Meetings Pro Tip: Embrace Branding Within Your Virtual Sessions

The medium may be the message, but what does that do when the medium is a virtual event versus a hybrid or in-person one? Specifically, what does that do to your organization’s branding imprint?

In general, branding can play a larger role in virtual settings—making it one of the most important ways for your organization to stand out.

What’s the Strategy?

“Branding an event shapes how everyone involved—speakers, attendees, employees, and sponsors—remembers the experience,” HubSpot’s Katrina Kirsch noted  (opens in a new tab).

However, the nature of that branding shifts in a virtual setting, where the options for putting branding in front of attendees are limited. 

So that branding has to be more direct. This can take two primary forms—a white-labeled branding approach, so your virtual event platform looks native to your organization, and a branding approach that works within sessions.

While it’s possible to do something like virtual backgrounds, the approach is shifting to more native baked-in branding—something tools such as Zoom are experimenting with. (The company recently added a feature called Webinar Session Branding  (opens in a new tab) to its offering.)

Why Is It Effective?

The growing use of webinar platforms means that there are fewer places to stamp with your branding. After all, your attendees are not going to see your banner with your list of sponsors as they walk into the expo hall.

However, while virtual branding can be a great way to draw attention to both your organization and your sponsors, it does have its limits, notes BizBash  (opens in a new tab).

“Remember to always be mindful of the attendee’s experience when developing your branding,” the site explained. “You don’t want to disrupt their experience or prohibit a sponsor’s branding from being noticed by, say, including a flashing logo or constant pop-up messaging that’s only going to distract from your event’s key content.”

What’s the Potential?

Another way to bake branding into the overall approach is through the use of a virtual stage, which can integrate relevant visuals into the background that attendees see. Over at the event branding website Bluewater  (opens in a new tab), writer Rilee Chastain makes the case that such an approach is actually more important now than it might have previously been.

“It helps to set the scene for your attendees, and for this reason, it may actually be more important in a virtual conference setting,” Chastain wrote. “This is because with a virtual event, you’re already fighting to engage an audience who is removed from your speakers and is facing distractions a world away from your presentation.”

(And there’s value in getting all this right, too—HubSpot says that consistent brand presentation can raise revenue by a third.)

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