Recently, we had the pleasure of chatting with Martin Renaud, Head of Production at video production company Freedom Potential.
Specialising in live-streaming and hybrid events, Martin and his team have worked with some the most reputable speakers and educators in Australia, as well as several ASX listed companies like Citigold, The Motley Fool, and brands like BMW, Barry Plant and S-Force.
Check out what Martin had to say about the tech required for a quality hybrid or live-streamed event, video marketing for events, and how you can keep online attendees engaged and attentive.
There are some basics for the online components of hybrid events that need to be met to retain and engage the audience as long as possible on the livestream. We’ll call this the live-streaming etiquette:
All the successful live events producers use techniques to keep the audience attention. The same amount of craft is required online and in hybrid scenarios. Make sure to have online moderators and contributors on your team during a live event to engage participants, especially if you are running a sales event! Then think of Q&A, polls, live chat, virtual hot seats, break out rooms and other techniques to keep it interactive. We’ve devised many effective techniques over the 250+ events we produced and we can help you select the freshest ideas, most appropriate for your event.
Apart from the video funnels we create with ad content, FAQs, educational material and call to actions, we are very strong advocates of repurposing long form content. We are literally building the tools for that, as we are launching our automatic editing platform called Edit on the Spot. It will capture any livestream and repurpose its content while you are still recording with our AI models that create clips in multiple formats to share instantly during the event.
In the era on instant gratification the best way to market your event is to organise a campaign during the event! DMs, Reels, multicasts of certain segments of your events (while others are for registrars only), creates FOMO and increases your hip factor.
The best analytics for hybrid events are the ones for which objectives are set in preparation of the event and that help track the results expected for the event.
If it’s a sales event: how many sales calls have been booked? How much sales? Which items sold best?
If it’s an awareness campaign: How many shares? How many new subscribers? Concurrent viewers? How long did the online viewers remained engaged?
Apart from the technical challenges mentioned above, most of the challenges of hybrid events are elements that create friction with the audience, both live and online. Here are some examples:
One thing we hear regularly from companies that are less experienced with hybrid events and are risk adverse, is that they hesitate to offer an online option by fear of not filling their venue. This is until they realise that when running a hybrid event, your livestream becomes an incredible marketing tools before, during and after the event. You can expect to increase your audience and impact by going hybrid!
We are a video production company specialised is live streaming and hybrid events with turnkey solutions. We assist you along the entire process of producing your event, negotiating a venue and selecting A/V equipment/team, setup your campaign, impact strategies and delivering an impeccable production. We have captured over 250 events in the past 3 years from a 90 min presentation in a meeting room to a 9-days multi-stream hybrid conference and events in the largest ballrooms in Australia.