If you’re involved in planning a live event, you probably know just how much goes into them. You and your company spend a lot of time and money to create a memorable experience for your audience. So get more out of your event – with video. From growing your audience to marketing and promoting your event, video is one of the most engaging and cost-effective tools you can use to increase ROI.

Pre-Event

1. Teaser Content: Get your audience excited about the event. Demonstrate the value they’ll receive for showing up. Create something high energy, short and easily shareable. Did you capture a previous event? Cut together a sizzle reel from the existing footage.
   
   Going to have a keynote speaker? Do an interview with him or her ahead of time. Have the speaker talk about some of the topics he or she will be touching on at the event.
   
   Announcing a new product or service? Don’t give it away, produce a video that plays up the new advancements and gets people hyped to find out more. Check out this teaser video we produced for Crocs™ before the launch of a new shoe technology. It generated over 13,000 views and over 100 comments on instagram in the lead up to the launch.
2. Speaker Support: Without a doubt, video is vital to your keynote presentation. Events can be chaotic, the right video can ground audience, gain their attention and get them focussed on what’s coming next. This video we created for Jeppesen used surround sound and an ultra wide – 50 foot – screen to get things started on the right foot.

@ The Event

1. Time-lapse: Probably the easiest way to create a social media share from your event. Set up a camera up high where nothing will block the lens. It’s a good idea to run the camera for set up, the event and break down. That’ll give you the most flexibility for the time-lapse afterwards. GoPro cameras are an easy and inexpensive way to pull this off. The ultra wide lens will get the most action in the shot. Plug in the GoPro in to AC power and it’ll run for days. Time-lapse footage came in handy for this Great American Beer Fest recap video.
2. Live Steam: You likely have a larger audience than can attend your event. But your remote audience can virtually attend your event. According to Tubular Insights, viewers spend 8x longer with live streaming content than recorded content. Live streaming content on YouTube or Facebook Live also offers your audience another way to engage with your brand as both platform have live chat and comments features available.
3. Interview Team: Who’s attending your event? You may have the opportunity to create even more content for your brand. Are their customers attending that would be willing to record a testimonial or case study for you? Maybe you have product specialists from multiple regions in the same place for once. Perhaps an expert panel would be interesting to your audience. Often times a run and gun crew can capture audience interactions and quick soundbites form attendees at your event. Consider setting aside a quiet space and building a backdrop to conduct more intentional interviews for case studies or testimonials.  

Interactive & VR: Help your event feel cutting edge, interactive content and virtual reality are some of the newest ways video is influencing live events. Transport attendees from the expo floor to a factory halfway across the world, or down a mine shaft. Set up a green screen booth and send attendees a video of them placed into a new an exciting environment. Better yet, build your event inside an immersive 360 degree screen. One Floor Up has partnered with immersive VR company Igloo Vision to create content for several upcoming events. Their 306 degree screen can fit an audience of 200 inside at one time. That’ll get attendee’s attention.