How Do You Make an Amazing Virtual Event?

0
How do you make an Amazing Virtual Event

In the light of the second wave of COVID-19, event organisers are full-fledgedly converting their in-person events into virtual reality. This has paved the way for new innovations and technologies as well. Virtual events may still sound futuristic to some but fortunately has become a new-age phenomenon due to its unique online experience and benefits it offers.

With the massive hype of virtual events and its emerging trends, many people are still unknown to its functionalities and how they can conduct a successful virtual event to make a mark in the event industry. Therefore, to cover all the doubts we have highlighted a few effective and insightful tips that will help you reach your potential and outshine yor virtual event in the future. Let’s dive right into it!

Captivating Tips for Hosting an Astonishing Virtual Event

Create a Map for Your Virtual Event

Creating an activity map that includes all the questionnaires and strategies that you are planning to put in your virtual event will help you cover all the essential parts of the event.

Ask yourself a few questions before you draw out your map, like the following- Why are you hosting the event in the first place? How are you planning to engage attendees? What all tools will you use to generate better ROI and revenue? Will your event have breakout sessions? How are you going to market your event? Etc.

Apart from that, define how you will enhance your attendees experience, what strategies you will need to gather feedback from your audiences, which date and time will suit the best for your event, How many attendees are you planning to invite, and so forth. This will help you mark the first step towards the success ladder.

Know Your Audience

To make your event more seamless and engaging your second target step must to know your audience. This will help you create an event just the way your target audience is willing to attend. Have a thorough research and understanding of the market trends and keep yourself up-to-date to fill in more attendees at your event. You can conduct a pre-event polling for your visitors in order to gather all the information accurately. Ask questions relevant to your event as this will help audiences better understand the content presented at the virtual event and allow you to tailor their needs effortlessly. This will two key advantages:

* You will provide more value and relevant content to the target prospects while also improving your ROI in a positive manner.

* Your event show-rate will get doubled since the content you are providing will be more inclined towards your audience’s perspective. Hence, people are more likely to show up at your virtual event.

Many experts have stated that live polling can relavative increase audience interaction and can build an empowering relationship with your audience.

Choose an Appropriate Virtual Event Tech

Choosing a software to perform your event online is the same as looking for a venue to host a physical event. While evaluating a platform, an organiser must consider their activity map and opt for the one that allows integrity, easy accessibility, networking and engagement altogether. Tools that offer an open communication to attendees, helps you create outstanding virtual lobby with the basic outlets such as networking lounge, breakout rooms, audis, information desks etc just like physical venues is our best bet.

Besides that, as we see technology advancing each day, many platforms today have improved their services making the event completely custom-free for their customers. Event customisation feature enables the organiser to create their own platform and change the look of the entire ambience starting from the registration form, to the colour and font size of the button & icons, to adding music of their choice and much more! This new technique has enabled organisers to become more creative with the event and also explore more  for better engagement and interactive experience.

Smartly Promote Your Virtual Event

After events switched to a virtual space, planning and marketing events became much easier and hassle- free than expected. The best way to promote your event on;ine is by ustilising the gift of social media channels to reach more audiences effectively. There many paid and unpaid marketing strategies that may be considered depending upon your event type. For instance, if your event is more confidential and you want less people to attend, you don’t need paid advertisement tools. But if you are planning to host an art festival and want to level the attendance, a paid tool can do things more seamlessly.

To do smart promotion, one must first know their target audience and where they reside. Which social media channel will help in reaching the most targeted audience. After you analyse that, next comes spreading awareness, educating the audience, and appealing them to attend your event. Promoting your event months before it takes place can affect your event attendance. So find the right time and then start advertising your event full-fledgedly.

Include Breaks and Networking Sessions during the Event

If your event is going to last more than an hour, inculcating breakout sessions is a must to allow participants to rejuvenate and restore their energy.

This will allow you to check if everything is running as planned while at the same time attendees can regain their focus and settle back on their seats to continue participating in the event for more engagement and interactivity.

Alongside of this, you can also incorporate rooms for attendees to network with other participants via using interactive tools like live audio/video chat, or text chat. This will create more excitement and build powerful connections amidst people.

Collect Follow-up Surveys from Audience on Key Metrics

Virtual events can be a brand new concept for many people and hence it is important to know about their event experience. This can be done by making a small follow-up survey for them that includes event related questions like- What did they like the most about your event? Which part was less entertaining and why? What will you rate the event on the scale from 1 to 10? And so on.

This will help gather information more precisely and allow room for improvement in the future.

Encourage Audience with Different Engagement Tools

Audience engagement is one of the most important parts in organisers lives as this allows them to analyse their performance metrics more effectively. Many professionals have stated that engaging audiences has been more challenging than anything and hence they advise others to use appropriate and productive engagement tools to build better relationships with audiences.

A few engagement tools are- gamification, photo booth, social wall, quiz or contest, knowledge sharing discussions and so on to keep attendees hooked for longer hours while also uplifting the atmosphere of the event.

Hire Moderators and Entertainers for Better Experience

One of the best ways to keep your audience away from distraction is to hire professional moderators and entertainers that would naturally help in keeping attendees engaged during the event.

For instance, if you are planning to host a small virtual event, you can invite a sketch artist who can keep your audience entertained in a super creative manner. One of the key advantages of working with a sketch artist is that they can provide high social media engagement. With their creativity and unique engagement tactics your audience may be willing to share the art on their social media accounts making your event a big hit.

Whereas, if the event you are planning is going to involve a huge crowd, it is likely to have entertainers like a magician or a music band. They can do some enticing things in order to keep the audience engaged and away from distraction. You can also host a whiskey or wine tasting session for your audiences and provide them with free tasting samples. Because let’s face it, people love free stuff and they look for an opportunity to attend these kinds of events wherein they can get knowledge and gifts altogether.

Over to You

Ever since the pandemic, virtual events have become the most effective and convenient platform for event organizers and businesses. It is expected to shape the future of the event industry in the most radiant way possible. Event professionals find virtual hybrid events more powerful than physical events as it has given so much to them. Right from greater reach, sustainable ROI, to brand visibility and qualified leads. By following these 8 tips you can build a virtual event from scratch and turn it into a successful event. Not just that it will allow great exposure because let’s face it, with the new emerging technology and trends these events are only going to march forward making it a great place for event organizers to expand their business in every corner of the world.

Just make sure you have a thorough knowledge of the virtual field so that nobody fools as there are many marketers available in the market today which can create confusion and disruption. We hope these tips ensure great results across all your performance indicators and bring in a pocket full of success and shoe rates.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here