By Gordon Dutch & Stuart Coe

As most of you will know, Re-Sauce was conceived and launched during the global grip of COVID. Working from home, if you were able to, became the ‘norm’ and the traditional ways of launching, marketing and selling your products changed. All the major shows, like ISE & InfoComm, IFA & CES were either pushed back or went virtual and many other physical networking events were simply “put on ice”.

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This ‘new norm’ gave rise to a whole host of new virtual marketing platforms, some of which have been more successful than others.

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It is fairly easy to create a very basic webinar, with a brand or person showing their product and then live streaming that content at an advertised time to their existing customers. This can be a very cost-effective way of virtual marketing. However, it is not always engaging and can rely on the quality of the product and skill of the presenter to keep the attendees engaged.

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But what do you do if you are a new brand or you are looking to target a new audience?

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At Re-Sauce we feel the answer to this is in creating a virtual event that has the right mix of educational and informative content, and brings different brands and elements of the industry together. After all, when you strip down the most successful trade shows to their bare bones, that is exactly what they do, just physically.

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The Pro-AV business is built on different brands and businesses working together to deliver highly complex solutions globally. Therefore, at Re-Sauce, we are looking to recreate this with our partner The RAVe Agency & their fantastic platform LAVNCH.

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We chose specific areas of the business, such as Digital Signage, Pro-AV & UCC as key topics and, with the assistance of Gary and his team, will create an exciting event based on and fully focussed on EMEA. The LAVNCH platform has some fantastic features, which allow the attendees to really interact with all the speakers and brands participating. This way it is not only Educational, but a true interactive experience, informative and fun, just virtually.

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By talking to the leading brands about what new products they have, we can bring exciting and exclusive new products to market with this platform. These cutting-edge products are important in the development of our industry and often won’t wait for a physical show to come back around. We like to ask the brand how they want to do to get their message across and then we bring those brands and their key thought leaders together in a way that allows for the attendees to not only understand more about the brand, but that particular market.

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For example, in digital signage, there is currently a major shift happening within large-scale video from the traditional video wall products to narrow pitch LED. As the quality, price and availability of narrow pitch LED products drops, this challenges the more traditional solutions. Therefore, what could be better for a virtual attendee than a platform like ours getting together a couple of leading brands of LED and traditional LCD to present their products and case for their technologies. Tie in an integrator and a content delivery provider, who are often tasked with bringing the project together, plus maybe an end user, and you have the makings of a very interesting virtual event.

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The key focus of these virtual events is to educate and enlighten the attendee and do so in a fun and informative manner. However, it also needs to add value to the brand thus having dedicated networking and chat rooms provides a great way of further interacting with the attendees, allowing them to ask more in-depth questions of the brands and companies presenting. 

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Keeping it fun, friendly, and upbeat, by using trivia and other factual market information and predictions, keeps the attendees entertained and engaged. 

In our opinion, virtual events are here to stay, since it is highly likely that the world will take some time yet of viral stability to get back to the place we were pre-COVID. So having a virtual and a hybrid strategy that runs alongside these physical events when they get back up and running will be critical to your brand and company. Come and talk to us here at Re-Sauce to find out how we can help you deliver all you need, whether virtually, hybrid or physically. We even have a 15 minute COVID testing capability now to ensure the safety of our face to face events, so just mail hello@re-sauce.net if you want to know more.