Video is often thought of as something you just park on your YouTube channel and embed in the various landing pages, emails, social media accounts and whatever other ways you promote your brand.

But, it can also be highly useful for spicing up live events, too, particularly for B2B companies that use live events for promotion. And there are a lot of those, as over ¾ of marketers deem in-person events to be the best marketing tactic at their disposal.

Nothing can take the place of talking with prospects face to face and really interacting with the people you’re trying to build relationships with. Even in this environment videos can be used for greater engagement with audiences.

Let’s check out how to utilize videos in a live environment.

Pre-Event

Before you hold your event, you’re going to want to promote it and that means running a marketing campaign for it. If you have (or are attending) a recurring event, you can use edited footage from past events to make a little “trailer” for it.

If you’re hosting an event for the first time, you may have to get a little creative when making a video to promote the event, but you can do short interviews with key speakers or outline what people can expect to learn and experience from the event.

Once you’ve got your promo video for the event, mail it to your contacts and use the word “video” in the subject line, as that increases your open rates and including a video in your email can increase click-through rates by as much as 200-300%. You can also put them on the landing page for the event and share them on your social media accounts.

After you’ve gotten people excited about coming to the event, you can make a little introductory video for your brand for visitors to get to know it better. But, don’t just stop at telling them about your brand and the event, give them even more value by giving them some tips about the best workshops or speakers to see and even where they can find the best spots in your city for food, drinks and downtime entertainment.

Event

During events, brands can utilize videos to connect with guests in a variety of ways:

Presentations

Inserting a video into a presentation breaks it up and gives attendees something new to concentrate on for a bit, making it more likely that they’ll keep paying attention and effectively process the information coming their way.

Booths

At trade shows and other events where your brand has a booth, having an explainer video for people to watch is a great way to grab attention. (Bonus points if it’s animated.) You can also point them to online videos by printing out QR codes for them to scan with their mobile devices that take them to online videos. This is a clever way to repurpose any older videos you may have.

Live Stream

You probably don’t want to live stream the whole event, but if there are some visually appealing workshops or other things going on that might be of interest to people who could not make it, it will give them a taste of the event.

Make sure you let people know ahead of time that you’re planning to do a live stream and also make it available to watch once it’s done. Be creative and see what you can think of that will get people interested in watching it.

Post-Event

If you’ve taken video throughout the event, you can use some of it as a lead generation tool. If there was a particularly compelling speaker or workshop that you taped, edit the footage into a nice video package and make it available on your website in exchange for an email address.

Just like you can edit together footage to make a preview video for the event, you can also do that to make a “highlights” or recap video of the event to share with both attendees and people who couldn’t make it.

Event marketing is an important part of the B2B marketer’s arsenal and can even be used for B2C marketing. Incorporating video into your event marketing harnesses the attention grabbing power of video. Use it in the lead up to the event, during the event and after the event for full effectiveness. If you need help creating an explainer video for your event, click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)