The Benefits of Livestreaming and Video Production
For Corporate Events
Here is a list of 6 benefits of live streaming and video production, which your organisation could take advantage of if you request a quote from CPDonline:
The video conferencing platform Zoom has exponentially increased in popularity. Today, "Shall we have a video call/an online meeting?" is now synonymous with "Shall we have a Zoom call?". From December 2019-2020, its daily number of meeting participants shot up from 10 million to 35 million. Therefore, some organisations may believe that the disadvantages of live streaming lie in the fact that it is unnecessarily expensive during a time when Zoom can be relied upon.
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However, this mainstream usage now means that this platform is too much of a part-and-parcel business communication strategy. With "Zoom fatigue" making workers so weary that over 800 million hours of productivity were lost during the first few months of the pandemic (March - August 2020), it is time to seek more effective live streaming solutions for your organisation. This is especially true for your biggest events of the year, such as Summits, key conferences and guest lectures. These take special effort to organise and should not have their engaging natures marred by simply holding them via a video call on a platform that your audiences are already fatigued by.
There are a number of benefits of live streaming that explain why so many audiences are expecting events they attend to use more engaging live streaming alternatives to Zoom, which we summarise in our article about why it is time for your organisation to stop relying on Zoom.
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To discuss in more detail, it seems that people find Zoom meetings to be quite frustrating due to the difficulties associated with having a productive conference on the platform. An article by Yahoo!Finance reported that 44% of Brits claim to struggle to keep up with conversations on such video calls when too many people are taking part - we are all aware of the awkward moments when multiple people accidentally speak at once and none of them can be heard properly.
The fatigue associated with online meetings and conferences can be rectified if you hire a team of live streaming specialists like CPDonline; we can stream your event to the platform of your choice, giving you everything you need for a bespoke, fully branded streaming platform. Instead of relying on one platform like Zoom, we can adjust our costs to take into account different requirements you have, such as a live-scrolling Twitter feed, or captions displaying the names of your speakers. Once you submit a request for a quote, we can narrow down our pricing brackets for you.
Even if video calls seem to be effective enough for your organisation, that does not mean that you should rely on them. There are numerous technical issues that can arise when you rely on whichever platform you are using to share ideas online, and assume that no technical problems will occur - and this does not just apply to Zoom, but to any platform which allows you to stream videos. A 2019 survey by Haivision reported that 36% of enterprises struggled with managing bandwidth in their facilities. This statistic will be even more problematic for 2021 event attendees who are very much used to virtual events. These people will will be severely unimpressed by online events that use Zoom streams with lagging audio or poor picture quality.
To avoid technical glitches at online events, a more beneficial event planning strategy would be to hire a team of live streaming specialists, such as those that we have available at CPDonline. We will take care of the technical side of online events, so that you as the event organiser do not need to take on additional responsibilities regarding this. All you need to do is request a quote, and we will get into contact with you and start the process of being a part of your communications team, whom you can call upon at any time.
Of the many benefits of the services offered by CPDonline, the live streaming benefits for businesses are very evident.
At CPDonline, we can live stream your events to any modern and innovative platform that best suits your audience's viewing needs, which in turn represents your organisation as innovative and in tune with the needs of your audiences. This will help you and your audiences get the most out of your events, as they are tailored to meet your goals and event specifications. We have more information about how to ensure that these events are as engaging as possible, in a separate article.
Due to the many benefits of informative video content, CPDonline does not purely live stream the event on the day and send you a raw recording: We also carry out video editing services to produce a bespoke, branded and well-edited video that you can share on your website and social media. This way, you can benefit from the content shown at your events long after they have taken place. Such videos can also be used to increase anticipation for your next event.
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Video production is certainly something that your organisation should be taking advantage of in order to keep up with the 21st Century, and something that you should raise to your team. It is widely acknowledged that video content will increase your website's visibility online, and elevate the standing of your organisation in this area. Research has continued to back this up over time:
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In 2019, Animoto found that 93% of businesses landed a new customer thanks to a video on social media.
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This has heightened during the pandemic, where in-person explanations of your services at exhibitions and other events have not been possible: In December 2020, Wyzowl were told by 94% of video marketers that video has helped to increase user understanding of their product or service.
And why does this make video content improve your business's online standing? It has to do with SEO: As people are more likely to watch video content than read a text post about your business, this means people spending more time on your website, which leads to said website benefitting from high positions in search results.
Therefore, if your organisation is looking to attract more members/employees, or increase awareness about your work, dynamic video content can help you greatly. This is another example of where CPDonline are different from other live streaming services, as we also offer a promotional video production service. No specification is too broad or too narrow for CPDonline, so simply request a quote from us and we will travel nationwide to carry out your video shoot.
Whether you have an event that you want us to livestream or produce a polished video of, or you want promotional videos to be produced for the benefit of your organisation, CPDonline will be your video communications team, dedicated to making innovation and knowledge dissemination a reality for you. We know all about the importance of live streaming, so we will carry it out meticulously. We will go into more detail about why this content is so popular and effective, by discussing more benefits of live streaming and video content in the next section:
Especially in recent years, live streams are demonstrably the most engaging way of getting your audiences excited about new ideas, products or campaigns that you wish to share.
But why are live streams so engaging? What makes them the ideal medium for audiences in 2021? What are the key benefits of live streaming on YouTube or social media compared to simply recording and sending out a webinar?
In terms of live streams, the manner in which they're broadcasted allows employees, clients and/or members to experience the sharing of ideas together. Our clients, notably The Institution of Civil Engineers, have stated that our live streams have been integral in their knowledge dissemination strategy. Now, their members can receive, share, and immediately react to, ideas in a much more appealing format, as opposed to one-way webinars to which they must passively listen. Our fully produced live streaming service enhances this by using use such features as fades between lecture slides and speakers, and on-screen live Twitter feeds to encourage cross-channel interactivity.
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Even when videos are shared on-demand as opposed to being livestreamed, they are still a highly engaging format for audiences. But why is video content so highly preferred?
Video content is much more appealing to people's brains and the way in which we absorb content: Studies show that the average viewer can only remember 10% of a message when it's read, whereas they can remember 95% of a message if they watch it. Therefore, one of the many powerful benefits of live streams and videos (e.g. to social media) is that they can dramatically improve your viewers' retention rates. Therefore, the benefits of live streams and videos are especially prudent if your organisation has an emphasis on spreading knowledge to its members or employees. Whether you need to carry out employee training or spread the professional standards of your organisation to a wider audience, video content is likely to be essential to your mission.
This is likely to be because of video content's combination of audio and visual content - 2 mediums that are easy for people to digest. Plus, text, music, links and even podcasts can be incorporated into video content. Video content has the benefit, therefore, of being incredibly dynamic and flexible - and whichever specifications you have for your video content, CPDonline will deliver on these. Just send us a request for a quote and let us know what kind of video content your organisation is most keen to incorporate.
Both live streamed videos and on-demand video content appeal to people as an ideal way to hear from brands - 85% of marketers claim video content to be an effective way of getting attention online (Animoto 2019). Therefore, if you wish to improve your organisation's standing online - which is integral today as the internet is the one guaranteed space to reach your audiences - the benefits of video content should not be ignored.
As CPDonline tends to work with professional membership associations, we know all about the importance of knowledge disssemination.
Many organisations have knowledge banks and training libraries for their members or employees to benefit from, but a staggering minority of them only use e-booklets or text guides. We have already discussed why such text-based content will be ineffective as a resource library, as video content is the best format for ensuring that this knowledge is actually retained by your audiences. If your organisation prides itself on being industry-leading in the sharing of ideas to support members, your mission would greatly benefit from live streams and video content.
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Our clients can testify to the fact that we do not only livestream the day of the event, as we have also already discussed: We record and edit bespoke versions of your events so that they can remain on your website as a training library of high quality video content. Therefore, if you have a new intake of members or employees that you need to educate in your professional standards or share knowledge with, you do not need to re-host another event. Nor do you have to make your members/employees travel all the way to a certain regional centre just to hear the same information that you have already delivered to another audience a few months ago.
Instead, you can simply refer this new audience to your high quality video content library, curated by CPDonline, where they can find all of the training information that they need. Best of all, it will not be contained in a simple online brochure that they will struggle to retain information from, but it will be delivered to them via engaging video content. This is a much more effective medium for CPD learning and will significantly improve the long-term expertise of your members. Despite it being on-demand and not live, it will be of such a high quality and edited to include the most important sections, that they will still retain as much knowledge as they would have if they attended the event in-person.
With CPDonline, your audiences can all get the same amount of knowledge from the same event, regardless of whether they attended the event in person or are watching the on-demand recording of it. That is our mission: to make knowledge sharing easier for everyone, regardless of location or timezones, utilising the benefits of live streaming on YouTube and other platforms.
This lack of needing to travel also links to the next benefit of live streaming and video content:
Before the Coronavirus put a stop to frequent international travel, corporate events caused a significant environmental strain. For many people working in leading industries, travelling all the way to a certain regional centre or even a different continent, is compulsory for them to attend training for their CPD (Continuing Professional Development). The international travel involved in this specifically was a significant contributor to carbon dioxide and other emissions, such as nitrogen oxides and particulates. The necessity to spend so much money on travelling and contributing to the Earth's air pollution by attending these corporate events in-person was diminished by COVID-19, and people were able to attend these online instead - which led to a significant improvement in worldwide air quality, one of the key benefits of live streaming.
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However, as restrictions ease, we expect that these international events will start to return soon, leading people to travel long and expensive distances once again to attend events in-person and undo the positive environmental effects that have occurred in the past year. At CPDonline, we believe that even if an important industry event is held in-person, this does not mean that you should be obliged to travel across the country or world just to attend in-person.
One of the powerful advantages of live streamed events by CPDonline is therefore that there is no need to attend events in-person to benefit from them, as they are available online in an exceptional quality with none of the the usual audio or visual glitches that you might expect from viewing events online. You can see and hear everything in 1080p quality without having to physically attend.
We believe that these online events are the future, due to how unnecessary we saw physical events to be during the pandemic, and how easily they were shifted online. At the very least, we should expect to see an overall shift to hybrid events, where people can attend in-person if they so choose, but also have the option to simply view the event online if travelling to the venue poses a financial or environmental concern to them. Hybrid events certainly have the potential to be the popular event format for 2021 at least; The 2021 hybrid version of the Sundance Film Festival gained an audience that was 2.7 times larger than their usual solely in-person event - their biggest overall audience. When an event allows people to also view them online via a high quality live stream, attendee numbers increase. And pollution levels do not.
Are hybrid events here to stay? CPDonline believes so. Even if you are planning in-person events for the near future, consider hiring us to also live stream it for a remote audience by requesting a quote from us.
All of the above benefits of live streaming and video production will differ slightly depending upon which platform you choose to host your videos and live streams. Benefits of livestreaming on YouTube include video monetisation options, while advantages of live streaming on social media sites like Facebook include heightened interactivity compared to passively-viewed Webinars. Our Instagram page features full live streaming platform reviews on a weekly basis. These include well-known ones like YouTube to more obscure ones like Uscreen, and it is evident that there are so many to choose from.
One of the things that sets CPDonline apart from other live streaming services is the fact that we can live stream your events to whichever platform you choose. Whether it is your Facebook Live page, or your own website, we provide everything you need to develop your very own branded live streaming platform.
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Our platform development services include branded name straps incorporating the names of event speakers and your company logo, credits at the beginnings and ends of your videos, and your company colours. Our aim is to give you everything you need to establish your organisation's collection of live streams and videos online.
Our expert platform development team view these platform development services as essential to your brand. This is because most of the people whom you are attempting to reach will be viewing your content online via smartphones and tablets, and you will probably have an idea of on which platforms and websites you want to reach them on. Even if you're unsure of which platform to use or where to reach your audiences, CPDonline will offer to help you in this area. It is important that your brand is fully established online via a video platform, as it is 50 times easier to achieve a page 1 ranking on the Google results pages if you have video content. Therefore, your success is our success, and we will make it our mission to establish you online.
To Conclude:
We hope that the above points have communicated well why your organisation would benefit from the live streaming, video production and platform development services of CPDonline.
If you have any more questions about the importance of live streaming or how we could help with your specific requirements, feel free to get in touch and we would be happy to discuss this further so that we can benefit the live streaming and video production efforts of your business as much as possible.