GPJ has been producing digital events and streaming for over a dozen years, with clients like Cisco, IBM, Dodge and Rodan & Fields. We’ve helped bring content to our clients’ customers wherever they are, and tailored to the medium and audience, whether it was a product launch, a sales meeting or a B to B conference.
One byproduct of the pandemic was that it accelerated the importance of streaming, and very quickly also raised the bar on quality and expectations. As a result, a highly engaging, cinematic stream with an emphasis on leveraging all of the techniques of digital marketing and cable TV broadcasting will be key to the success of many events.
And it just makes sense: who doesn’t want to increase their audience, create content that can be used throughout the year, receive real time feedback, reduce barriers to attendance and control messaging, to name a few of the benefits.
At GPJ, we leverage the best techniques in digital marketing, together with our history of experiential innovation to create engaging, memorable and measurable moments that create relationships and ROI.
Consider Salesforce’s flagship conference, Dreamforce. Because they had previously offered live streams of many keynotes, (and since we’ve been a Dreamforce partner with them for over a dozen years) we were well positioned to partner with them and build on that to produce the first ever, all – Dreamforce To You in 2020.
For 2021 we were able to build on that success to produce a truly best in class hybrid experience with them. There were about 1k attendees on site, but the 120 hours of live streamed “don’t want to miss it” content reached nearly 100 million people from 177 countries. Not only that, the energy, talent, beautiful set design and easily navigable dashboard kept people coming back.
To do this better than anyone else, we engage our deep bench of strategists and digital wizards, and agency partners like NOMOBO, whom we’ve been working with for years, and recently invested a significant minor stake in. (You can read about our partnership here.)
Here are Questions to Consider and suggestions to ensure your content keeps your attendees engaged:
What are we trying to accomplish?
Who is our audience?
What do we want them to get from the experience?
What key messages do we need to deliver?
What actions are we trying to drive?
Ways To Maximize Hybrid:
- Consider Your Options: Take this as an opportunity to reimagine your event strategy.
- It’s not just a livestream: And it’s definitely NOT a webinar. Keep the attendee experience at the heart of everything you create.
- Hybrid Events = Content Studios: Design for both physical experience and broadcast.
- The Power of Live E-Commerce: If driving real-time sales is important to your strategy, ensure a holistic and integrated solution that has secure connectivity to e-commerce and other critical business platforms.
- Measure, Measure, Measure: Virtual events are digital, which means plenty of data. Turn your metrics into actionable analytics to reap the rewards of the format.
- Focus, Integrate, and Maximize: Focus the effort on what will create the biggest impact, integrate systems to create a unified, streamlined experience and then amplify the content across your channels to maximize reach
It’s not easy or simple to produce an engaging, immersive, on brand live broadcast. It’s technically, not to mention strategically challenging, to keep attendees engaged and get them to take action as a result of your broadcast. But it’s not only possible, it’s being done by your competitors.