The past two years have seen the proliferation of virtual events and digital content on a scale we’ve never experienced before, which has led to both opportunities and challenges for event organizers, brands/sponsors, and attendees alike. 365 engagement and “always-on” event communities have become buzzwords within the events industry, as organizers and brands have more ways than ever to connect and engage with their audiences outside of the confines of a physical event — and it’s increasingly essential for them to do so.
Kurt Miller, SVP of Strategy & Planning at experience marketing firm George P. Johnson, notes that when it comes to brand engagement, many brands are looking to host an always-on TV network approach to video content, which can include but isn’t limited to sessions that take place during an event.
“There is a wide variety of content that brands create and distribute, from inspirational storytelling and thought leadership, to the most detailed and technical formats. A lot of the content, especially with the B2B tech clients that I work with, tends to be based around technical offers or solutions to specify a particular set of customer benefits around a product or service,” he explains. “Some of these are best experienced on-demand, and in-depth. Others are more appropriate for bite-sized chunks, and more session-type formats.
“Especially in the pandemic era, there's not a lot of opportunity for face-to-face demonstration, so you have to either rely on videos that are pre-shot — some of them are very highly produced, and some of the more technical ones are simply screen captures and voiceovers, which is an optimal learning experience in many situations — or live sessions that get recorded and put onto the same curated video platform environment.”
Brands will often host their own video environments, but Miller adds that sometimes their content lives online as part of a sponsorship package for another event. And in many cases, “it becomes part of that always-on presence on behalf of the event organizer,” he says, and can live on indefinitely the same way it could if the brand was hosting it themselves.
“As long as that piece of content — whether it's thought leadership or whether it's technical — is deemed relevant and useful in helping to make a decision or influence behavior, it stays online,” says Miller. “It's searchable, whether through organic search or paid search efforts. There are number of methods of outbound and inbound communication, personalization, etc. that help to make more content more useful for a longer time, regardless of the platform or the brand that hosts it.”
As a result of the pandemic, the delineation between event content and digital marketing content has been increasingly blurred, allowing brands to focus on creating content around specialties, personas, specific kinds of technologies, solutions, etc. and not worry so much about the different channels the content might end up on. For example, Miller shares that brands may leverage social media posts with video components that attract people to their longer-form videos “in a way that was largely reserved for online campaigns in the recent past.”
“Now, the way that event experiences — led by digital in the pandemic era — have been planned, they've incorporated those multiple types of video assets,” he says, “and they more seamlessly roll into a cross-channel plan — they’re not just intended only for an online campaign or only for an event, so they become indistinguishable in some ways. And that's been a good thing.”
That said, a big challenge facing brands — and event organizers in general – is the lack of incentive for audiences to attend virtual events live. As digital content is increasingly available on demand and media libraries grow, it doesn’t matter as much whether people tune in when the event is technically live or a couple of days later.
“Deciding from the creator’s point of view, not only how you’re going to create exclusivity and uniqueness for an audience member, but also when and where and how you’re going to host, distribute, and keep alive the video assets all becomes part of a really extended equation that is not as easy as it was two years ago,” says Miller. “And it's certainly much more nuanced than it was in 2019, when we were planning online media as an extension of physical events, and it was much more cut-and-dried, even though it was a multi-channel planning exercise.”
In many ways, the flexibility afforded by virtual events and content is beneficial to all parties involved, but “it puts the decision making and the consumption in the hands of the attendee or visitor,” says Miller, which “can make it trickier for brands and hosts to plan content that is consumed the way they want it by their audiences. It’s harder for them to manage a prominent sense of occasion, like with physical events.”
However, brands have seized the opportunity to focus on doing fewer things, but doing them well, “with a more careful and intentional marketing approach to draw people to those fewer pieces of content,” according to Miller. “I think that it's been a benefit to the brands to have to tighten their focus on how that content is developed, because it really helps them to realize where they need to prioritize in order to move behavior and to move revenue.”
He adds that those fewer, highly produced pieces of content then make for great event content, which can be shared and discussed during a specific time window and can lead into extended media, deeper dives, etc. that are shared as event follow-ups, help to nurture leads, and live on the brand’s always-on content hub.
In the end, Miller emphasizes that most brands — as well as attendees — are craving face-to-face interactions and physical events and experiences, and those will return, with the addition of more robust digital components. He notes that online content hubs and TV-type digital environments were being built even prior to the pandemic as extensions of physical experiences, but efforts were often sidetracked.
“Brands, hosts, and attendees alike were forced into an environment where they had to go experience things on platforms that maybe had not had progressive technology roadmaps since ’13 or ’14,” he says, “and there was an inferior product, in many cases, to disseminate content in these online event experiences.”
Of course, virtual platforms have improved significantly over the past two years, and the opportunity for brands going forward, says Miller, will be “to take the best of both worlds of what was being planned earlier, and what was improved and accelerated over the last two years, and blending it into a true hybridized approach, where physical is the desire for primary event experiences, but events can extend online and over time.”