Stream your event without sacrificing live attendance

Common sense has it that providing a live stream of your conference can kill rather than attract attendees to your conference. After all, if they can watch it at home why pay for a ticket and come along in person?

That doesn’t have to be true. In fact, if you have a strategy and the right approach to live streaming, it can be a fantastic asset to your event marketing and promotion. It’s all about how you live stream, why you live stream and the story you’re trying to tell about your event.

Here are just six – among many – ways you can use live streaming that won’t kill your live attendance numbers and will help you to attract genuine interest in your event.

1. Live stream the big moments of your conference to promote to a wider audience

If you’re organising an industry or professional conference you will often have specific highlight key-notes that have much wider appeal than the rest of your conference. You can use these moments to drive a much wider audience to a well-timed live stream. This really works if you have big-name speaker and use social media to attract attention from news journalists and others to your live stream.

2. Use Facebook Live to give people a taste of the conference

Facebook Live is a cheap and effective tool to show off your event to an online audience. If you use it well. By concentrating on selective content. And planning your coverage and event story before streaming. It can offer reportage from the conference floor or sneak peeks of speeches. For those who don’t have a well-used, active Facebook community for your conference. You might look at inviting those that do – and giving them the chance to use Facebook Live at your event.

3. Make the conference the star of the live stream

Rather than concentrating on the plenaries you can use a live stream to focus people’s attention on how great your a place your event is to go to and be part of. This works really well for conferences that know their audience is mostly interested in the conversations and networking opportunities it provides. You can do this with roving interviewers or with panels. And with occasional sweeps across busy halls to excite interest.

4. Use live streaming to promote your conference

Live streaming can play an important role in promoting your event in the weeks and months before it arrives. By hosting short chat events or specific lures that will attract specific segments of your conference audience. Live streaming can become an effective promotional tool. By creating a registration page to collect leads it can feed your marketing automation too.

5. Link up parallel conferences

Some event managers hold repeat or parallel events to offer the same conference content when audiences can’t or won’t travel to a single event. Live link-up – effectively two-way web conferencing to link different conference spaces. Offers one way to bring this content together and share speeches or hold group discussions. In turn, you’re able to attract potentially larger audiences to the same core-conference content.

6. Live stream to new audiences

If you are trying to broaden the appeal of your conference to a segment of the market who don’t currently attend. Why not use a live stream to offer a select audience the opportunity to watch key plenaries? Again, you can use lead capture to drive your marketing to those who are most interested.

Therefore if you’d like to find out more about using live streaming for your events. And get more help on how you can effectively use webcasting. Please visit Alpha Media Events, subscribe to our blog, and get in touch.