Virtual events can be of great value to participants. They’re often free and bring a wealth of information, workshops, and networking opportunities to the table. Events are also invaluable to you as the organizer, doing wonders for your Brand Awareness. But if your audience doesn’t get immersed in your brand (and that of your sponsors and partners), then your event missed the mark. So, let’s make your event spot-on with this complete event branding guide and tips.
Jump to:
- Event branding definition
- The importance of event branding
- Main features of event branding activities
- 5 tips for an unforgettable event branding
- Event branding services & platforms
- Kaltura virtual events platform
Event Branding Definition
Event branding means making the various components of your event instantly recognizable as part of the same identity, through the use of a unique logo, together with custom fonts, colors, and design assets. Even a specific tone of voice can be part of your event branding. And while your company brand should clearly be present in it, your event brand should be stand-alone.
Many event components provide great branding opportunities: the event landing page, all promotional material, email templates, swag, apps, video overlays, and stage design. You can make all these components work together to deliver a unique, uniform brand experience to your audience.
The Importance of Event Branding
Today more than ever, brand experience plays a crucial role. It makes your products, services, campaigns, and company actions instantly recognizable. It generates trust and attracts new customers. Brand experience also positively affects employee satisfaction and retention. Top talent is attracted to strong brands. What’s more, consistent cross-platform branding increases revenue by up to 23% [Forbes, 2018].
The same goes for event branding. As Hubspot puts it, event branding shapes how people remember the experience. And that goes for participants as much as speakers, sponsors, and employees. Outstanding event branding will help generate leads, build brand loyalty, and credibility.
Main Features of Event Branding Activities
Branding your event is all about telling a unique and uniform story through a bespoke logo and tagline, colors, fonts, design assets, and tone of voice.
Logo and tagline
Your event should sport a unique logo. It can borrow elements from your company logo, like Salesforce does with their Dreamforce events). Kaltura chose to create a completely unique logo for their 2021 Virtually Live event, that includes the mention “By Kaltura”.
Colors
Color improves brand recognition by up to 80% [Forbes, 2018]. So part of your event branding should be to consistently use the same unique colors across all your events assets, from banners to landing pages and admission tickets. How much does color impact brand recognition? One of the most famous assets of Amazon is its ubiquitous orange-colored “Buy Now” button that has been copied by pretty much everyone, and which is also reflected in the arrow in the Amazon logo. While Amazon’s AWS re:Invent event uses a completely bespoke color palette, the “Watch Now” buttons and other links are discretely but very effectively highlighted with a line in the same orange color. Genius.
Fonts
Fonts are another great tool in the event branding toolbox to create a visual consistency across the various elements. The classic design rules apply: use a single font type everywhere. You can be original, but don’t be too frivolous. Your font needs to be legible and in line with your image.
Design assets
To add a creative touch and personality to your branding, you can create a set of design assets. To keep with our examples, take a look at the cartoonesque and colorful design assets that adorn the Dreamforce landing page. Or the simple but stylish glowing lines on the AWS re:Invent landing page. When done right, these assets can become the visually most striking elements of your branding.
Tone of voice
The mood of your event copy and your word choice should be consistent across all elements. If you’re going for a light and funny style, then make sure you stay consistent even in your error messages, titles, and buttons. Same goes for naming conventions. Don’t call your event a virtual event on your landing page and a summit in your email communications.
Got your story down to a T? Great. Now you can adorn your virtual event components with your branding. The user flow from promotion to registration, event, and follow-up needs to be a uniform experience:
Event landing page
38% of users will stop interacting with a website if the layout is unattractive, and businesses invest a lot of resources in making their web pages pleasing to the eyes. Not everyone will see your LinkedIn banner, some people might have missed your last email blast, but, sooner or later, everyone goes through your event landing page.
So, give it a dedicated URL and create branded hero banners, images, backgrounds, and buttons. Don’t forget to brand the intro jingles, lower-thirds, and other video overlays of your live and on-demand video content, as well. See if you can use any brand assets to facilitate and drive registrations (e.g., by making the registration button and form more compelling).
Promotional material
You have a slew of channels at your disposal to market your event, ranging from social media banners and posts to emails, ads, articles, and PRs. Make sure all these materials are properly branded with your event logo, colors, imagery, and tone of voice. Swag bags, in physical or in digital form, present another great opportunity for event branding.
Apps
Apps are becoming increasingly popular with events, both in a hybrid and a fully virtual setting. If you plan on developing an app for your event, it should be branded in the same way as your landing page.
Stage design
Even if your event is virtual, you should work on a branded stage design for your live and on-demand video content. Panel discussions, fireside chats, and keynotes should be filmed on a dedicated stage with proper branding. Even if your content is recorded on four different continents, you should create a uniform branded experience by recreating the same studio layout throughout your videos.
5 tips for an Unforgettable Event Branding
- Identify your audience and your intent
Who are you organizing an event for? Gender, age, lifestyle, and preferences can all play an important role in your event branding’s stylistic choices. In the end, people connect and engage more readily with things that appeal to them on an emotional level and fits their views and interests.
- Define the intent of your event
After the “Who?”, it’s important to answer the “Why?”, too. Why are you setting up an event? Is it to educate? To entertain? What’s the main subject? You can reflect the answers to these questions in your design assets and take appropriate branding decisions accordingly.
- Create a welcome video
When you visit Kaltura’s Virtually Live event landing page, you immediately get into the right vibe with the autoplay video in the background of the hero banner. A welcome video is a great way to immerse your visitor into your brand from the get-go. It allows you to display the full breadth of your event branding on the very limited real estate of your home page hero area. You can also present your star speakers and a few key statements in your welcome video.
- Connect your event branding with activities
If you intend on organizing any fun activities during your virtual event, like virtual escape rooms, social media quests, quizzes, and other forms of gamification, you would be remiss not to connect them with your branding. You can brand the page and other paraphernalia surrounding the activity, you can offer the winner a branded prize, or you can somehow connect the contents of the activity to the event branding.
- Keep your event branding alive in your post-event follow-up
If you’re doing things right, then your efforts won’t stop on the day of the event. Rather, you’ll follow up with on-demand video offerings, thank you mails, surveys, and reports. There’s no reason why these shouldn’t be branded in the same way as your event. Give your audience and stakeholders a branded experience until the very end.
Event Branding Services & Platforms
You can outsource your event branding, if you don’t have the professional resources or you want to concentrate on other aspects of your event. In fact, many major virtual event productions were the result of a collaboration of companies, each contributing from their own areas of expertise.
You can call upon the services of professional virtual event management companies to help you develop creative ideas that will make your event branding unique and memorable. Kaltura, too, offers expert event branding and design services to help you create the right experience for you and your community. These creative services are part of Kaltura’s white-glove production services.
Kaltura Virtual Events Platform
Kaltura Virtual Events is the leading solution for professional-grade virtual and hybrid events. You can create, manage, and measure your events on a single platform and deliver live or on-demand video experiences to your audience. Through convenient and customizable templates, you can build any type of event at any scale in no time.
With Kaltura Virtual Events you can hyper-personalize the experience for all attendees, with personal agendas, content recommendations, customizable layouts, and more. I can wax lyrical about our virtual event solution all day. I will spare you and simply refer you to our dedicated page that you can access via the ‘Learn More’ button below and where you can even request a demo if you want to witness all the magic happen in front of your eyes.
