Many people assume that providing a live stream of your event can have a negative impact on people actually attending. If they can watch it at home why pay for a ticket and come along in person?
This is not always true and depends largely on the type of event. Live streaming can be a fantastic benefit to your event marketing and promotion. It’s all about how you conduct the live stream, what you choose to live stream and the story you’re trying to tell about your event.
Here are a few ways you can use live streaming that shouldn't affect your live attendance and should help you attract genuine interest in your event.
1) Live stream the key moments of your event to promote to a wider audience.
If you’re organising an important event you will often have specific messages or keynotes that have much wider appeal than the rest of your event. Use these to drive a much wider audience to a well timed live stream. This can really work if you have a high profile speaker and use social media to attract attention to your live stream.
2) Use Facebook or Twitter Live to give people a taste of the event.
Facebook & Twitter's Live broadcasting options are free and effective tools to show off your event to an online audience, assuming of course that you produce the broadcast professionally. By concentrating on selective content and planning this before streaming – it can offer good reporting from the conference or event floor or snippets of speeches etc.
3) Use live streaming to promote your event.
Live streaming can play an important role in promoting your event or conference in the weeks and months before it happens. Why not host short live chats that will attract and talk to specific segments of your conference audience? Live streaming is a very effective promotional tool. By creating a registration page for the main event it allows you to collect leads and gauge interest.
4) Link up parallel events
Some event professionals hold repeat or parallel events to offer the same conference content when audiences can’t travel to a single event. A live link-up offers one way to bring this content together and share speeches or hold group discussions. This means you’re able to attract a potentially larger audience to the same core event content.
5) Live stream to new audiences
Are you trying to broaden the appeal of your event to a segment of the market who don’t currently attend? Live streaming allows you to offer a select audience the opportunity to watch key content. You can use lead capture to drive your marketing to those who are most interested.
Find out more about using live streaming for your events – and get more help on how you can effectively use webcasting. Contact us today.