Virtual Face-to-Face is the Future of Business and Industry Events
If you’re finding yourself transitioning to online events — either as a consequence of the COVID-19 quarantine, budget constraints, or the desire to connect with your audience differently — you may be feeling apprehensive about doing it properly. We’re here to tell you that there’s no need to be nervous. In fact, going virtual is a great way to create a community for people who are drawn to your brand.
Not only is creating and online event an amazing opportunity to inform, entertain, and engage your audience by delivering an experience that compels them to participate, there are other nice benefits too. Virtual events have the potential to expand your audience significantly. They give you a way to connect with people from all over the world, and by integrating chat, networking, and other community tools, attendees are more likely to talk to you all through the year. Likewise, virtual events provide a huge savings over in-person events since there is no longer a need to rent costly venues or pay for travel expenses. That means your team can reinvest those dollars into a truly immersive experience. Another massive advantage of going virtual is the ability to extend the life of the event’s assets, which can be repurposed across multiple marketing channels cutting marketing dollars significantly.
Considering the major benefits of hosting a virtual event, we’ve created the following list of tips that can help you create an engaging experience. Keep reading below.
VIRTUAL EVENT CASE STUDY:
Pivoting to a Virtual Event During a Global Pandemic
IDEX Health & Science 2021 Virtual Global Summit
Tips for Creating an Engaging Virtual Experience:
Expand Your Audience — A virtual platform immediately eliminates travel time and costs for attendees. With this in mind, you can open your event up to a much larger gathering.
Invest in High-Quality Video — Whether it is for formal presentations, interactive livestream web chats, or follow-up edited clips, excellent video assets should be a focal point. The goal should be creating videos that are really well watched and shared, where applicable, providing a good shelf life.
Lead with Your Brand — It’s essential to keep your brand presence strong, so make sure you also embed your brand personality into the experience to make it feel authentic to your attendees. This can be done through graphics, backgrounds, streaming overlays, promotional banners, documents, video, audio, special downloads, and so much more.
Encourage Engagement with Interactivity — Webinars can be a wonderful tool, but they can quickly lose an audience’s attention. Get your attendees involved as soon as possible through polls, live Q&A, surveys, etc., so they feel like they are part of the experience. Speakers should actively share the real-time data and their interpretations of the results. You can also incorporate games with SWAG giveaways. Plus, people love a little competition!
Control the Presenter’s Environment — A good-looking and -sounding experience should not be taken lightly. Train, test, and rehearse with all your speakers to make sure they have the right equipment, camera, lighting, and audio. For consistency, create branded backgrounds for speakers to use.
Keep Sessions Short and Sweet — Holding people’s attention is even more difficult virtually. Experts suggest that ideal sessions should be no longer than 90 minutes. But, breaking up that 90 minutes into snack-sized content will help keep people engaged in the experience for the long haul.
Plan and Promote Scheduled Breaks — During a virtual event, keep in mind that your audience will not be as “captive” as they are at in-person gatherings. Include scheduled breaks so attendees don’t decide to break on their own. Make sure scheduled breaks are visible within the platform so attendees know what to expect. We’d even suggest incorporating a hosted break that includes physical activities, such as a guided yoga stretching session, or a DJ’d break to conduct a virtual game show. Anything to keep the audience moving and engaged.
Need Help Navigating Your Upcoming Virtual Event?
Marketing and managing virtual events come with unique challenges, benchmarks, and questions. Our team at V2Works does more than just brand — we advise and collaborate with organizations looking to pivot to an online venue. Contact us to learn more about how we can work with you on your upcoming virtual venture.
