- Don’t just move your event to online, appropriate adaptation is very important
- Make creative use of interactive features to help draw attention and response
- Virtual event provides real-time data for follow-up actions and to help fine-tune marketing tactics and logistic of future events
Virtual events are nothing new. Coronavirus Outbreak has pushed businesses forward to embrace the contactless format. Rapid increase on search volume of virtual events can be observed since Mar 2020.
What is a virtual event
In a very broad sense, a virtual event is an online event that involves people interacting in a virtual environment on the web, instead of meeting in a physical location. Virtual events are typically multi-session online events that often feature webinars and webcasts. They are highly interactive, often aiming to create as similar an experience as possible to their physical counterparts.
Popular uses of business virtual events include virtual trade shows, job fairs, conferences, sales-meetings, college open days, job interviews and company-wide gatherings, not to mention the online demonstrations and sales broadcasts proven to generate millions of revenue.
Why Virtual events? Plus tips to take away
Virtual events are not simply a way to maintain social distancing, it has a lot of advantages. Here are some of them along with tips on better organisation:
- Wider audience
Virtual events allow us to mingle around the world via the internet. It helps extend our reach to audiences globally. Except for the timezone issue, attendees can participate in the event anywhere with an internet connection.
2. Cost-saving
In addition to reusability mentioned below, virtual events help save costs such as direct mailing, venue rental in the case of marketing events, manpower to supervise events and advantage of registration flow to be done entirely electronically and automatically with appropriate process design and setup. As such, if budget allows, allocate them on targeted online marketing to draw the right audience.
3. Measurable
Don’t forget to take advantage of collected data for any of your online channels. Of all collected data, put your focus on the audience’s response such as engagement data, learn which sessions were the most popular, how many people attended, what type of content they are viewing, which sales representative they talked to, which attendees they are engaging with, what resources they are downloading and questions asked. Findings of above data can be applied in subsequent fine-tuning of event rundown, content and even the marketing tactics by putting the most appealing, attentive and interested topics for next promotion and content highlights. You also can easily handle sales leads by identifying questions asked by specific audience and approach accordingly with queries addressed.
4. Reusable
Each speaking session is recorded and can be reused as marketing materials or on-demand videos to drive page views to website or social media channels. To help audiences find relevant content, we can also group related videos into playlists on the YouTube channel for viewers to watch similar subjects. Don’t forget to apply your youtube search optimisation tactics by highlighting keywords and tags with data you gathered above
5. Easy to build unique experience by personalized Video / AR filter
To build a unique experience for the virtual event, we can create an AR filter and ask speakers to try it and upload it to their Instagram or Facebook accounts by using event hashtags for pre-event promotion. Also, event organizer can upload to speakers profile pages to shorten the distance between the audience and speakers. To maximize engagement, we can encourage attendees to use the filter on the event, tag us in Instagram / Facebook the stories, and add hashtags to increase event awareness and enhance interaction. What’s more? We can create an AR filter for a unique virtual booth experience.
Here are some examples:
Event ideas:
Virtual booths ideas:
6. New revenue stream
For some events that sell tickets, virtual events can provide a new revenue stream. For example, we can use different interfaces for login and before login pages. For those who paid for the tickets, they can log in to consume all sessions. For those who did not they can pay by consumption.
Virtual vs physical events
After organizing and joining numerous webinars and virtual events, I find attendees are easily distracted by external factors, such as ad-hoc tasks and meetings. But we will stay for at least half a day for a physical event, to participate in different breakout events, experience in-booths product demonstrations and connect with industry peers. If entry fee is needed, there is a higher motive to participate for better return on investment.
When it comes to online events, the cost of quitting is as low as just a click away. As such, drawing and maintaining audience’s attention, with such elements as video demonstration and information download, is a key successful factor.
Hosting a virtual meeting revolutionises our business and lifestyle. As mentioned above, it is easy for our audience to get distracted when attending virtual events as they may be working at the office or taking a rest at home. We need to improve our virtual event audience engagement by providing unique, and surprising elements for them to do as they attend events for they want to learn information, trends, or connect with industry partners during virtual events. Also, we need to address the audience’s needs by providing a seamless experience throughout their virtual journey.
But how can we provide a seamless and engaging experience? Besides the AR filter I mentioned above, highly anticipated speakers and sessions, live chat, discussion boards, polls, networking, personalised videos, 3D, VR can help to make it social, increase engagement and provide a unique virtual experience. Also, we can provide a button for participants to download ebooks / researches and dive deeper into the topic during the seminar.
Having the aforementioned, virtual and physical events organisation are totally different in many aspects, including event strategy, planning and execution. “Direct translations” of a physical event are unlikely to succeed.
Summary
Virtual events versus physical events, webinars versus seminars, or hybrid events that combine with both virtual and physical, no matter what your decision is, there are three things in mind.
- Target Audience
Provide our target audience relevant and valuable information with an exclusive and unique digital experience to increase engagement. Besides, we should choose which time zone is best for the majority of our attendees.
2. Virtual Experience
For lead generation, face-to-face communication at physical events is easier to establish a quick relationship with someone and potentially qualify them as a lead. Therefore, we need a holistic digital experience, networking, and interaction for virtual events.
3. Data and Analytics
We can capture event data, profile data, and engagement data at virtual events for further improvement.
About the author
Karen Lau is a Web3, Metaverse and NFT enthusiast. She has a passionate interest in applying the latest technology, such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, and business intelligence (BI), to digital marketing for long-term growth. She successfully developed and evolved the company’s digital activities across online platforms.
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