When you think of events, what kind of events do you think of? Considering we are back to in-person events, and virtual events are just as popular as ever, it feels like we are less limited by the type of event to host these days. Whether it be concerts, webinars, training programs, onsite or online conferences, there are several types of events to host and market. 

Event marketing is a must when getting as much recognition as possible from current or prospective customers/clients. And as I’m sure you already know, event marketing is a powerful tool that can help businesses reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and build customer/client relationships. Here are five great tips to help you get the most out of your event marketing and witness an expansion of your network. Ready?

1. Develop a strategy

Before you begin any event marketing campaign, developing a clear strategy is critical. Think about who your target audience is and tailor your content accordingly. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is the ideal attendee?
• What message do you want to communicate? 
• What kind of impact do you want to have on attendees? 
• What is the event timeline? 

Answering these questions will help you formulate an effective strategy that will resonate with your audience.

2. Set realistic goals

When planning an event, setting realistic, achievable goals is important. Having clear objectives will help you stay focused and keep track of how successful your event has been. For example, goals can include bringing in a certain number of attendees, generating a new lead, increasing web traffic, or educating attendees about your services or products. Be specific with your goals and ensure they align with your marketing objectives. Doing so can measure your campaign’s success and identify improvement areas. 

3. Focus on engagement

Make sure that there are plenty of activities at your event that encourage attendance and participation from guests. To keep attendees engaged throughout the event, include interactive elements such as quizzes, competitions, interactive displays, and an area to take photos and provide hashtags for social posting. This not only encourages attendees to participate at the moment, but you can get access to content for future promotions. This will also create a positive experience that they’ll remember!

4. Utilize technology

Technology plays a significant role in event marketing. The use of technology can be extremely beneficial in an event marketing setting, whether it’s using social media channels, offering on-demand sessions, or providing attendees with tablets or phones so they can interact with each other more easily during the event itself. Just recently, while at the Hubspot Inbound Conference in Boston, each attendee was provided an electronic badge making it much easier to check in daily and share your contact information with other attendees. Technology like this builds community and creates a seamless and enjoyable experience for attendees while providing valuable data for future campaigns.

5. Follow up post event 

After the event is over, it’s important to stay in touch with attendees. This involves sending out email newsletters or survey forms, following up on conversations you had during the show, and building relationships with attendees through social media channels. This helps to maintain engagement and build a community around your brand. Not to mention, it makes it that much easier to sell more tickets for your next event.

How are you feeling about marketing your next event? By following these five tips, careful planning, and considering all aspects of your event marketing strategy, you can host a successful event that will leave a lasting impression on all attendees!

From video production services, motion graphics services, or event video production services, we love video, and we can talk about it all day long. Start your project and stay inspired to continue your company vision and story.

When you imagine brainstorming, a small group of people gathered in person is usually what comes to mind. As our typical place of work has shifted into remote and hybrid settings, adapting traditional brainstorming into a virtual setting is a new challenge to consider. Think of a brainstorming session as a great way to assemble a team, create and explore new ideas organically, without judgment. 

A study from APA PsycNet comparing virtual and in-person brainstorming groups found that in-person groups enjoyed the process of brainstorming more and had more fun doing it. But, the study also found that virtual groups ultimately generated more ideas. The same research finds that virtual environments provide a better experience for group members as a whole, balancing the preferences of introverts and extroverts, optimists and pessimists, and employees ranging from entry-level to executives. A virtual setting levels the playing field for all participants. 

There are a few key differences between a traditional brainstorming session, and one held virtually. In this blog post, we’ll go through five tips to make sure your brainstorming session is successful virtually.

5 Tips To Host a Successful Virtual Brainstorm Session

1. Utilize Technology 

In 2022, rightfully so, we’re all digital meeting experts so it remains imperative to make sure your brainstorming session setup has clear and crisp video and audio, the chat function is enabled, online note-taking is available, and the agenda is easily accessible. That way, the meeting attendees can participate and follow along effortlessly. In addition, taking advantage of features like whiteboards and breakout rooms, allow everyone to collaborate in real-time. These features and other file-sharing and communication tools will give everyone on the call the ability to seamlessly share links, notes, and details. 

2. Create an Agenda and Send it Early 

Poorly planned meetings can be extremely frustrating, and will often feel like a waste of time. Trying to construct an agenda on the spot is stressful, and it takes up a lot of meeting time, so don’t be one of those meeting hosts. Creating and distributing an agenda to review and follow along with beforehand can keep meeting attendees focused and on track during your virtual brainstorming session. When you make your team aware of the topic before the brainstorming session, participants can properly prepare. Recommend they take a few moments to jot down any ideas or questions they might have prior to the meeting to be shared once the meeting begins. 

3. Set a Time Limit 

Brainstorming can be a nonlinear process, so setting a time limit is important to utilizing time wisely. Brainstorming methods should be structured, but never rigid. Leave room for tangents and different ideas, and let the session proceed organically. However, don’t be afraid to shift directions if you don’t think your team is getting distracted or the conversation has become stagnant. 

4. Appoint a Facilitator

It can be hard to stay on track for long periods in any setting, especially in a remote setting. Assign a facilitator who can speak up, and guide the conversation back to the agenda when participants veer off topic. In a large setting, appointing a timekeeper and a scribe could be beneficial as well.

5. Schedule a Follow-Up 

Once the brainstorming session has concluded, it’s time to turn those ideas into action. Send out a follow-up message with meeting notes, a checklist of any tasks that need to be accomplished (with deadlines), and a calendar invite to the next session. This way, you’ll keep the session at the top of everyone’s mind. Top of feed = top of mind! 

Like most endeavors, the best way to figure out what works best for you and your team is through experimentation. Use the tips above to help guide you and your team to find your perfect virtual brainstorming sweet spot. 

From video production services, motion graphics services, or event video production services, we love video, and we can talk about it all day long. Start your project and stay inspired to continue your company vision and story.

When we log on to our social media channels, we are bombarded by an endless stream of photos, illustrations, and videos. To stand out amongst the crowd, designs and animations are being utilized more and more to create a visual break and provide eye-catching differentiation online.  But how do you know which designs are on trend and which are ready to be tossed in the trash?

Creation of Design Trends

In 1937 James Laver created a timeline of trends and how fashion styles are predicted and viewed over the years. This document, called Laver’s Law, is still used by trend forecasters today. When it comes to graphic design, using tactics from the fashion industry to forecast and utilize trends can help designers understand and predict what will be popular in the design world. Creators benefit from keeping tabs on what’s trendy, whether in our own line of work or others. 

 As with any trend, here today is gone tomorrow, but we think the four trending design styles will really inspire your work in 2022.  

1. Inclusive Visuals

Inclusive design considers differences in how people look and interact through imagery, animation, and videos. It accounts for function and usability and presents a more accurate picture of the world by showcasing diversity at all levels. Designing with accessibility in mind will always include things like color contrast, text size, interactivity cues, inclusive character representation, diversity, ability, language, culture, gender, age, race, and other forms of human difference.

It can be something as simple as having captions on a video or an image of someone with a tattoo or as complex as having multiple translations and cultural shifts for content.

Implementing a checklist for accountability like the one by Automattic Design is a great way to hold yourself and others accountable.  

2. Mixed Media

Mixed media is having a moment right now. This traditionally physical art form reminds designers of ways to create art that experiments with various styles and methods and inspires graphic artists to incorporate this style into the digital space. It’s also a powerful indicator of authenticity. So much design work is digital. Commissioned, conceived, created, and carried out entirely in a digital environment. Mixed media lets designers get their hands dirty once again by experimenting with various techniques and design elements. In the digital world, blending 2D and 3D in a single digital space is also a trending crowd-pleaser!

3. Bold Typeface

The main goal of typography is to be legible – but sometimes, the best way to grab the reader’s attention with words is to do it with a visual shout rather than a whisper. The average person sees around 10,000 ads per day, so typeface is a way to stand out in a sea of advertisements. As a designer, if you can make just one word look good with an interesting font and a thought-provoking composition, imagine what the actual product can do! Fonts can be colorful and whimsical, or classic and bold, shapes can be incorporated; there are no rules for typography in 2022. 

4. Nature

Design, in general, is becoming more diverse, more colorful, and inspired by nature. Nature has been a source of inspiration for every type of artist throughout all of history. In 2022, designs inspired by nature have been influenced by the sustainability and environmentalism movement and by shapes, neutral colors, and textures we see in our own lives daily. While frequently seen in product, interior, and industrial design, references inspired by nature also flow seamlessly into the world of graphic design. 

Trends come and go, and come and go again. Next time you’re approaching a project, take a look at trending designs and find ways to incorporate them into your strategy. Design is all about inspiration, authenticity, and discovering exactly how you want to represent yourself.

From video production services, motion graphics services, or event video production services, we love video and can talk about it all day long. Start your project and stay inspired to continue your company vision.

Video has become the most popular media consumption in the past few years, with the average person spends around 100 minutes per day watching online videos.

Understanding how video is used on different social platforms and how members and brands use it will give you valuable insights into how to incorporate video into your LinkedIn and social media strategies. We’ve put together 35 social media and LinkedIn video stats to inspire you to add a video to your social media pages and marketing strategies. 

Linkedin Stats

1. Video posts on LinkedIn are shared 20 times more than other content formats. (LinkedIn)
2. 80% of videos on LinkedIn are viewed with the sound off. (LinkedIn)
3. 70% of videos are designed for silent viewing (with texts or captions), and are more likely to be watched till completion. (LinkedIn)
4. Videos that are 30-90 seconds long work best on LinkedIn. (LinkedIn)

5. Brands get 24 times more comments and seven times more reactions on LinkedIn live streams compared to a published video.
6. 38% of marketers post video content on LinkedIn and 75% of them said it was successful. (Wyzowl)
7. Video posts are five times more likely to get comments than a standard text posts. (LinkedIn)
8. Videos on LinkedIn are getting shared 20+ times more than any other content. (Buffer)
9. Video posts also earn three times the engagement of text-only posts. (Buffer)
10. 51% of video marketers have used LinkedIn videos in their campaigns. (Wyzowl)

Social Media Stats

11. As of January 2022, there are 3.96 billion total social media users across all platforms. (Statista)
12. TikTok is the fastest-growing social network, with a staggering 105% user growth rate in the United States over the past two years. (Emarketer)
13. In 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic, 15 times higher than in 2017. (Cisco)
14. Video posts on social media get 48% more views than standard text posts.  (The Marketing Helpline)
15. The percentage of marketers who say video is an important part of their strategy increased from 82% in 2017, 85% in 2018, and 91% in 2019 to 92% in 2020 (Wyzowl)
16. 16% of social video viewers use vlogs to research products (Global Web Index, 2018)
17. 17% of companies use live video as a part of their social marketing strategy. (Invideo)
18. YouTube (88%) is the most popular platform among marketers for sharing videos, followed by Facebook (76%), LinkedIn (66%), and Instagram (65%). (Oberlo)
19. With shorter attention spans, marketers have only 2.7 seconds to get their audience’s attention. (Marketing Mag)
20. Linkedin is the third most widely-used video marketing platform, with 63% of marketers planning to use it this year. (Blogging Wizard)
21. 64% of consumers purchase a product after watching social videos created by brands. (Tubular Insights, 2017)
22. 80% of users can recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days. (Small Biz Trends)
23. 45% of consumers want to see more live videos from brands on their social media. (Sprout Social)
24. 63% of social media marketers believe that live video will become more important in the coming year. (Sprout Social)
25. 89% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI, 83% say video helps them with lead generation, and 87% say video has increased traffic to their website. (OptinMonster)
26. Promotional videos for a product or service, brand storytelling videos, and product demos are marketers’ most common video types. (Invideo)

27. 54% of people want to see more video content from marketers. (HubSpot)
28. Emails with the word ‘video’ in the subject are opened 7% more than emails without. (Social Media Week)
29. On average, marketers increase digital video budgets by 25% yearly. (IAB)
30. The video marketing industry in the US alone is worth $135 billion (Social Media Week)
31. Video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year (Oberlo)
32. Eight of 10 people have purchased an app or software after watching a brand’s video. (Wyzowl)
33. 55% of consumers watch videos before making purchase decisions. (Search Engine Journal)
34. 48% of marketers who used video in their strategy for the first time said they started because they found it easier to convince others of its value through video. (Wyzowl)
35. 18% of marketers that started using video as a part of their marketing strategy in 2019 did so because they felt clearer about the ROI on video. (Wyzowl)

With three million users, nine billion impressions per month, and all the statistics listed above, it’s evident that videos are super effective for businesses and marketers. However, only 86% of businesses leverage video content for their brand.

Bottle Rocket Media is the perfect partner to help integrate video into your marketing strategy. From video production services, motion graphics services, or event video production services, we love video and can talk about it all day long. Send us an email, and let’s start your next video project!