How event engagement can help you monetise festivals & expos?
Votemo CEO and Co-Founder Maarit Mäeveer was one of the speakers at the European Film Forum Tallinn 2021 during Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival discussing how event engagement strategy helps monetise festivals. Here are the key takeaways from the delivered Keynote presentation.
With festivals and industry platforms forced to hybrid production for the foreseeable future, the critical question for festival and market managers becomes how to monetize and reach sustainability in this new reality.
Votemo is a cutting edge event engagement platform that helps festivals, fairs and expos, and hybrid events to engage and monetise their audiences taking the quality of the productions to the next level, but also helping organisers to keep revenues in check.
How Festival Organisers can create new revenue streams
1. Create a Detailed Event Engagement Strategy
Make an event strategy on how to increase your event's ROI (return on investment) during virtual events. Make sure you include an engagement strategy in your event strategy and share it with all stakeholders.
2. Tactical Plan Illustrates How Strategy Will Come To Life
An engagement strategy is for everyone to know What you are going to do and what you aim to achieve, whereas a tactical plan allows you to let your team know How. It is important to share the plan with all the stakeholders so that they know engagement is an important part of the event.
In your tactical plan answer questions such as:
Which way are you planning to engage audiences and how can users access engagement tools?
How are you planning to involve Sponsors and how they can achieve their goals (e.g. collect contacts, convey their brand messages, etc.)?
How are you planning to implement interactive Ad-Space for Sponsors?
How are you planning to implement e-commerce solutions for selling merchandise, tickets, books of Keynote speakers, etc.?
How are you planning to collect feedback and use audience data for your next events?
3. Engage viewers right on top of the video stream
Use video engagement tools and engagement results overlays that are displayed on top of the video. Make sure to brand those in your branding or sponsor branding. Votemo offers customisation and branding options for Commenting, Chat, Q&A, Polling, Emoji Reactions, and E-commerce solutions.
4. Understand Your Sponsors' Goals and Deliver Accordingly
Votemo helps event organisers to sell sponsored space in a way that the Brand is a meaningful part of the engagement layer and the event. This is the only way your partners get real data and you will build better and long-term relationships with your sponsors. You can also use the Votemo Lead Generation feature and allow your Sponsors collect contacts of people interested to win prizes or get extra information regarding products and presentations. When planning Sponsored online events, don’t forget to create an Engagement Strategy for Sponsors.
5. Collect and Analyse Engagement Data
Analyse audience participation data during and after the event—monitor participation activity, see who participated and when, track user location and engagement. Invite participants to write reviews on how they enjoyed Keynote presentations and seminars. Make the feedback query forms and Q&As available during or after each presentation.
Why is event engagement so important to festival organisers?
Most Film Markets and Festivals depend on returning audiences and sponsors that keep supporting the industry. From the event organiser's perspective all you can hope for is the audience that is happy with the event, writing the best reviews, and promoting it to others.
Data in different surveys shows that event organisers still think keeping the audience interested and engaged is the hardest part of event organising. We truly believe in Votemo that giving the audience a voice and the possibility to interact with speakers is the best way to organise the event, and doesn't matter whether it's an in-person or online event.
It is also crucial that sponsors and partners are happy and see value in the collaboration. We know sponsors need more data to make strategic decisions on which events to support. Votemo offers data reports that sponsors can use in their decision making. With Votemo's engagement tools, event organisers can be sure that every person who attended the event physically or watched it online saw the sponsored engagement layer. And the data collected will lead to deeper collaboration with sponsors, based on trust and measurable results.
Take a look at the Keynote presentation below:
Feel free to contact us at hello@votemo.eu in case you have ideas or questions you want to discuss, or fill in the contact form on our website.
Our team is ready to share cases and support with strategic and creative know-how and to help you create event engagement strategy for your event. Votemo audience interaction tools and Graphics Control Software are compatible with all common broadcasting software (OBS, vMix, CasparCG) and event platforms—i.e. NJ Productions, MultiCityTV, Videolevels, Icareus, Brella, Talque, Worksup, etc.—out there.