How to delight your attendees with personalized video marketing for events
Personalized video marketing for events is the not-so-secret key to attendee engagement. Despite the fact, not a lot of brands resort to it - partially because they lack the right tools or ideas, and partially because they focus too much on other “proven” tactics to hook their attendees’ attention.
This means two things:
- Many brands are missing out on a huge opportunity to increase attendance rates and engagement levels
- You can pick this low-hanging fruit, exceed your attendies’ expectations, and generate word of mouth
Personalized video marketing for events can do wonders for your brand. What’s even better, you can use it pre-event, during the event, and post-event. It can help you sell out your event and boost your PR coverage organically. But let’s start from the beginning.
Understanding the value of personalized video marketing for events
“A person's name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language”. These wise words come from Dale Carnegie, the best selling author and a pretty well-known name of the 20th century. Come to think of it, the guy probably doesn’t need an introduction.
Anyhow, Carnegie has nicely phrased something that modern marketers are still trying to crack, but it’s actually very simple. The connection we seek from every interaction, including the ones we have with brands, has to be personal and somehow oriented towards us.
This is especially true for event marketing. Think about it. Whether you’re attending a conference, a festival, business event, or a meetup, you are a part of the crowd. When brands recognize your individuality in such a setting, consciously or not - you are likely to develop a more positive attitude towards them. Heck, you’ll probably even grow fond of them.
The biggest advantage of personalized video marketing campaigns for events lies in the fact that you can personalize at scale - all thanks to automation and dynamic fields.
Thinking beyond just names: what to personalize in event marketing videos
Names are certainly the most obvious choice when it comes to personalization. However, there are other things you can consider as well. You can also personalize information like job titles, company names, countries, motivation for attending the event, main interests, etc.
It all depends on the information you collect through forms. Speaking of which, you need to find a good balance between gathering enough info to make an engaging personalized video for your event, but also not to overwhelm the potential attendee or to make them worried about the amount of personal data they are sharing with you.
The more data you gather, the more special will they feel when faced with a personalized video.
Now I’ll share some ideas how you can incorporate personalized videos before, during, and after your event.
BEFORE: Personalized video marketing for events can help you get a better attendance rate
What do you think is the difference in performance between standard outbound email campaigns that invite people to attend an event, and a personalized email invite? I bet you underestimated the power of directly addressing your potential attendees. A personalized email invite leads to 8x more clicks, which means that people appreciate being acknowledged as individuals.
Now imagine if you add a video format to this equation. Personalizing text has become a norm, but seeing your name appear in a video that’s dynamic and engaging… That’s something. That’s an invitation impossible to ignore.
Here's an example we created for a blog post we did a while back:
Depending on your budget and resources, you can create a fully produced video that you can then personalize at scale for your event, or something more modest, but also effective (e.g. simple animated slide invitations with the attende’s name and key information).
Marketo and their Marketing National Summit is a good example of “going all in” when it comes to personalized video marketing for events. They promote their conferences in a way that truly resonates with their target audience. Check out the video here.
As you can see, the video is produced in a way that creates urgency for the recipient, but also makes them feel wanted, like they are the key person everybody’s waiting for.
DURING: Personalized video marketing for events can help you create social media buzz
All great events, no matter if they are educational, business, or sale events, have to include some type of games or activities for people to recommend others to come next year. If you want to learn more about crafting the perfect event experience, I’d suggest you snoop around the TED community and see how it’s done since they are the absolute pros.
You can encourage people to mingle and network by coming up with different ice breakers or photo opportunities. But you know what’s even better? Incorporate personalized video into the mix.
For example, you can set up booths where attendees can get their pictures taken. In contrast to the classical photo booths, these pictures can be automatically inserted into various types of personalized videos.
You can create ten or more different templates where the attendee is shown saying something funny or doing something that’s related to your event’s theme. I am a big advocate for humor in these situations because it can trigger a positive reaction and motivate people to immediately share their video on social media. Humans have an inborn desire to connect with others through laughter.
Of course, if your event is more formal, you can adjust the look, feel, and the message so that everything’s appropriate.
AFTER: Personalized video marketing for events can help you build lasting relationships
Have you ever thought about the power of “thank you”? Well, Harvard scientists did. Turns out receiving even the simplest expressions of gratitude makes us feel a heightened sense of self-worth. This creates a close bond and reinforces our will to do good in the world.
You probably realize what I’m getting at by now. If you’re exploring personalized video marketing for events, it CANNOT go without personalized “thank you” videos.
We all love to feel seen, heard, and appreciated. If you succeed at creating a great event and make every person from the crowd feel special, then you’ve set a fertile ground for long-lasting relationships.
Personalized “thank you” videos are extremely simple to make with the right tool. As I already mentioned, you can scale personalization and automate everything. You don’t even have to know how to code.
The beauty of “thank you” videos is that you can build upon the positive event experience that you created for your attendees. Moreover, you can catch them at the time when they are experiencing something I like to call the “event afterglow”. You know - that’s that feeling when you’re just full of impressions and highly energized after intense sessions and interaction with a bunch of interesting people.
That’s also a good moment to upsell for the next event, so why wouldn’t you do a 2 in 1 personalized "thank you" video and also invite your attendees to sing up for an ultra-early bird ticket for the next conference? Conversion rates will go through the roof if you do it right.
Personalized video marketing for events is easy with Plainly
Plainly is a straightforward tool that enables you to create videos on autopilot. It allows you to combine a video template of your choice and any data source (database, spreadsheet, API…) to automate personalized video creation. This makes it perfect for events just like yours.
We actually created a tutorial on how to create a workflow that will send personalized video invitations to your atendees. Want to see this live? Book a 15-minute demo and try Plainly immediately after the call.
