• One billion hours of video viewed on YouTube every day
• Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook daily
• Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80% year over year
• Videos are six times more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than photos, and three times more likely to receive retweets than GIFs
• Snapchat has 10 billion daily video views

Here’s how video marketing can boost your social media marketing plan for events:

1. Broadcast live and get more attention

Using the ‘Facebook Live’ feature, you can broadcast videos to your audience in real-time. Apart from Facebook, social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope also provide the live video feature.  You can rope in your event’s performing artists and use this feature for promotion in the run-up to the event.

According to Facebook, users spend 3x more time watching live videos than videos that aren’t broadcast in real-time.  Your Facebook followers automatically opt-in to get notifications when you are “going live” which further increases visibility. Once your live broadcast is complete, you can upload the video to your timeline for those users who missed it. This feature is also helpful to give a sneak peek of your event to potential attendees who might show interest at a later point in time.

2. Grab attention early and sell tickets quickly

It’s important to grab the attention of your audience within the first 10 seconds or less, failing which they’ll stop watching your videos and move on. Within the first few seconds, you must convey the purpose of the video to your viewers and also offer some interesting information about your event, like early-bird discounts, and offer for meet-n-greet with artists, etc. You should capture interest during the first or second frame of the video before users have a chance to scroll away.

3. Optimize for search to garner more views

As you would have noticed, most social media platforms have inbuilt search options wherein you can search using terms such as hashtags. Consequently, make sure that your videos are SEO optimized to get noticed in the search engines of these platforms as well as external search engines. To make sure your videos are optimized, add proper headline and description to your video posts. Also, add relevant hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to boost search results. On YouTube, apart from the title and description you can add keyword tags to your videos.

4. Keep clear call-to-action in your videos

A call-to-action is an invitation to your viewers to take action which is why you should end your videos with a bang. Video content marketing needs to garner certain user actions, whether it is getting them to visit your event, share your video, or purchase an event ticket. The most effective place to add a call-to-action in your video is at the end. While creating videos, you must define a proper flow viz. ‘Introduction – Content – Call-to-action’. Keeping call-to-action at the end helps to motivate them to take your desired action.

5. Take your audience behind the scenes

The reason your audience follow you on social media is to know you better and get glimpses of how you run your business. When you do the latter, they connect with your brand. Once they get connected to your brand, it improves brand loyalty which is vital to growing your business.

So, showing videos such as behind-the-scenes, artists performing rehearsals, or the crew setting up the event – can garner interest and brand familiarity as well as engage your audience.

6. Capitalize on trending topics and hashtags to boost engagement

Like all other posts on social media, you need to leverage trending hashtags and topics while posting your videos. Capitalizing on these can help you connect with your audience regularly and eventually lead to fulfilling 3 content-goals. Delivering content that interests your audience, increase engagement level, and boost the number of views for your videos.

7. Run video ads to a targeted audience

You can run video ads to a targeted audience, including relevant users whom you haven’t already connected with on social media and get them excited about your upcoming events. Marketing videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have ad options that focus on increasing  views and engagement.

If you want to be sure about your video ad campaign, make sure your YouTube marketing is on point. If you get good engagement and views after posting a video on your page, you are more likely to get better results when you turn that video into a video ad campaign. It will eventually help you save a lot of money, which you can otherwise use to promote your event on other channels.

To sum up

After having implemented the above elements if you do not check the performance of your videos, all efforts go in vain. Monitor video analytics components such as the number of views, reach, average view completion rate, average view duration, etc. – to keep a tab on the effectiveness of your videos.

To sum up, video marketing stands out as one of the most in-demand forms of marketing currently. If you aren’t including videos in your social media mix right now, you are incurring a lost opportunity.

The post 7 Ways to Leverage Video Marketing for your Events appeared first on Yapsody.

PERSONALIZED DIGITAL MARKETING

After you’ve spent the past few hours browsing evening gowns on online stores, all websites you visit next will have advertisements showcasing discounts on evening gowns at various websites. Co-incidence? Nah! Personalized digital marketing.

As an event presenter, you could also segment your customers based on their past experiences with you or their preferences. Simple things like including their names in the subject lines of email newsletters, or greeting them with a “Welcome Back!” if they’re visiting your page for the second time, these things create a lasting impression and you’re bound to get higher conversion rates.

SIMPLIFIED METRICS

Event presenters practically breathe data and analytics to measure their progress, and to ensure their ways are working. The budget, revenue generated from selling event ticket, attendee reports, and engagement analytics are some of the many figures that are always buzzing at the back of your head. Data collection is not a big task, analyzing and utilizing it is. If you have an event at Yapsody, you can use YapStats to get all the numbers related to your event integrated into a single app, so that analyzing it in a single glance doesn’t sound like an overstatement.

SEEING BEYOND “ASL”

Ever logged on to a stranger chatting website and talked to someone? There are very few people who’d actually be interested in your name or your hobbies, or even greeting you for that matter. The first question they ask you would be – ASL? (short for age, sex, location). It is obviously very cold and unwelcoming, and makes you want to disconnect the very next moment.

This is a common mistake that event organizers need to accept and move on from. Grouping customers based on demographics is NOT in trend now. Every attendee wants to be acknowledged by his identity, his personal interests and goals, and not just a number. Add some personal touch to the way you invite your potential attendees, the way you communicate with them and consider their ideals. This will add definite value to your event as well as your organization.

BEING ‘RESPONSIVE’

While it definitely implies responding to your attendees in as little time as possible, the tech-savvy generation is familiar with the pun attached to the term. Your online content is supposed to be responsive, i.e. it should look good on any device that your attendees may use. Event websites, emails, networking platform, speaker profiles – all should be optimized for viewing on the big as well as small screens. Because the world today is way smarter, ensure that online content pertaining to your event is optimized for smartphones and tabs of all kinds.

USING WORD-OF-MOUTH SERIOUSLY

“But… I’ve always been serious about that!”

Of course, you have. But, there’s always scope for betterment, isn’t it?

Word-of-mouth is the BEST (no amount of bolding, italicizing, or underlining could stress on just how important it is) marketing tool. It is organic, and cannot be faked, but you have to roll out referral programs to actually get it going. When attendees are given the opportunity to earn rewards for simply referring the event to their friends or colleagues, you’re turning them into brand ambassadors. The more brand ambassadors you successfully enable, the more you’re going to be promoted.

DEVOUR TECHNOLOGY

Yes, eat it up till you’re satiated! Almost every task can be automated to save time and increase efficiency. Event managers who are too far ahead in the technical marathon even use drones to capture images that professional photographers are unable to. Further, there are innumerable apps that do most of the updating and calculating business for you without you putting in anything except your login details. Find out technological developments in the event industry and make complete use of them.

SKIP THE SPREADSHEETS

Spreadsheets are huge necessities, and give just as huge headaches when they are color-coded, complex, and multi-tabbed. Maybe you can never entirely get rid of them, but you can definitely skip the part where you have to manually edit them. There are apps that automatically update your list of registrations and separate out attendees based on whether they’ve paid or no, or are returning customers, and many other filters.

OUTSOURCING

Now that we’re talking about getting everything done ‘automatically’, let’s talk about the humans who fill in for these robots that you fancy – freelancers. Often, deadlines aren’t met because a few things were left hanging and weren’t achieved on time, be it a promotional video, or a logo for the event, or a simple blog post. With websites like Fiverr and Taskrabbit, you can get a list of people who’d do these little jobs for you for as less as $5, hence relieving you of the stress that these little pesky pests bring with them.

In conclusion, all the above points focus on one primary thing – personalization. The event organizers who look into the depths of the needs and requirements of their target audience, and try to relate with them on a personal level often find the best solutions and strategies to make things work in their favor. Your ultimate goal should be to create an unforgettable experience that touches the lives of your attendees. Anything that distracts you from this goal can be outsourced.

The post Innovative Event Organizing Measures appeared first on Yapsody.