoyed before – therefore bringing more eyeballs to your current promotional messaging and drive more people to attend.
Archive footage can have a wonderful and fascinating influence on people emotionally and for you and your media partners to be able to access, playback and really leverage impactful moments from the past as part of your publicity drive, is sure to increase engagement.
On the day
When the big day arrives, attention should shift to current and upcoming content. Live and near-live content harnesses a completely different emotion from your audience – in recent years, our need to be up to date and constantly connected to the latest information has been heightened and social media has played a crucial role in this.
Providing snippets of live and near-live content before your event starts and during is integral to maximising reach and increasing engagement with your audience – whether they are attending or not:
- To those attending, you can provide clips of additional content over and above what they will experience at the show – including behind the scenes videos, interviews, insights, commentary, and different angles – depending on the nature of the event. This allows you to more easily control the conversation online and generate as many touchpoints with your brand as possible.
- To those not attending, it is possible to enable just as much positive engagement with your event and brand. Your use of video content can allow them to follow the action as if they were there. Whether that is through live broadcast, live clip sharing or near-live highlights – the better you can represent the occasion, the more likely they are to attend next time or discuss the experience amongst peers.
Our sister company, Screenocean recently teamed up with BAFTA’s to deliver live clipping and sharing of content from the awards ceremony through their Imagen platform just last week. Find out more here.
Post-show
Once the curtains have closed, there is more time to produce and curate edited, longer highlights to share holistic recaps of the event direct to your audiences through social media as well as provide access to media partners. This enables you to maximise the reach and exposure of the event as much as possible before attention is drawn away.
Of course, the content that has been produced during the event should be securely stored as valuable archive footage which can be reused when promoting future events.
Delivering different types of content
The strategy above sounds straightforward, and it can be, so long as you have the right tools.
In order to deliver live, near live and archive content to a number of outlets efficiently, you need a reliable, secure and easy to use media portal to store, manage, create clips and distribute large volumes of video files very quickly.
To find out how Imagen’s video management and distribution solution can help you promote and deliver your live events, request a demo here.
