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Doing social but not doing video? Then you’re missing a huge opportunity to promote your events to a wider audience.
According to our recent Pulse Report, video is the most effective social promotion tactic of all. Only 3% of those who used video to promote their events last year didn’t find it effective as a promotional solution.
If you’ve not produced video content before, it can certainly seem daunting. However, it needn’t mean giving up masses of time and money – you can produce effective content in minutes, utilising free or low-cost tools.
To show you how, we’ve gathered four event creator case studies. These real-life examples highlight different ways video can be used and explain how to measure the success of video marketing.
Case Study 1:
Jack Terry, VHR
“VHR is an international technical recruitment company. We use video to promote all the events we host, as well as vacancies and opportunities within the business. We find it to be a more engaging medium than others and allows us to communicate quickly and effectively, in places that we know our audience will be
“One of our best events to date was ‘Inside The Red Arrows’, held last October, and our marketing team believes this is largely down to the power of video. We created two short videos to promote the event and they were used on social media and our website, accompanied by a link to our Eventbrite registration page.
“Our key metric when we use video to promote events is always the level of attendance. Exposure is also important for us. We got 1,342 views on our Eventbrite page and sold 114 tickets. LinkedIn was by far our most successful avenue for gaining impressions, with 19,875 impressions and 94 clicks.
“We also filmed the event, live-streaming it to our audience via Facebook Live, which achieved 3,460 impressions and 111 engagements. We’ve also been able to utilise these videos as collateral post-event to engage with new and existing audiences.”
Case Study 2:
Jennifer Wright, BlueSky PR
“The three main ways we use video are: to promote events, as an enhancement to traditional blog content and as a social media teaser. However, our use of video is constantly expanding (such as documenting client case studies and testimonials) in line with the increasing popularity of video.
“We find that videos on social drive the most engagement in terms of event sign-ups – on Twitter, in particular, we have had a lot of success in achieving webinar signups from our teaser style videos. These are really quick and easy to create – I’m talking a matter of minutes – using a tool called Lumen5.
“One of the key things to increasing video effectiveness when promoting events is to get the main stakeholders involved both on and off screen – employee advocacy, and event stakeholder advocacy where there are stakeholders outside of your company, hugely increases the reach of your video. You’ll notice increased impressions and hopefully increased click-throughs, shares and overall engagement.
“But how do you really know it’s working? For us, tracking the source of event sign-ups is the real measure of success. We do this by creating an Eventbrite promotional tracking link or a Google campaign URL that we include when we post the videos on social.”
Case Study 3:
Antonia Taylor and Helen Perry, Elevate
“Elevate is a creative events series for small businesses, freelancers and bloggers. We’ve found video has helped strengthen our brand and created a clearer sense of the experience we’re aiming to offer through our workshops. We’ve focused on the video features for Instagram as this is really where our audience hangs out – from chatting to camera on Instagram Live to animated slideshows and self-produced IGTV videos. We’re both frequent Instagram Stories users – check out @notaboutthekids.
“Smartphone video is absolutely fine for any brand. There’s actually a move against over-produced video, towards reality over perfection – look no further than The Guardian’s incredibly successful Instagram presence, ditching laborious production in favour of authenticity. Video editing apps like InShot are designed to make your content fit perfectly on Instagram Stories – or any video platform – and are great at adding interest and variety, such as a soundtrack.
“Instagram’s video features are an effective way to broaden engagement opportunities – they boost views, shares and direct messages and we’ve been able to have really effective conversations with our Elevate community as a result.
“We’ve found sharing great video content with our event partners to be super-effective too. It enhances their content strategies so it’s essentially a value-add that we can bring to the partnership. If 80% of website traffic’s going to be video by 2020, we all need to get strategic about how we build video into event marketing.
“We work with small businesses and start-ups that are terrified of getting in front of the camera. They’re scared of adding to a noisy market, so they opt out but it’s simply about thinking, ‘What can I bring to the conversation that’s helpful, entertaining or educational?’”
Case Study 4:
Jack Hersh, The Blues Kitchen
“We find video is generally the most effective way of selling tickets; a video can explain to people what the event is about without them having to read anything. Given how difficult it is to grab people’s attention on social media, if we can do this by posting a video it makes the job of selling tickets a lot easier.
“When promoting well-known artists, a short clip of them performing always does well with audiences who know them. When we’re promoting, say, a Fleetwood Mac Special, we tend to convert old Fleetwood Mac footage into a promo video for the night.
“We always post our videos on Facebook and Instagram. We’ve learned they shouldn’t be longer than 10 seconds and should only contain crucial information about what each one is promoting. These types of video should need no more than 30 minutes to produce.
“We spend a bit more on production when making videos to promote the overall venue as this is something that reflects on us more significantly. As we put events on each week, it’s not always possible to invest a lot of time in video production as our designers have limited time to do this. Neither is it worth it.
“One can look at the success of video marketing in different ways (video views, likes/comments/shares, landing page views or ticket sales). I generally look to use video views and landing page views to then re-target with further video footage. This audience is clearly engaged and is likely to be interested in what we’re offering, therefore these are the people we ought to be focused on when selling tickets.”
Conclusion
With the plethora of video production apps available for your phone – and homemade video content performing just as well as professional – this valuable medium is at the disposal of any event creator.
All it takes is a little bit of imagination – and perhaps a little bit of confidence to get in front of the camera – and you can massively amplify your message. Integrate video into your social strategy and watch your audience grow!
