3 Ways your Conference Videos Can Increase your Revenue

Technology is reshaping all the processes involved in event planning - from management and ticket-purchasing apps to live streaming panels and even using augmented reality to entertain attendees onsite. If your goal is to host a successful event, regardless of location and audience, you must look out for emerging technologies and behaviors to generate competitive advantages that will likely positively impact your revenue.

In this article, we will explore how conference videos are helping event organizers address two of their biggest challenges: increasing revenue from their event strategy, and reaching new attendees, sponsors, and speakers.

We will break down some misconceived assumptions about the online video attendance market and teach you the tools and strategies to successfully monetize your conference videos and grow your event's relevance in an increasingly saturated market.

Here are 3 ways your conference videos will help you generate more revenue and increase your overall visibility:

1. Grow your revenue after your event happens

29% of event marketers said that increasing revenue from their event strategy was their biggest challenge (Bizzabo, 2017). Often, an event's budget remains the same from year to year while costs for marketing, speakers, and venues go up. It can be hard to visualize a way to increase your margins within traditional event-planning structures.
What events, like MicroConf and Growth Marketing Conference, have realized is that, through virtual passes and conference videos, you can keep selling after your event has taken place. When ticket sales compose 60 to 100% of revenue - which is true to nearly half of events worldwide (Eventbrite, 2019) - having more time to sell your event's panels and presentations can make the difference in your revenue line - especially when there are very low incremental costs for doing so.

Growth Marketing Conference has sold over 150+ virtual passes at $299 each for its 2019 summit - totaling over $45,000 as additional income. MicroConf's video bundles got over 500 subscribers - totaling more than $13,000 in sales. These events were early adopters of conference video technologies, and their revenue growth has been significant from year to year.

When optimizing time and allocation of resources, studies suggest you should opt for video content over articles, or any other medium available online. As a report by VidYard showed, event organizers who successfully use their conference videos grow their revenue 49% faster than non-video users. Event videos achieve these results by positively impacting your SEO, among other indicators, as #2 suggests.

2. Promote your next event with your conference videos

Your conference is certainly going to have outstanding presentations and panels that will set trends in the industry and leave your attendees looking forward to your next edition. Distributing your conference videos on an online platform allows you to expand this expectation beyond your attendees, increasing your market size on a national - or potentially international - scale.

As 60% of people prefer to watch videos over reading text (Digitell, 2018), videos also stand out as the perfect medium for summarizing your event's most memorable moments. Speaking of the online advantages of publishing event videos, data from SmallBizTrends suggests that event planners using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-users.

Besides boosting your event's SEO, conference videos act as an incentive for the purchase of tickets. As a report by Hubspot suggests, after watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to make an online purchase. Linking conference videos to your ticket sales can, therefore, not only raise awareness for your upcoming event but also speed up your lead conversion process.

3. Expand your audience to a global-scale market size

In 2019, video accounted for 80% of global internet traffic, and 85% in the U.S (Cisco). Not only do people prefer to engage with video content, as we mentioned in #2, but they also spend more time navigating the medium online.

This change in behavior has created momentum for video talk businesses, such as TedTalk, and encouraged a global movement for the decentralized distribution of knowledge from top events and speakers.

Challenging the misconceived assumption that attendees and leads are only interested in the live aspect of conferences, which allows for networking and real-time engagement, 54% of event attendees claim their primary interest in conferences is to keep up with trends (Bizzabo, 2016).

As learning about trends and opportunities has become more and more a virtual activity, conference videos emerge as a practical choice for those who are not necessarily your event's target audience but that still find it's content very valuable. It is an often untapped opportunity to engage those who cannot physically attend an event for a variety of reasons - such as professional duties elsewhere, personal emergencies, and a limited budget for ticket and travel expenses. As we showed in #1, not only there is demand from these segments for virtual passes and videos, but it is also a profitable niche that can quickly add up to your revenue.


The following two graphs from Google Trends support two key points from our analysis: 1) searches, or demand, for 'event videos' have been nearly the same as searches for 'event tickets,' and 2) at least in the U.S., the focus of some states' residents is on conference videos rather than tickets - perhaps because of the physical distance from some large-scale events. This lack of overlap between the two segments weakens any possibility for ticket cannibalization - if anything, as we pointed out in #2, people are more likely to buy a ticket to a conference after watching videos from a past edition.

Google Searches for 'event ticket', in blue, and 'event video', in red, throughout a year.

Google Searches for 'event ticket', in blue, and 'event video', in red, per state in the USA.

At ConferenceCast, we want to empower conference organizers and speakers to share their knowledge globally and make the content from live conferences available offline. ConferenceCast.tv is a marketplace for video content from industry conferences and the ultimate platform for video streaming conferences on-demand that allows audiences to digest video content quickly and conveniently with our built-in video features like video navigation, transcripts, and in-video search.