Top Industries That Have Major Content Marketing Potential

Here are five industries that are seeing major growth and creating enticing content marketing opportunities:

1. AI and Machine Learning

Generative AI was the “COVID baby” of the tech world. In its infancy, it was used to write admittedly stiff, yet grammatically correct articles and blogs. Soon, it slipped into many programmers’ toolboxes, writing somewhat decent code in many languages.

But these applications quickly became superficial novelties with the rise of AI agents. Do you know what AI agents can do? Perhaps. Do you know how they use gen AI to process and validate data in real time and then integrate with an app to autonomously perform core business functions? Neither do the businesses that need them. But they — and you — should.

The knowledge gaps in the AI agent space are cavernous. Countless businesses can save thousands of dollars a year with the right AI agent integration, but they have no idea how to do so. Agentic AI producers need content marketers to explain how they work and what they can do to prospective clients. It’s no surprise that ZipRecruiter puts the average AI content writer salary in the six-figure range.

Bridging the canyon between agentic AI solutions and their diverse target users requires:

• Creators who understand how machine learning works to build and improve the generative AI that powers agentic solutions.
• Content marketers who double as entry-level AI architects, who can quickly identify how agentic AI can improve a business’s efficiency and also break down the short-term ROI of an agentic solution.
• Creators who can build infographics and straightforward explainer videos that make it easy for non-techy decision-makers to understand their benefits.

2. Outdoor Recreation Equipment

Outdoor activities enjoyed a dramatic surge during the pandemic, partially because proximity restrictions made safe indoor recreation infeasible. But post-COVID, the upward trend continued.

A recent report by the Outdoor Industry Association revealed that in 2025, outdoor activities, such as hiking and camping, gained 2 million new participants. The spike has been powered by both young and old — literally: There has been a 7.4 percent participation bump among seniors, and 5.6 percent more youth are heading to the great outdoors for fun and sun.

The Demand for Outdoor Products Continues to Grow

Driven by the need to see something besides their own four walls — and get the kids out, too — people have rediscovered camping, cabins, fishing, and other nature-based activities. For instance, canoe and kayak makers are seeing a historic spike in demand for their products, driven by a projected compound annual growth of 4.6 percent through 2033.

One- or two-person marketing teams may no longer suffice to meet ramped-up sales potential when a niche product (i.e., mountain biking, tiny trailers) suddenly becomes a mainstream must-have. To cash in, smaller companies need a way to attract customers away from the biggest brands. Large traditional companies, meanwhile, need to reposition themselves as less stodgy (L.L. Bean) or less extreme (Patagonia), or whatever the recalibration might be, to seem more inclusive to a bunch of newbie customers.

Consumers don’t just need products, either; they need information, sometimes as basic as “What is the activity you’re setting out to do? Where should you go to do it?” Content creators of all types, from user experience (UX) to social media marketing to lifestyle feature writing to customer service, are needed to communicate all of this, and it’s an easy pivot for lifestyle writers from other categories like travel.

3. Financial Services

Economic relief efforts in response to COVID-19 resulted in an alphabet soup of options, such as PPP, EIDL, and other disaster relief programs. Financial services companies stepped up to guide businesses as they tried to figure out which resources they qualified for and how to use them. This elevated the value of financial services organizations and created a huge demand for financial services content.

The ripple effects continue to power the finserv sector. Whether it’s credit-fixing apps like Credit Karma, established online publishers like Bankrate, or digital service providers like Revolut, financial services have been central to many management teams’ strategies. You may think that only seasoned financial journalists and experts have a place writing content for financial content marketing, but you’d be wrong.

Many such companies assume that the average consumer is pretty naïve about finance, and they often hire content marketers who can explain the basics to those folks from the standpoint of a regular Joe, not a professional investment advisor. There’s lots of work available writing explainer articles and advertorials, as well as SEO content and LinkedIn-style social media content.

4. Cybersecurity

The content needs of cybersecurity organizations shifted dramatically during the pandemic because attackers started tapping the potential of phishing and other non-malware-dependent assaults. With so many workers communicating through email, it became relatively easy for hackers to trick them into divulging sensitive data. Instead of merely purchasing a subscription to antivirus software, organizations were forced to fight criminals using intrusion detection, firewalls, automated monitoring systems, and other perimeter security solutions.

The need for innovative cyber solutions continues in 2025. CrowdStrike reports that 79 percent of cyber incidents have been malware-free.

This has been great news for cybersecurity companies because it drives a need for more of their services. Security providers need content that explains how their products and services improve data safety and compliance, which is good news for anyone pursuing a content marketing career.

High-level statements aren’t enough, though. Cybersecurity companies need content creators who can explain:

• How next-generation firewalls identify and stop malicious traffic.
• The differences between signature- and behavior-based threat detection.
• How machine learning-powered solutions provide stronger security.
• Diverse defense techniques, including Internet of Things (IoT) protection and edge network safeguards.

5. Ed Tech

With the rapid shift to online education came a backlash boom in alternative education options, and all of it leans on education technology to some degree. Home-schoolers and tutoring companies had used online learning tech tools for years, with higher education also making a gradual shift. COVID-19 forced a rapid acceleration of remote learning.

Content creators with expertise in web copy optimization, UX design, consumer communication, and other components of user experience continue to be in demand because new users are eager to understand the tools that can power their kids’ education.

Then there are all the people needed to actually create or expand curriculum and coursework. This is possibly the biggest area of opportunity, not just for career writers, but for former tutors and teachers. Beyond that, content marketing roles also require specialists (i.e., people who have traditionally done in-person, small-group, or 1-on-1 education) for:

• Test prep
• Special needs (e.g., speech therapy)
• Tutoring
• After-school enrichment programs

People with experience in the above can work with tech companies to bring these programs to the virtual world.

Education is a volatile and high-stakes space, and while some people think the switch to online learning can’t last, others think that it must — not only for safety reasons, but to even out the financial playing field for higher learning and to allow students greater access to education.

The Takeaway

Despite the financial destruction the pandemic caused, it also breathed life into several industries. This means opportunities abound for creators and content marketers. Organizations need to rank higher in search engines and make their value add clear to potential clients, and a data-driven content strategy can check both boxes.

Content marketing teams shouldering a stack of responsibilities may not have the bandwidth to build and execute comprehensive strategies. This is where ClearVoice’s solutions make a difference. Our team of industry experts can build strategies and deliver content that supports your marketing goals. Connect with a content specialist now to start powering your growth.

The post 5 Industries That Are Thriving (and Ramping up Content Marketing) appeared first on ClearVoice.

What is niche marketing? Niche marketing is the strategy of precisely defining one or more small segments within a larger customer market, and targeting marketing efforts (messaging, spokespeople, distribution) specifically to the needs and preferences of those segments.

While niche marketing is based around differentiating customer groups and targeting marketing efforts specifically toward those groups, it does not mean that niche marketing is for small budgets, small audiences, or products with narrow appeal.

It’s simply a strategy of defining target audiences and customizing marketing efforts to them. It can be — and often is — applied to large campaigns and launches. It also is crucial to those with a limited marketing budget who need to optimize it.

Finally, in the era of “finding your community” and building lasting relationships within it, niche marketing is a great way to accomplish this as a company. So, even for the largest companies with the best-known names, when it’s time to launch a new product or drum up buzz around something specific, niche marketing is often the way.

Niche marketing: the strategy, practice, and rationale

Niche marketing is the practice of targeting a very specific and small customer segment with distinct, predefined needs/wants. Mass marketing is the blanket or the blitz: it assumes that your product has such widespread appeal that all budget should be spent on one tentpole campaign that reaches the most possible people.

Niche marketing, by contrast, assumes that different groups of people will respond to your brand, product, or marketing messages in different ways. Even the largest brands use niche marketing — sometimes as a counterpoint to mass marketing — because those brands often have an entire portfolio of different products to sell. And not all products appeal to all people.

For example, any major beer company will do mass advertising for its flagship brands, and possibly for the “lite” versions of those beers as well. However, those companies would apply niche marketing strategy to craft beer portfolio brands, and an entirely different niche strategy to launch a new hard seltzer product.

As a marketer, when should you think about planning a niche marketing campaign?

At the point where you’ve created customer segments or buyer personas and are thinking about specific messaging, activities, and ad sets to reach specific segments, you’re already planning niche marketing.

The question at that point is how much do you want to lean into it, versus taking a more generalized approach.

Example: Your marketing is already targeting moms.

• Do you want to focus on a niche of moms with kids in a certain age range?
• Do you want to target single moms?
• Moms of blended families?
• Do you want to focus on a nutritional niche within moms?
  •  Is your target moms who try to shop healthy?
  • Or, are you targeting the “wine mom” niche?
  • Or, are you targeting fun moms who aren’t ingredient conscious?
  • Or, are you targeting busy moms who want small nutrition decisions made for them?

Depending on the product, you may find it optimizes your campaign and your budget to think through all these questions. One product likely does not appeal to every single mom. A “Mom” niche possesses more clearly defined traits and preferences than just having children.

You’ll have thought through whether she’s still married or not; what her views are on sociopolitical issues; whether she balances home school with work. Your marketing messaging, images and offers can be fine-tuned for the specific niches that you’ve studied and that you know.

Upsides of niche marketing

Proponents of it think there is a myriad of upsides to niche marketing, starting with:

1. As an exercise, it encourages marketers to research and understand the characteristics and needs of potential customers.
2. It narrows focus from an enormous, noisy field dominated by large companies to a few smaller, defined, and researched customer segments.
3. It’s more cost-effective for those on a limited budget.
4. Niche products typically have higher profit margins.
5. Customer loyalty is easier to achieve.

Downsides of niche marketing

If you have the option to do niche marketing or mass marketing, then you should consider the downsides as well.

It may not be right for a specific initiative due to reasons such as:

1. Smaller potential customer pool
2. Increased time spent on customer research and targeted messaging
3. Higher customer standards: If you purport to know your customer’s needs completely and provide the exact solution, higher customer satisfaction comes with the territory.
4. Reduced economies of scale: if you wanted to grow your outreach outside your niche, you might not be able to because of the thoughtfulness and customized efforts that are part of niche marketing.

What types of companies benefit from using niche marketing?

Nearly all types of companies benefit from using niche marketing. The only ones who probably can get by with ignoring it are those with such mass-market messaging that they don’t need to reach out specifically to customer segments.

Even some extremely famous brands only market their products to a small niche.

For example:

• Boeing: While it benefits this aerospace company to have mass name recognition and credibility because it’s publicly traded, the number of potential customers is probably in the lower hundreds. Those customers are enormous: namely, commercial airlines, and the US Department of Defense.
• Aston Martin: Most Americans’ experience with this ultra-luxury British car brand goes no further than seeing James Bond driving one of its sleek super-vehicles around in an action sequence sponsored by the local tourism office. But Aston Martin’s ultra-narrow focus has actually harmed it, leading marketing executives to diversify their outreach just the slightest bit by targeting Americans (and women!).
• Caterpillar: On the flip side of specialized vehicles, let’s take a minute to know this company by its name. It is so integral to construction and engineering that one of its signature yellow earthmovers by the side of a highway is an instantaneous signal to passers-by: roadwork in progress. Everyone knows what a Cat looks like. How many people would buy one? For personal use, probably no one.
• Harry Winston: This ultra-luxury jewelry brand built its legend status by loaning lavish pieces to Hollywood stars for the Academy Awards. This inspired marketing strategy launched its proprietor to international renown, alongside Cartier and Tiffany. Fun fact: for nearly a decade, the company has been owned by Swatch, but no one would necessarily know that. The brand story is a piece of Hollywood lore.

These brands stand as excellent examples of mass-market names that likely put all their real marketing efforts into niche marketing. The public knows them, but isn’t the target. For better or worse, they stay strictly within a very limited customer niche.

With most products and companies, as a rule, you can put some effort toward understanding customer niches, but this doesn’t mean you alienate or ignore everyone else. Niche marketing helps to put personas and parameters around an endless parade of passers-by, helping to decide who may or may not be appropriate for your brand to expend effort reaching.

Let’s look at a few more categories and how they niche:

Women’s clothing

• Inclusive sizing
• Maternity
• Petite
• Business
• Travel/easy-to-transport
• Sustainable/eco-conscious

Pet food

• Organic
• Grain-free
• Meat-free
• Raw
• No artificial ingredients
• Fresh
• Made-to-order

Residential real estate

• First-time homebuyer
• House hackers
• Neighborhood experts
• Veteran relocation
• Eco-friendly
• Luxury
• Downsizers

As you can see, any space that’s ‘crowded’ i.e. where there are many marketers vying for people’s attention, can benefit from narrowly identifying their target customers and creating niche marketing to reach them specifically.

What types of companies benefit from mass marketing?

Many larger companies still opt for mass marketing. Those who tend to believe in its efficacy are companies with a broad consumer base, high-volume production, low-profit margins, and an offering and/or message that has general appeal.

This could include:

• Basic household staples: laundry detergent, trash bags, disposable paper goods
• Big-box grocery stores, especially value: Costco, Walmart, Kroger, etcetera
• Healthcare companies, both insurance providers and over-the-counter medications
• Awareness campaigns: “Don’t text and drive,” anti-drug and alcohol, get out the vote.

Major entertainment events also often utilize mass marketing, because enough people in a cross-section of niches are fans: Examples include major studio movies, as well as professional sports teams and their “big game” playoffs.

Now that we’ve had a look at mass marketing, juxtaposed against how/why different companies and brands approach niche marketing, let’s look at how it works for providers who are niche themselves.

How does a product approach niche marketing?

Example: A fitness app might track steps, motions, calories, and sleep. What customer niches would want this information?

• People with weight loss goals
• People who have been advised by their doctors to monitor their sleep patterns and time outside
• Work-from-home newbies concerned with a suddenly sedentary lifestyle

Niche marketing would attempt to reach these customer segments in the publications they read, the stores they shop, the platforms where they work, and through partnerships with other companies with synergistic alignment: For example, Aaptiv’s pandemic-driven partnership with WW (formerly Weight Watchers).

An agency

It often behooves agencies to define the niches they serve, and demonstrate expertise in those niches. It shows that they have deep intelligence, passion, and dedication to the field.

Typically, clients want an agency that leans into niche marketing — even if that in itself is a trick of clever branding. Because niche expertise sells so well, even if an agency is somewhat generalist, the corporate structure and positioning will be as specialists.

For example: PR giant Daniel J Edelman Holdings has created many subsidiaries and fronts beyond its flagship Edelman Group, many of which were created to serve clients in niche sectors, including:

• BioScience Communications
  • Emerging science, biopharma
• Zeno Group
  • Purpose-driven marketing and social impact
• Edible, Inc
  • Food and agriculture
• Revere
  • Technology — growth and startups, as well as large tech companies

At times, Edelman has put major resources into creating a grass-roots, indie, or even activist brand to serve its clients’ needs. This agency is a generalist, but one with the resources and messaging expertise to create a niche company whenever the market demands one.

A solo practitioner

While the “generalist versus specialist” debate amongst freelancers seems to have legs that last forever, the practice of niching down is smart business, no matter how you look at it.

As a generalist, you can do a project about mushrooms one month, sled dogs the next, nursing homes the next, and Brazilian carnival costumes the next. The process of discovery never ends. The fascination of the new is eternal.

But if any of those clients want you to go deep — i.e. dig up expert sources with cult audience appeal, tap into historical research for a WOW campaign, use your relationships in the space to pull off award-winning casting — as a generalist, you’ll be in trouble. You may be able to pull it off a couple times, but it becomes exhausting if you repeat it for each new client.

And thus, niche expertise is created. Personal interest or special training or simple repetition, digging into one topic for multiple projects and with multiple objectives, creates a niche expert. It allows you to know what’s been done before; what works and doesn’t; what the audience responds to; and how to handle an exciting pitch to an effective campaign.

Niche marketing: the final word

For many, niche marketing is actually where the magic lies. There’s an imperative that you identify and understand your audience. There’s a challenge to do more with less budget. There’s an opportunity to win over specific customer segments — not because they’re mindlessly buying the product anyway, but because your messaging resonated. As a marketer or a brand, this leads to the ultimate goals of customer retention and brand loyalty.

Get quality content developed for your niche marketing campaigns by talking to a content specialist at ClearVoice today.

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What is a microsite? A microsite is a branded web page or small set of pages that is a standalone (i.e., separate from a main company URL) and is meant to serve a specific campaign, brand, or product. Microsites are often created for large campaigns that have a specific goal, different from general company awareness.

When might a business want to create a microsite?

A business generally considers creating a microsite when they’re launching a new product, service, or brand that they consider big enough and special enough to merit a space of their own on the web.

This often goes together with some sort of activation or event, whether it may be one of the following:

• Contest
• Social influencer campaign
• Tour
• Premiere
• Infomercial
• Book launch
• Important study

But in some cases, for example, if a business has a popular product that is successful enough to draw users who are only interested in that product, they may keep a microsite up and running just to accommodate those users.

Difference Between a Microsite and a Landing Page

A landing page lives on the main website domain. Think of it almost like an overlay that delivers the most important brand story of the moment. The difference between a landing page and microsite is the “next step” after the site visitor clicks. With a landing page, they go deeper into the main company site. With a microsite, they continue to navigate around the microsite.

How complicated does a microsite need to be?

While the homepage of a microsite is usually quite thoughtfully designed and engineered to engage, the site doesn’t need to be complex — in fact, it can just be one page. More likely, though, it’s a few pages, with the subpages being much simpler than the homepage.

Should your microsite have the main company branding?

Yes, it’s a good idea to have a mix between the main company branding and the campaign or product branding. If your microsite features only the new product or campaign branding, people may not associate it with the larger company, and then the microsite loses the larger company’s credibility while the large company may lose the PR boost and the refreshed company profile that the new product or launch was supposed to bring.

As a rule of thumb, a new launch with all the creative materials that accompany it is fun and exciting, but this has to fit within the existing company context — branding included.

Example of Software Microsite

Adobe doesn’t suffer from a lack of customers, but to create buzz around Adobe Creative, the company launched Creative Types: a personality quiz that appeals to anyone with a creative bent but really showcases the potential of Adobe design tools better than any particular personality traits.

Example of a General Interest Microsite

When your brand is world-famous (NASA) with an enormous following, and your products are at the apex of engineering and science to a level that almost no one would understand, how exactly do you serve your audience? Offline, such institutions usually open museums. Online, a great experiment was the NASA Spacecraft Site, which was a sortable, visual, interactive index of every NASA spacecraft.

The images were 3D models, which allowed self-styled space nerds to study them from multiple viewpoints (top, left, bottom). While the site is no longer up, it is still a great example of how a microsite can be tailored to a niche audience’s needs.

When your campaign/launch ends, what do you do with your microsite?

There’s no set rule. They often come down or are allowed to expire after a set time. If a campaign was a success and/or you want to continue featuring the product as a company highlight, one popular practice is to migrate it to a subpage of the main company site, making it easy to navigate to via a featured option on a homepage dropdown menu. But when microsites are good enough to be a destination on their own, as our examples show, sometimes they enjoy an extended life on the web as standalone sites.

Whether you need persuasive copy for a microsite, landing page, or website, ClearVoice’s talented team of writers is here to help. Get SEO-friendly copy that converts by talking to a content specialist today.

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As a response to this, my post, which was going to be about streamlining teamlance work in the age of COVID-19, has also taken a familiar pivot — one where we realized, halfway through trying to outline the post, that there is no such thing as streamlined workflow right now.

All the best practices for content flow (i.e. less back-and-forth, scheduling far in advance, going lower-touch on influencer campaigns) aren’t really working in this crazy year. The more you try to streamline, the more likely something will need to be corrected, backfire horrendously, or fail to launch.

8 tips for staying as consistent as possible with your content

Here are eight tips that can help you maintain your content marketing and keep some semblance of sanity while doing so. Note they are complete opposites of the advice you might have seen in productivity posts at the top of 2020… and we realize this and still fully stand behind this non-intuitive list of 2020 tips.

1. Don’t set go-live dates on a campaign till everyone has what they need in hand.

This particularly pertains to when people need a product to review/demo before sharing their opinion on it. Supply chain and shipping issues can cause multi-week delays, and if you’ve made promises to the brand that rely on certain deadlines being met, you may be in trouble.

Make sure everything is “subject to review/delay pending product delivery,” and don’t put dates into the contributor contracts or pub dates into your own calendar till the product is in people’s hands.

Steps:

1. Reach out to contributors (Gauge interest without setting a date)
2. Tell the brand manager you’re ready to activate
3. Put contributors on standby
4. Get the product and ship it out
5.  Set the campaign calendar
6. Get contributors contracted
7. Get the calendar approved by the brand manager or marketing manager

This is completely different from the process pre-pandemic when you’d put together a flighting plan and deliverables schedule for brand approval before ordering samples.

2. Make allowances for a few downweeks in your paid advertising flighting plans.

And expect that the down days will happen in multiple short stints, and you won’t have advanced knowledge of them. In one case, a campaign we ran over the summer had to stop running ads for six weeks on and off due to a pileup of national unrest, natural disasters, and pandemics.

Our small team watched the news cycle with beady eyes, evaluating and re-optimizing every three days. Big agencies reassessed every two weeks, making changes at the end of the month — and by the beginning of September, were hopelessly far behind the fast-moving ball of public sentiment, and unable to catch up on their annual goals.

3. Be prepared at any time to shift tactics and campaign spending.

You may want to reallocate funds to organic/owned creator content rather than paid advertising, or vice-versa, depending on what unexpected external factors come into play. Also, be flexible with switches over to different platforms, i.e., to Pinterest when the Facebook blackout happened… or, as many companies are going through right now, i.e., “We’re testing out TikTok, it’s the hottest platform for Gen Z. Oh, maybe we’re not, because it’s banned. But maybe we are because now it’s Oracle?”

4. Set up smaller check-in/touch-base meetings to supplement the ones with a larger team.

“More sub-committees, more meetings” was heretofore in everyone’s top gripe list of how to get bogged down and not actually execute anything, but in this socially distanced pandemic season, the larger the team, the more tasks and updates everyone is forced to review hastily before dispersing to their desk at home. Tiny teams are like clusters of folks in an office: if it were normal business, you’d be head-down working on this stuff together and then reporting back to the main team. Since you can’t, these little meetings are like virtual work sessions to get more granular and get things done.

5. Texting and DMs can be part of the client/agency or freelancer/agency communication process. Even off hours.

Unless you were very close colleagues, maybe even friends, texting and DMing at all hours used to be frowned upon. People who insisted on doing it were thought of as disrespectful of personal space and time. Now, though, with so many people juggling family and work, the lines between personal and professional time have blurred or disappeared — and people would often rather coordinate something through a quick text exchange rather than an email chain. If you’ve got three work projects on the go and are simultaneously looking after a toddler playdate and a home-schooling teen, it can be much easier to get work done on a smartphone than on a computer.

6. Don’t try to get your queue of social media content or semi-timely blog posts filled a few months out.

This used to be one of the ultimate hallmarks of content plan accomplishment and solid preparation. Being able to look three months into the future and know that all but your timely/news-bounce content was finished and queued up, ready to publish… ah, what a feeling. These days, the further out in the future you plan content, the more likely you’ll have to scrap some portion of it and revise with current events and sensibilities in mind. One odd and counterintuitive learning from the pandemic is that the quicker your turnaround, the safer you are, because the less of a risk you’ll have to rework or throw out part of it.

7. Stop automating the scheduling/publishing of any posts at all, whether blog or social media.

One very important byproduct of this fast-turnaround publishing schedule is that a lot of things tend to slip by fact-checkers and proofers. Google Deadline, Mike Pence, if you don’t know how bad the consequences of this could be. Whether you’re an editor pushing content out to an online publication or a content marketing manager in charge of a brand’s social media posts, don’t schedule anything to automatically post without a final edit. Things are just too chaotic right now. If you schedule a tweet or post for a week out, you have no idea what’ll happen in that week… and if you try to put something in the queue with a “hold publication till X” note, the person going through and publishing things at lightning speed might very well not see it. The fix is to switch, hopefully temporarily, from automated publishing systems to human oversight.

8. Be ready and open-minded to people going outside their swim lane when needed.

While publishers have always tended toward a business model where everyone on the editorial team wears whatever hat is necessary, brands tend to expect people to stay in their roles and perform only the things that are in their swim lane. And even publishers expect a separation between editorial teams and publishing/sales. All of those rules of conduct on content teams across every industry are completely blurred right now, because people need to find different ways of doing things than they’ve ever needed to before.

•  Editorial professionals are gladly taking influencer gigs
• Magazines are playing with live streams where their departments turn into “shows”
•  TV personalities are offering to set up product integration segments for a fee
• PR agencies have given up trying to secure no-fee-earned media

The old roles of “digital producer,” “lifestyle journalist,” “brand integration producer,” etcetera are morphing together in many cases, and if people can’t make enough money doing one of them, they’ll do more than one. [Lena] suggests leveraging this to everyone’s best interests instead of stopping to fret that a veteran lifestyle journalist is suddenly promoting Hard Seltzer on their personal Instagram.

Greater efficiency through not streamlining

A lot of these tips are counter-intuitive to how to streamline during normal days, but we are not in normal days, and we find that you really can’t take your eye off the ball for a second. It’s much less about automating and going low-touch, and more about staying hands-on and in the game, making small adjustments all the time. Make things easier with our publish-ready checklist.

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From post-work mixers to Friday night pizza night to inclusion workshops with a fun twist, all sorts of activities and exercises have been moved to the virtual spaces. Not only are favorite teamlancers invited to join, but those with a knack for creative ideation and execution are often the ones pegged to pull the events together, both before and during.

5 virtual team-building events by and for teamlancers

Here are five types of events that are familiar from pre-pandemic, have been pulled into the virtual space in order to cater to newly remote workforces, and lend themselves to being produced by teamlancers.

1. Comedy night

Before social distancing, an office manager or events staff might bring in an improve troupe for a customized workshop, or perhaps book a corporate comedian to do a set at an after-work party.  While some of these would be just for laughs, others were to encourage colleagues to have fun with each other and perhaps — with guardrails set — express things that they wouldn’t in a normal day.

Working in the virtual space does set new, less penetrable social barriers, but laughter still has great power to engage folks and deliver a lesson wrapped in metaphorical candy coating.

Possible billable tasks for teamlancers:

• Come up with a shortlist of potential comedians and /or troupes to hire.
• Think of other types of talent that could collaborate with a comedian (chef? HR person? productivity coach?), and scout those talent as well.
• Handle negotiations and contracting for the talent
• Work with the talent to create a program and/or a loose script of their set for client review.
  •  Provide them with company backgrounder, messaging points, notable news, and other information about the client that’s approved to incorporate into their set.
• Manage the AV and tech platforms that will be broadcasting the show and hosting guests.
• Create run-of-show, contact list and other necessary documents.
• Manage the performance for the client, including recording it so that someone can potentially cut it down to shorter videos later.

2. Scavenger hunt

Because virtual scavenger hunts allow people more time and location flexibility to compete than the IRL ones do, this challenge-based activity is enjoying a new burst of popularity with people who have just discovered it. People who have done scavenger hunts before are often called upon, not just to explain how the game is played, but to lead the customized creation of one.

The virtual scavenger hunt lends itself to remote workforces because players can complete missions within a time window — sometimes even a period of days — and still be in the running to earn points. Also, virtual platforms like GooseChase can be even more engaging than traditional, because of their capabilities to allow players to view each other’s photos, comment, vote and otherwise interact.

Possible billable tasks for teamlancers:

• Come up with the theme of the scavenger hunt, as well as themes for different days.
• Create missions and point structure.
• Write the copy that will encourage people to sign up, explain how the game is played, and otherwise give a “voice” to the virtual competition.
• Review submissions and award bonus points and special prizes (i.e. “most spirited,” “best outfit”).
• Create prize list and buy prizes.
• Create and post social media around the game.

3. Trivia night

Whether people are ferociously competitive or just playing along for a laugh, trivia competitions always pull in a healthy number of participants — and the small-team format naturally lends itself to office dynamics.

Possible billable tasks for teamlancers:

• Figure out what platform or software the trivia game will be hosted on, and what the game structure will be.
• Come up with themes and categories for the client to decide on their favorite.
• Create questions and answers.
• Outreach to potential participants and collect RSVPs.
• Act as the virtual host, calling out the questions and tracking points scored.

4. Game night

From Bingo to charades to Uno, a lot of games can move to the virtual space, and because of their structured nature, they can be easier for people to engage in than virtual conversations. Game night could even include trivia quizzes or a mini scavenger hunt, but the beauty of ‘games’ plural is that it provides multiple options in one block of time to accommodate different preferences. You can jump from drawing games to card games to something a little edgy like Two Truths and a Lie.

Possible billable tasks for teamlancers:

• Create a list of games that could be played, along with the software or platform that hosts the virtual game.
• Help the client set up the back end for whatever games are chosen. Is a special app needed? Can the game be played via one of the standard virtual videos? Will attendees need to download anything ahead of time?
• If needed, curate clues/questions lists ahead of time to make sure everything is appropriate and lighthearted.
• Create a program with time blocked out for each game.
• If the client wants attendees to raise hands in advance to play certain games, set up a registration process and manage the list.
• Make sure all attendees have instructions on how to join and play: i.e. what screen will they need to have pulled up on their computer? What programs need to be running?
• At least one person and maybe one small team will need to volunteer to support everything during the event, making sure people can log on OK, get into virtual ‘rooms’, that scores are being fairly kept, etc.

5. Culture immersion night

This type of activity used to be more of a theme party (Cinco de Mayo, Country-Western Night), but with the recent emphasis on diversity training and inclusivity, culture night can be planned with a bit more depth. It may even crossover with D&I event, if planned correctly. You could, for example, plan a virtual Polynesian luau with lessons and stories. Or, a Southern regional cooking class hosted by someone who knows the deeper history of where the dishes and traditions originated.

Of course, it’s best if a team member who is an expert on the featured culture leads the program-planning, but other people can join in on the planning and presentation.

Remember, if you’re involved in planning such an event and you’re not an expert in the culture, take a support role and don’t attempt to dictate what the right activities and guests are.

Possible billable tasks for teamlancers:

• Create presenter/talent lists.
• Wrangle the talent: negotiation, contracts, content deliverables, time commitment.
• Coordinate the program.
• Design event invites and other digital materials.
• Manage invitee/RSVP list.
• Will attendees need certain special items in order to participate? If so, coordinate ordering and shipment.
• Will there be interactive activities with visual components? If so, pre-produce these elements.

The new style of team building has a place for teamlancers

While remote work has made many former in-house people feel lonely and siloed, it’s made teamlancers feel the opposite in many cases. After years of being offsite, teamlancers are now as integrated as anyone else is.

Sure, a virtual pizza party might not be quite as fun and yummy as taking over the favorite local pub, but the social aspects are still there… and if you can bill 30 hours toward helping plan that virtual pub night, plus enjoy a beer with your colleagues at the end, there’s really no room to complain.

The post 5 Virtual Team-Building Events That Teamlancers Can Get Paid to Produce appeared first on ClearVoice.

Big companies that had in-house teams are asking those folks to work at a social distance and to reduce their hours in the field or go out in smaller crews. Editors no longer have to work with clients and producers hanging over them. Remote collaboration tools are being adopted en masse.

10 ways teamlancing has reshaped branded video

Overall, in order for the teamlancing model to work for video creation, there needs to be a shift in standards for the finished product. Pieces that have been reworked a hundred times and focused-grouped and tested before general release may just not be worth it anymore. Here are the trends that are driving creative and production now.

1. Brands rely more on influencers/independent content creators to develop and produce

There’s never been a better moment for people to produce content in their living rooms or backyards and see that content make its way into ad campaigns and feature publications. With an ongoing need to push out new content without convening large teams or going out in public, brands are turning to independent creatives more and more. Unprecedented times have forced them to reconsider the way they market — halting annual budgets and reconsidering every tactic month-to-month.

2. Hybrid creators are in peak demand.

Many companies have rolled out semi-permanent remote work and distancing policies, so whether they rely on in-house people or agencies to do their content creation, they don’t want groups of more than a few people to convene. Because of this, they are looking to a distributed workforce with multiple tiny teams or one-man armies who can all handle part of the work and collaborate in the cloud to create the finished product.

3. Big agencies go direct for skilled talent.

The white label business model is extremely common in creative industries, but the pandemic has forced big agencies to compete with smaller ones that use the friend-network model much more than the expensive traditional trickle-down model of allocating different parts of the business to established subcontractors and often working through agencies who then hire talent. The go-betweens at each layer of hiring are being trimmed as businesses realize they can speak to each other directly rather than giving several intermediaries a cut.

4. Corporate travel bans mean that video content generated in-house is also slowing down.

Even in-house staff is often not able to work freely in pandemic times. Many corporate employees are under tight travel restrictions,  and a lot of corporate content teams’ traditional workplace responsibilities — i.e. shooting corporate events or filming the company executives — are curtailed. In-house teams need to find different ways of doing things, or just find different things to do altogether.

Instead of shooting incentive meetings and conferences, they might be:

• Producing Zoom luncheons for a thousand staff members
•  Livestreaming the annual shareholder meeting
• Doing mid-day virtual learning sessions for stakeholders
• Touring the CEO’s pantry
• Filming virtual media events

Many of the teams who work in corporate video find themselves taking a closer look at the day-to-day workings of the company, from the perspective of, “When there are no cool events happening, no non-essential gatherings, no way to bring in cool outside talent — what quieter stories are unfolding right here at the plant, in our hometown, with everyday heroes?”

5. Remote shoots are a must in video teamlancing.

If you can’t film in person, you’ve got to figure it out remotely. I’ve written before about the various new tools and collaborative platforms that are becoming available to accommodate this, from OpenReel to Canva, and becoming familiar with this filming method is a must for anyone who wants a future career in production of any kind.

6. Editors need — and are getting — clearer directions.

In the past, many producers resisted the tedious task of putting story on paper, often preferring to have editors put together a stringout and then physically hang over them requesting cuts and changes while watching the video play. In fact, among the better practices to come from the pandemic-distanced work paradigm is that story scripts for editors now need to be carefully drafted rather than given in the editing bay. When nobody’s allowed to hang over the editor’s shoulder asking for changes on the spot, it necessitates proper and well-thought-out storylines to be done before the editor starts on the footage.

7. UGC is more important than ever.

User-generated content has long been the secret weapon of social media managers and marketers who need to fill their company feeds with content on a low budget. Instagram comment sections often contain from brands large and small, “Hello, we love this post and hope we can get permission to repost on our channels.”

In pandemic times, the practice of sourcing creative assets for marketing purposes has expanded beyond social media and into every channel including broadcast, as creative directors suddenly need to get creative and lightning-quick in sourcing assets for campaigns.

•  as a writer
• on a production team
• at a social media agency
• in R+D
• in production

… or as any other kind of creative vendor, you very well might need to engage real-life product users among your teamlancing collaborators.

8. Employee-generated content is part of today’s teamlancing video strategy.

While I have written about the usefulness of employee-generated content before, it didn’t used to be as popular for consumer campaigns as UGC – for various reasons. First, it’s hard to lean on employees to create content when their day job is something else, and quite demanding on its own. Second, there’s sometimes a bit of internal resistance to pulling in non-creative staffers to do the creative work. Or… there WAS.

At this particular moment in time, there’s a consensus at the executive level that authentic employee voices, especially essential workers, are the best and sometimes the only people to tell a company’s story. But their footage has quickly become the creative standard. If you’re working with employees to incorporate them or their personal photos and videos into a campaign, remember that their value isn’t based on how well they can write/produce/shoot – it’s based on their lived experience and POV.

9. Brand managers are open to less polished, more authentic content

The pandemic is forcing brand managers to reexamine what engages them, what they enjoy watching, and what they believe about their own customers.

Things are changing so rapidly in today’s world, there’s no time for the customary market research, focus groups and so on. Brand people need to decide what content will resonate with consumers based on what resonates with them, and get it out there in the time windows that are hospitable to marketing and advertising. They are making decisions that aren’t necessarily aligned with what the AOR says –and this is going to have lasting repercussions across how budget is spent, whose guidance is most trusted, and the accepted thinking around how to connect with customers.

10. Audience tastes are leaning toward less staged and pre-packaged content.

People are used to video content looking a certain shiny flawless way, just like they’re used to stunning, flawless makeup ads and perfectly packaged studio movies. But that does not at all mean that audiences only want that type of content. Many these days prefer something that looks a little more raw, rugged and relatable. This was already a trend in influencer content before the pandemic, and it’s been intensified to a different order of magnitude in today’s society.

As a team hiring other small teams, you’re no longer calling on modeling agencies, makeup artist, camera crew and recording studios to set up a perfectly by-the-book shoot. Instead, you’re thinking, “Where will my audience be a week or a month from now? What will make them feel safe and sane? What will resonate with them instead of feeling tone-deaf or passé?”

The post 10 Ways Teamlancing Has Changed Branded Video appeared first on ClearVoice.

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Many PR agencies were lightning fast to switch to new models of conducting their endless business, but not everything pans out. Some things, however, are creating new paradigms for the industry.

An incomplete list of the types of promotional events we’ve seen piloted in virtual spaces would include:

• Artist showcases
• Festivals
• Makers’ fairs
• Open houses
• Concerts
• Tastings
• Conferences

… and that’s just the beginning.

But all of these are consumer events. Media and industry people may attend, but they are not geared to them. PR’s purview, on the other hand, is media and trade activities. In many ways, the PR industry has been luckier than consumer event planners… at least PR events are still trying to run. But creating an experience that’s impactful, memorable and effective is difficult.

4 ways teamlancing supports virtual PR events

Here are four examples of how the PR industry is restructuring and forming different workflows that rely on teamlancing to create campaigns.

1. The live product launch is now a teamlance-powered virtual effort

In the old days, i.e. up till February of 2020, when a brand was launching a new product, they’d throw an event and invite people to see and learn about the product. These days, a mailer or delivery featuring the product is sent to a certain number of targeted key media. While it seems like an easier process, the logistics are actually tricky, especially if the mailer includes many components and an experiential virtual event is scheduled for people to experience it together.

Process

The client hires a freelance copywriting team for a product manifesto, and those teamlancers work with a corporate copy consultant on a PR release that goes out to the wires.

Another teamlance pod that specializes in talent pulls in four different brand ambassadors to create videos of the product. All of the brand ambassadors shoot their own footage, then collaborate in teamlance edit sessions. For the product launch, brand ambassadors publish their videos to their social channels, while the teamlance PR folks coordinate the delivery of the experiential media mailer to the key media.

Number of teams involved

5

Special component

Brand ambassadors are now being asked to create content on their own, thus creating a need for their own teamlance crews to tell stories from their perspective. Turns out, many brand ambassadors like this, since it provides a different perspective than the brands’ standby agencies have determined is the one and only.

2. Virtual networking events rely on teamlancers for seamless execution

Shmooze events are on a semi-permanent pause. Instead, a slew of virtual panels, virtual happy hours and other virtual networking events are bubbling up.

Process

A brand or organization decides to put on a virtual networking event. They create the lineup of speakers from their broad network – no need to worry about geographical constraints anymore unless it’s a regional org with a geo-targeted audience.

Oftentimes, the organizer works with marketing, design and social media teamlancers to make sure the event gets special featured placement in the company newsletter and social channels. If the boss feels the event is newsworthy enough, a freelance PR team may be engaged as well.

Ideally, all the panelists and presenters also have their own PR and social media teams working to promote their appearance at this event and add RSVPs to the attendee list. It behooves everyone these days to let your professional networks know you’re staying busy.

With the popularity of virtual backgrounds these days, it can be very fun if you have a little extra in the budget to put a graphic design team to work creating a few custom backgrounds just for the event.

During the event, the IT team runs the show and makes sure every attendee can find their way into the virtual room. This isn’t always automatic; sometimes a person will need to be serving as virtual list-keeper and letting everyone into a virtual room one by one. Once everyone’s managed to get in, the IT team makes sure that presentations can be accessed, the internet stays strong, and if a presenter drops off unexpectedly, they get right back on and are able to pull up their screen share.

Number of teams involved

5-15

Special component

As people become jaded by this type of event, organizers are becoming more inventive with programming — experimenting with everything from virtual speed-networking sessions to virtual townhalls to virtual fireside chats.

3. Community events with local business sponsors are aided by teamlancing

These events used to be the backbone of local PR and private business-community partnerships. Everything from pancake breakfasts at the rodeo to fundraiser 5Ks to veterans’ appreciation days at the local bank fall under this umbrella. And to be honest, it’s hard to move them into the virtual space. Some of the more creative publicists and event planners are trying though. The key is to replace pure leisure elements with other programming that is philanthropic to the locals, educational in a helpful way, or fun with a timely twist. For example, movie nights on military bases, or virtual food and wine tasting events where all the proceeds go to a local hunger-fighting charity.

The process

Coming up with successful ideas can be tricky because human interaction is truly integral to these events traditionally. My advice is to focus first on what you’re going to give to the attendees that they’ll appreciate and remember. Challenge the teamlancers — event organizers, marketers and community engagement — to ideate together over what this might look like. If you are bringing on a person or team based on what they might have done in the past, make sure and ask them: how is this going to be relevant and meaningful to people now? A speaker or performer who doesn’t typically switch up their act much needs to huddle with their own creative team and figure out how they can bring something special to this unique setting.

Number of teams involved

4-20+

Special component

People didn’t generally used to attend community events to learn something – even if that event was sponsored by the Chamber and ostensibly had a learning component. This is no longer the case. With so many people underemployed, learning as a hobby has gained in popularity. You may want to include more educational content than you normally would — and this may provide a reason for your executives to get out front and center.

• Giving advice
• Providing solutions
• Answering important questions (about timely or important topics such as health and personal finance)
• Offering access to experts
• Diversifying the invitee/attendee list

…this is how executives can score big points with the public and with media and community members alike.

After the programming lineup is created, there will be work to do for video teams, event teams, community engagement and PR teams. As planning progresses, you may wind up pulling in a catering/culinary team, a team to work on swag, and expert guests from your company that need a media training teamlancer before they can do their part. These teams may actually need to work right up until the day of the event.

4. The immersive journey and teamlancing go hand in hand

The junket is dead, and so is the press trip. Big conferences are canceled indefinitely. Will they come back? The forecast is uncertain. However, many PR professionals have decided not to wait until physical travel is safe to begin getting their destination or product in the public eye. Many are considering virtual trips and junkets… some generating more interest than others. Interestingly, one of the first to do so was Wuhan… and their target market was the United States.

Process

As with real trips, virtual ones are a collaborative effort between an organizer, a destination, and many on-the-ground destination partners that each chip in to contribute part of the experience. The organizer would need the most robust teams. Design and UX do the heavy lifting here — and indeed, we can predict that if this whole virtual experience market really takes off, consulting UX teams will become one of the most sought-after teamlance niches. While UX, production/filming and graphics works on creating the experiences, a PR team gets to work handling invitations. All the destination partners that will be featured have their own work to do, creating their own part of the virtual experience.

For museum, zoos and other feature attractions, this is probably something they’ve been working on already and just need to customize and make more in-depth for media and trade groups, with the teamlance support of:

• Video/editor teams
• App developer teams
• Story teams
• Social media teams
• Community engagement teams

… and other specialists. For businesses with smaller budgets and less UX savvy, putting together a virtual presentation might really be a stretch, unless they’re fortunate enough to know a creative team they can farm the whole thing out to.  Or, in some cases, a Chamber of Commerce or local CVB can make introductions.

Number of teams involved

3-12

Special component

Remember, this does not have to be live. If you’ve got a local citizen personality that is a super crowd-pleaser, but is too far out or too elusive to be worth putting on an agenda when people have traveled, you can actually send a videography team to that person’s space ahead of the event and capture their part of the program in advance.

Learn more about the new era of teamlancing:

• What Is Teamlancing? The Future of Content Marketing
• How to Introduce Teamlancing to Your Company
• What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Teamlancing
• The Cross-Generational Teamlancing System

The post How PR Is Pivoting for a Remote World — Supported by the Teamlance Model appeared first on ClearVoice.

• Digital video to live on a brand’s owned channels
• Short-form video to post on social media
• Blog posts
• Tutorials
• Slideshows
• Podcast material

And much more.

The workforce’s move to remote collaboration has been a perfect catalyst for an accelerated move toward the teamlancing model, where small groups come together to execute all sorts of projects in the virtual space — oftentimes, each group focused on a different aspect of a larger campaign. And teamlancing is perfectly suited to the explosion of small virtual events that corporations are forced to execute these days when their normal event calendar has disappeared.

People may not love virtual events in place of real ones — to be honest, the novelty of Instagram Live dance parties and Zoom weddings wore out fast — but for business purposes, virtual events are, in some cases, proving more popular. The crowds and mindless business card exchange ritual are gone. Quality conversation and connection are realistic objectives. Teamlancers, with their ability to be nimble and adjust their resources to fit the task at hand, are extremely well suited to support companies as they adapt to the new normal.

7 examples of events gone virtual and how teamlancing can help

1. Virtual tastings require teamlancers with good taste.

Instead of booking a room at a restaurant, many food and beverage brands are hosting virtual events. They typically work with a freelance PR team and a freelance event team, hiring a freelance catering team to put together a food sample box and bottle(s) of wine, and ship them out to attendees. Everyone comes together on Zoom while a culinary expert leads the attendees through the tasting experience.

Content ideas:

Encourage attendees to post photos of their food and wine to Instagram. Save the Zoom presentation by the culinary expert, and have a videography/editing team turn it into video marketing content. Put social content teams to the task of creating pairings posts for the brand’s owned channels. Recipe content is also extremely popular right now if you’ve got a culinary team on your teamlancer Rolodex.

2. Artist showcase platform

This has been done by liquor brands, art fairs, maker communities and music communities. Often hosted by social media personalities or collectives, these events bring industry decision-makers, arts supporters and media together virtually to check out new talent in a showcase setting. It’s similar to when up-and-coming artists used to do musical showcases or private showings of their art… only it’s quieter, less smoky, and the drinks are much less expensive.

Content ideas:

Obviously, the artists are happy to have their “show” shared with as many people as possible, even people who didn’t attend the virtual event, so if you decide to host one of these, make sure and get a high-quality recording of every performance that takes place.

Also, on the flip side, if your business is promoting artists, create content that helps artists get better at the business side of things – online courses or virtual business boot camps that focus on this are very needed since artists who rely on live events usually don’t think too much about building an online business.

3. Virtual product launches

The candid guideline from media is, as long as you’re sending out product for sampling along with the presentation, virtual launches can be fun. For some types of products, such as cosmetics or athletic wear, some people actually prefer to check out the samples in the privacy of their own home — with a brand expert right there on the screen to help answer questions or give styling instructions.

Content ideas:

Forget the press release or media advisory. What you’re going to get from this type of virtual event is lifestyle content. Plan accordingly. Here are some tips:

• Give people an activity, not just a Powerpoint. They want to be engaged, and Powerpoint presentations don’t engage people even in the nicest rooms on Earth, much less their living rooms. Make it fun and interactive!
• The most important teamlance crew here is the AV team because it’s their responsibility to ensure the presenters can go live at the right moment and stay online, that all visual materials come up the way they’re supposed to, and that no attendees have issues joining and interacting.
• If there is some sort of tutorial involved, have a production team create a video version of it in addition to the livestreamed lesson. Some people like to watch a live video later, but others want the short-and-sweet lesson.
• Make sure and note attendees’ questions so you can create FAQ content for consumers later.
• Think about utilizing a virtual photo booth to encourage attendees to take “event pics” and share.

4. Virtual fireside chats

There have been a thousand versions of panels and talks, but the “fireside chat” is good positioning because it evokes intimacy, a casual vibe, evening hours and perhaps a nice adult beverage. While nobody is really beside a fire — especially in the summer — this is really a clever way to package a small-scale panel discussion that takes place in the Happy Hour time window.

Content ideas:

Some great learnings and dialogue are coming from the small virtual discussion format these days. Perhaps because the setup is always a bit awkward, and people’s guard comes down when they’re physically at home, answers tend to be less polished and more open.

A written and design teamlance collab can do justice to the great content that comes out of this by recording it and reviewing later for:

• Short cutdowns and snippets
• Pull quotes for Instagram graphics
• Transcribe the best Q+A moments for blog posts
• Screengrabs of great visual moments to publish as images

Make sure and create profiles for all the panelists. Also, since these are usually work events with the goal of sharing information, webinars can go over well. Definitely this shatters the “fireside with a cocktail” mystique, but sharing out the webinar deck later might be appreciated with the attendees who were really there to learn.

5. Livestreaming classes

At a point early in the pandemic, everyone was using their time at home to learn things, enthusiastically. Mainly they were learning to bake bread, but there were also hosted lessons teaching everything from cocktail mixing to gourmet cooking to yoga online. These will probably continue, as part of brand programming, until the country is fully open for business again — so figure out how to make them better every time.

Content ideas:

Even more than product launches, everything in this category is a lifestyle event with the potential to create great lifestyle content around it. Moreover, because publications are now covering virtual happenings in their “What to Do” and “Top Activities” coverage, if your virtual class is really well-executed, it might actually earn some media. So, if you’ve got a chef engaged to do culinary classes, try doing them on IG Live, on Zoom, on Facebook Live, on IG Stories, and maybe on a niche platform. See if your talent has a favored platform.

Create photo content, text tutorials, short- and medium-form video, and even save the full version of streaming video presentations to see about cutting the highlights to repost.

Social media personalities have seen a huge spike in traffic to their educational content since April. People with a large following often have their own teamlance groups that they will pull in to help create their style of content, which will augment whatever your teamlancers produce.

This is the type of creative collaboration that some might dislike because it incorporates different visual and storytelling styles instead of a uniform brand look. But brand managers often love the variety since it showcases their brand in different ways.

6. Virtual fundraisers allow teamlancers to support good causes

After some early nerves, nonprofit development pros found that, with the right audience and some clever targeted programming, it’s possible to raise as much money through a virtual fundraiser as a live event… and at a much lower cost. Auctions and raffles don’t need people present in order to participate. Event production teams have stayed busy, booking presenters and entertainers. In this space, the audiovisual or IT teamlancers might be the most important, since they need to make sure the whole thing stays online during the vital event window.

Content ideas:

Whatever the nonprofit is, create a lot of content around it in advance of the event to remind the donors what cause they’re helping keep afloat. Multiple video and storytelling teamlance groups can be kept busy in the run-up to larger fundraisers.

Any key person within the organization should record a personal message to donors. People who have benefitted from the charity in the past year should be encouraged to share photos and personal stories. Go the extra mile to make sure anyone who donates items for auction, raffle or gift bags gets a spotlight on the event or organization’s website.

7. Employee appreciation events let teamlancers buoy up the staff

This is a tricky type of event to pull off when people are so used to working with each other in person… more so if they still do have to perform essential work in person, but would really rather not be there other times. Still, it’s possible to honor employees, to give gifts or scholarships to their families, and to bring in special guests and entertainers. It’s important to do this, too, in order to combat feelings of disconnect.

Full-time employees are often used to the social aspects of office culture, whereas teamlancers with a remote work history usually didn’t have that and therefore don’t miss it, and are happy to step into the planning and support roles to help bring upbeat culture into the virtual space.

Content ideas:

Whether it’s a virtual concert, virtual bingo night (with prizes!), virtual teambuilding exercise or virtual graduation, remember: These are the types of events that people really do look back at footage or photos a couple years later and remember — hopefully as a bright spot in a weird and tumultuous time.

Virtual event? Teamlancing to the rescue

We all hope for a time when happy hours, fireside chats, employee appreciation events and other connection opportunities can take place in “the real world” once again. But in the meantime, one unintentional advantage of remote work is that you reap a bumper crop of repurposed content from all those video calls, livestreams and webinars. And teamlancers, who are so used to virtual relationships and working without a safety net, can help displaced full-time employees get used to the new normal.

More articles on the teamlancing model:

• What Is Teamlancing?
• How to Introduce Teamlancing to Your Company
• How to Scale Content Production With Teamlancing
• The Cross-Generational Teamlancing Ecosytem
• What Hollywood Can Teach Us About Teamlancing

The post 7 Virtual Event Content Ideas (and How Teamlancing Can Help) appeared first on ClearVoice.