About the AuthorJazeel Badur Ferry is the Co-Founder of Eventifier and serves as its

Chief Executive Officer. Jazeel and his two buddies, Nazim Zeeshan

and Mohammed Saud, founded Eventifier as a smarter way for event

planners and event marketing managers to archive all event photos,

videos, slides, tweets, and conversations in one place.

@acemi10

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Table of Contents

Table of ContentsWhy Should Marketers Care About YouTube?

Useful YouTube Features Most Marketers Ignore

How To Use YouTube Videos for Event Marketing Success

Before the Event

During the Event

After the Event

Why Should Marketers Care About YouTube?

YouTube is the second most-used search engine in the world, and it’s owned by the company that holds the number one spot. Being owned by Google means the search engine giant prioritizes YouTube videos in their rankings, making publishing videos an excellent way to leap ahead in search results for your industry keywords. In addition, your website is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google if it includes a video.

YouTube also happens to be the second largest social network, with over 1 billion users worldwide. It’s second only to Facebook, where one of the most commonly shared types of content is (you guessed it) - YouTube videos. 100 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube per minute, and 6 billion hours of video are watched per month. These aren’t all teenagers watching cat videos - 50% of users watch business-related videos on YouTube at least once a week.

An impressive 75% of users will visit a company’s website after viewing a branded YouTube video, with 90% saying that watching a video about a product aids in their purchase decision-making process.

Email blast click-through rates increase by 2-3 times when marketers include video in the email, with subscriber-to-lead conver-sion rates increasing by 51% in marketing campaigns that include video.

YouTube’s power can be summed up in one word: engagement. 80% of users will watch a video until the end, while only 20% will read written content in it’s entirety. The engagement doesn’t end when the video is done playing - YouTube also drives the most engaged traffic to company websites. Referrals from YouTube have the lowest average bounce rate (43.2%), highest pages per visit (2.99), and longest visit duration (227.8 seconds) compared to every other major social network.

Despite these facts, marketers are largely overlooking the YouTube opportunity, with only 24% of top brands using online video in their marketing efforts

Get a leg up on the competition with our guide on how to use YouTube for event marketing success. In this ebook, we’ll give you the lowdown on YouTube’s many underused marketing features, as well as a blueprint for planning and promoting video content before, during, and after your event.

Useful YouTube Features Most Marketers Ignore

To best leverage YouTube for event marketing, you should be aware of the many features the platform offers to help your content get found, engage your audiences, and get them to take action. Whether your goal is to increase YouTube channel subscriptions, website visits, or event signups - knowledge of the following features will help your brand achieve a more effective YouTube pres-ence.

1. YouTube Channel Customization Options

There are several ways you can customize your YouTube channel . Create a stronger brand experience by going beyond You-Tube’s default color scheme: use custom background images, header images, and colors that match your brand. For a step-by-step on how to do this, check out vidiSEO’s extremely comprehensive tutorial. It also includes free, perfectly-sized PhotoShop templates to use when customizing your YouTube channel!

2. YouTube Video Title and Description

Help your YouTube videos get found by optimizing your titles and descriptions. With people typing millions of search queries di-rectly into YouTube each day and Google favoring video con-tent in their search results - effectively describing your videos is essential.

Less is not more when it comes to your video titles and

descriptions - make these as keyword rich as possible! YouTube has a 100 character limit for titles and a 5,000 character limit for descriptions, though only the first 157 will appear in the search result snippet.

Front-load your titles and descriptions, using your most important target keywords early on for the best results. That being said, make sure you are writing for humans first, algorithms second. News flash: the “keyword stuffing” approach to hacking SEO doesn’t work anymore!

A great way to write longer titles that don’t appear overstuffed is the “colon trick”. Start the title with your target keywords, then rephrase your title after a colon. For example: “The Colon Trick: How To Optimize YouTube Descriptions for SEO”.

3. YouTube Video Annotations

Annotations are those translucent text overlays that show up on YouTube videos. They are best used as calls-to-action to get your audience to do things like subscribe to your channel, watch another video, visit your website, or attend your event.

You can get these to show up throughout your video or at key moments for specified amounts of time. Too many of them can overwhelm viewers and distract from your video content, so be sure to not have more than 3 appear in your video at once.

Although there isn’t a character limit for annotations, there is a size limit: they can only cover up to 30% of the player size. You can also customize background colors, font colors, and font sizes. This how-to video from Flyte New Media will show you exactly how to set up and customize YouTube annotations.

4. YouTube Audio Library

The right music can do wonders for your video content, but trying to understand YouTube’s and artists’ copyright rules can be a real headache.

To solve this issue, YouTube launched a royalty-free music library fea-turing 150 songs that can be used for “any creative purpose”. These tracks can be downloaded, remixed, and added to videos - even those created for commercial purposes. Here is a video showing you exactly where to click to access this treasure trove of free and copy-right-free music!

5. YouTube Fan Finder

YouTube Fan Finder is a little-known tool that allows you to advertise your channel to users that YouTube thinks will enjoy your content. However, unlike YouTube pre-roll ads and sponsored search results, Fan Finder is absolutely free!

YouTube allows you to submit up to five channel ads, which are short videos that will ideally compel users to click through and subscribe to your channel. It’s simple to do: just upload a vid-eo, then submit it for review on the Fan Finder page. Here’s a step by step tutorial that walks you through the steps.

Use these videos to clearly explain why viewers should sub-scribe to your channel, making sure to address their question of “what’s in it for me?” Describe the type of videos you post in

a way that compels users to see what your channel is all about. Be sure to hook them right away - just like pre-roll ads, users can skip Fan Finder ads after the first five seconds.

Also make sure to include clear calls-to-action by adding annotations to your video that link users to your YouTube channel. If you’ve followed the previous steps above, viewers should like what they see and be inspired to subscribe to your updates!

6. YouTube Live Events

YouTube has allowed channels with over 100 subscribers to stream live content since 2011, but only in late 2013 did they roll out this feature to the masses. Now, all you need to use YouTube’s live streaming functionality is a verified account. It’s really easy to verify your account, just follow these quick steps.

YouTube Live Events offers a robust set of professional features, many of which are free. Without paying a dime, you can imple-ment things like multiple camera switching, closed captioning, and picture-in-picture functionality.

Live Events offers a great new way to make your YouTube channel more engaging, and is particularly exciting for event market-ers. People that can’t attend your event can tune in via YouTube and get an immersive experience that is the second best thing to being there in person!

Now that you know how to leverage YouTube’s top free features, stay tuned for our post next week on how to make a plan for blowing your next event out of the water with video content!

How To Use YouTube Videos for Event Marketing Success

Once upon a time, around the mid-20th century, people had to physically attend sporting events in order to watch them live. Even though the technology to live stream these games existed, the leagues and sponsors behind them were concerned that if they let people watch from their own homes - nobody would buy tickets anymore.

We don’t have to tell you the rest of that story, in which it became blatantly obvious that televising games actually increased de-mand for tickets to watch from the stadium. Democratizing the live sporting event experience so that anyone with a television set could enjoy it resulted in the creation of more rabid sports fans, with a greater desire to watch their favorite teams from the front lines.

Today’s event marketers can take a clue from this case study and recognize the benefits of using technology to recreate the event experience for those who can’t attend in person. By live streaming and sharing video snippets during your awesome event, you can get those watching from home convinced that they must attend next year. YouTube is the most social and searchable video channel that marketers can use for delivering live stream and short form videos.

The value of YouTube content generated during the event doesn’t end once the closing statements have been delivered and everybody goes home. These assets can deliver value throughout the course of the year, consistently reminding people why they should sign up for the next event. Videos can be repropriated into blog posts and infographics, published on social channels and email newsletters, and promoted on your own digital properties and those of your event speakers and industry influencers.

In this post, we’ll give you some event video ideas, along with tips for promoting them before, during, and after your next event.

Before Your EventYour venue, speakers, and sponsors have been booked - it’s time to think about promotion. How will you get people to come to your event? Before your event begins, the number one goal of your content marketing plan is to compel

people to take out their credit cards and sign up to attend your event.

Create an Editorial Plan for Event Marketing

The best next step at this point is to sit down and create an editorial calendar. Count back the number of days from when your event begins, or when signup time closes, should these dates be different. Depending on how much time you have, you may have the luxury of starting slowly with some teaser videos and building up your event-focused content marketing efforts as the date approaches. If time is of the essence, you’ll have to start your content blitz right away!

Integrate Video Into Your Event Marketing

Besides uploading your videos to YouTube and making sure you’ve SEO-optimized titles and descriptions, you’ll want to publish these videos on your other owned platforms. Plan to write blog posts around your video content, share links to them on your social networks, and integrate them into your email marketing campaigns. Also develop outreach goals for engaging with event speakers, sponsors, and industry influencers - in the interest of getting them to share your content to their audiences. This is also the time to define the unique hashtag for your event - here are some tips we’ve written on how to do exactly that.

What Type of Video Content to Deliver Before the Event?

What kinds of YouTube content should you be promoting at this point? Anything that gets your audience to say “I must go to this event!” Compile videos, photos, quotes - any sort of content from the previous event that can be edited into a highlights reel that shows your audience what they can expect from your next event.

1. Offer Video Tours - You can also publish a video tour of the venue in which your event will take place, give a sneak peak into this year’s workshop or speaker topics, or ask last year’s speakers to film themselves giving testimonials about your last event.

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2. Feature Speakers and Sponsors - This is also a great time to reach out to the speakers and sponsors that will be featured at your upcoming event. Chances are they will be more than willing to co-create content that will help them leverage their association with your event. Reach out to them presenting this as a promotion opportunity - after all, publicity is probably the main reason they’ve decided to get involved with your event in the first place! Get them to film a short introduction on their presentation topic or speak about the benefits of the product or service that they sell. Make this seem less cumbersome to them by clarifying that the videos they provide don’t have to be long. For example, you can create a video compiling introduction videos from multiple speakers or create a set of teaser videos by grouping them by similar presentation topics. You can use short sponsor videos as YouTube pre-roll ads that stream before your event-related video, giving these companies a uniquely targeted promotion opportunity.

During Your EventThe moment we’ve all been waiting for! Your doors open, attendees rush in. It’s too late for new attendees to sign up, but you’ve got a new mission. Much like the NFL tries to make The Super Bowl as exciting as possible for those tun-

ing in from their television sets, your content goal during this time is to recreate the event as best you can for those tuning in from home. Of course, videos on laptops and smartphones won’t capture your live experience in all it’s glory - but here are some ways it can come close.

1. Live Streaming - Live streaming is the best way to provide virtual attendees with an experience that is as close as possible to being there in person. YouTube Live Events is ideal for live streaming your event - whether you have no bud get, a small budget, or one that affords you all the bells and whistles of this robust tool. 2. Share Short Buzzworthy Video Nuggets - Along with live streaming your event in full, generate excitement for the most buzzworthy moments of your event by sharing short video nuggets. Upload these to YouTube and share across all your social platforms as close as possible to the time when they happen. Consider setting up a “social media task force” during your event that dedicates themselves to capturing and sharing these key moments. You don’t have to passively wait in the sideline for these moments to happen - set up mechanisms to create and capture them! Consider

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setting up a videobooth or designated area where attendees can be filmed chatting about the event, integrating fun and on-brand visual elements. Is your brand called Mustachioed Marketers? Have a variety of fake mustaches that attendees can stick on their faces for their videos!

3. Stack Up on Attendee Interviews - If your brand isn’t quite as comfortable getting silly, you can use these video stations for recording interviews, asking attendees for answers to industry questions or their opinions about the conference. Consider using incentives to encourage people to participate in these videos and share their videos to their social networks. Offer percent-off discounts to your next event or the chance to win a free ticket and/or airfare, in exchange for their taking these desired actions on social media.

4. Let Your Hashtag Shine - This is also the time for your unique event hashtag to shine. Make sure that you’ve printed your hashtag on all event collateral and given attendees clear instructions on how to use it. Keep in mind that some attendees may be more social media savvy than others - it’s better to err on the side of over-explaining and have more people using your hashtag correctly! This is another great way for people attending from their couch to be able to monitor the goings-on at your event, so be sure to promote your hashtag on these channels prior to and during the event.

After Your EventThe event is behind you, but promotional activities are not - it’s never too soon to start promoting the next one! Lever-age the freshness of your live video content and the fact that speakers and attendees are still basking in the afterglow

of your incredible event.

1. Follow Up With Attendees - Follow up with event attendees and speakers, asking them to follow you on social media to see all the great content you captured during the event. Tease them with the premise of more event content to be posted in upcoming weeks - is their mustachioed song and dance video up yet?!

2. Package Up Your Videos and do a Event Montage - Compile the video nuggets that your brand and your attendees shared during the event for a crowdsourced video that showcases your event from multiple perspective. Publish videos of your presentations and package them in such a way that highlight the speaker and their companies and brand - this will make them more likely to want to share them on their own social networks!

The goal is to extend the life of the video content that was just created. After all, you still have time before you have to publish video content that is focused on collecting signups for your next event. At this point, you may not even have a date set!

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Conclusion

Keep being creative with how you repurpose your event video content. Turn YouTube videos into blog posts, infographics, and SlideShare presentations. If executed correctly, you will have collected enough awesome video footage during the short time frame of your event to give you an entire years-worth of digital content. At this rate, your next event will be an even bigger success!

Eventifier helps you make sense of your event social media marketing by enabling you

to easily see and show social activity and analytics for your event. We create a seam-

less and smart way for you to automatically capture what people are saying and sharing

about your event all around the social media world.

About Eventifier

Get Free Trial!

Try out our free trial for 15 days and upgrade to a plan that best fits your needs.