Harnessing the Value of Digital in Branded Experiences
04.13.24
By Jason Woodworth,
Senior Digital Innovation Program Manager
Harnessing the Value of Digital in Branded Experiences
The digital landscape continues to evolve, showing no signs of slowing down – from artificial intelligence to augmented reality, virtual event platforms, mobile apps, and more. It’s a lot to digest for experiential professionals, but the underlying truth is that all these digital tools have very real, very impactful applications within our industry.
It’s predicted that in 2024, 20% of events will have a hybrid component and 21% of events will be fully virtual. Beyond event format, the same study reports that 61% of respondents intend to utilize an event mobile app, 42% expect to utilize Artificial Intelligence, and another 41% plan to utilize virtual reality.
The new challenge for experiential marketers is in understanding the value that digital can provide to enhance their audience engagement approach and brand experience strategies, and best practices for gaining the most from digital channels and tools. Let's look at how digital can enhance your experiences going forward:
Amplify Your Content
Digital tools and channels can dramatically extend the life of your content. Thoughtfully incorporating digital into the attendee journey can up-level any experience, regardless of event format.
Many event marketers have relished the opportunity to return to in-person events, but their content deserves to live beyond the ballroom. Live streaming sessions and hosting content on-demand are two straightforward ways of ensuring that event content continues to make an impact, long after the event has concluded.
Some brands have decided to forgo in-person events entirely, opting to move their marquee events onto virtual platforms. Regardless of preferred format (in-person, hybrid, digital-only), brands have new avenues for how event content can be consumed and experienced:
-Simu-live: The ability to create fully pre-recorded sessions allows for the content to be perfectly tailored, edited, and polished before being delivered to the digital audience. Virtual platform providers continue to refine their offerings, and most have revised their broadcasting tools to the point where audiences genuinely can’t tell the difference between live and simu-live.
-Choose your own adventure: Many virtual events are now formatted to include large catalogs of live, simu-live, and on-demand sessions, allowing attendees to tailor the event experience around their specific interests. Typically, the “Choose your own adventure” portion of the event is bookended by opening and closing keynotes, so that key messaging can be introduced and later reinforced. Most virtual event platforms offer session recommendation features, plus agenda-building tools so that attendees can select their session path in advance of the event. The ability for the attendee to personalize and customize the content to their interests drives high engagement.
-Built-in interactivity: Finally, audiences have maintained an appetite for real-time engagement – Live chat, Q&A, and polling have become mainstay tactics to get the audience involved. Most virtual event platforms come equipped with these tools, but the same can be accomplished at in-person/hybrid events with the help of event mobile apps or other second-screen technologies.
Broaden Your Reach
Beyond how event content is shared and consumed, experiential marketers have additional opportunity to determine who their content reaches. There are various reasons why an organization would take the opportunity to expand their audience, such as a global customer base, increasing lead-generation, or catering to a widely dispersed employee base. Fortunately, this is an easy decision to accommodate with the help of digital. Travel logistics, costs, and scheduling challenges do not have to be limiting factors for event attendance.
Take the “follow-the-sun” event format as an example, wherein audiences flow in and out of the event based on their region/time-zone. It’s now quite common for virtual events to cater to North American, EMEA, and APAC audience groups simultaneously. In these instances, content may be recorded from one primary time-zone and replayed for the others, with local presenters joining sessions to add commentary and ensure that all content remains relevant to all groups. Moreover, the ever-growing pool of AI-based closed captioning, translation and interpretation tools, allow event marketers to bridge the language gap and further tailor their content to their unique audiences.
Importantly, the in-person experience does not have to be sacrificed to reach a global audience. As mentioned above, live streaming and capturing content for on-demand viewing allow the best of both worlds.
In Conclusion
It’s exciting to see experiential professionals utilizing digital tools to drive value for themselves and for their audiences, and there’s clearly more to come. Illustrated in the examples above are just a few specific ways in which marketers are harnessing the power of digital to enhance their experiences, but the possibilities remain endless. The digital landscape will continue to evolve, and the events industry will grow and change alongside it, to the benefit of those who create events and those who attend them.
To explore how digital channels and tools can enhance your brand experience, contact your InVision Account Director, or email us at info@iv.com.