5 Simple Steps to Create Kick-Ass Online Events
Virtual events, commonly known as online events, are a major marketing initiative to aid businesses in staying abreast with the rapid pace of technological innovation and humanizing their brand by offering their audience highly interactive and engaging experiences.
Online events allow brands to step into the future of innovative audience engagement. These include virtual fundraisers, conferences, online trade shows, virtual meetings, networking events, live streams, and much more.
This article offers 5 simple steps to create a kick-ass virtual event to expand your audience and boost audience engagement.
Let’s dive right in.
Defining your Audience and Goals
The first step is to define your target audience and goals behind the virtual event to ensure success and effective audience engagement. You need to finalize all objectives behind your event, such as the chosen platform, the time and date, and the target audience.
If you’re planning a virtual fundraiser, consider the audience interested in such an affair. If you’re planning an online tradeshow, you need to target entrepreneurs running small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs). Similarly, online conferences and talk shows should target intellectuals and people who seek intellectual stimulation.
It is crucial to align your strategies with the goals that you seek to achieve with your virtual event. Are you seeking to raise brand awareness, market your new collection, or raise money with a virtual fundraiser?
Planning is crucial to achieving your objectives by identifying the key performance indicators that will enable you to measure your returns on investment (ROIs).
Choosing the Right Format
Online events come in a wide array of formats and scopes, so once you’ve defined your objectives and audience, it’s time to choose the right format. Can you effectively achieve your goals by offering your audience a variety of sessions? Or can you engage your audience with a small seminar with a keynote speaker?
It is crucial to make this decision with close attention to the preferences of your audience. If your audience seeks networking, it is ideal for putting together a network of dignified and noteworthy speakers in a panel discussion. This format will allow your audience to pose questions and enjoy quality interactions.
It is crucial to add multiple fun activities to prevent the virtual event from becoming dull and boring. Consider adding a fun virtual wine tasting or add polls to keep your viewers engaged.
Choosing the Right Tools
Finding the right tools is another crucial step that requires you to pay close attention to your audience’s preferences and accessibility. There are numerous tools that businesses can access to host a virtual fundraiser or a panel discussion.
Choosing the right platform for your virtual event requires you to ask yourself, is your target audience willing to adopt new tech tools? What are the social media platforms your viewers use the most? What are the features and tech tools you need to ensure smooth connectivity and interactivity?
Numerous social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, offer live streaming features that allow you to conduct polls, Q&As, and ensure audience engagement. It is crucial to choose a platform that supports live polling, instant chat, and allows your audience to pose questions. Be sure to monetize your event as these platforms allow you to create paid tickets as well.
Market Your Event
Marketing your online events requires a high-powered promotion strategy, and you can carve out a sizable budget as online events do not accompany the hefty expenses associated with face-to-face events. It is crucial to prioritize marketing and power your efforts with strategies that offer higher ROIs.
Since people are shut inside their homes, you can target a large audience and encourage them to sign up for your virtual event with considerable ease. In recent months, virtual events are enjoying immense popularity, allowing event planners to extend their reach beyond their local audience.
Social media offers numerous paid avenues, such as ads, hashtags, and stories, to effectively market your event. Be sure to curate a personalized, audience-centric campaign that emphasizes the value your virtual event has to offer, with an emphasis on the bios and note-worthy aspects of your keynote speakers.
Ensure an Engaging Virtual Event
Last but most certainly not least, as the big day arrives, your work has nowhere ended as the most crucial task is yet to be undertaken, ensuring an engaging and interactive virtual session.
It is crucial to ensure that timeliness and efficiency are ensured. Your audience does not have to sit around and wait for your speakers to arrive. As opposed to face-to-face events, where the audience is amicable and willing to wait, your virtual audience simply has to unplug and get engaged elsewhere.
Make sure that all speakers and delegates arrive on time and are ready to get started a few minutes before the virtual event is scheduled to commence. If your delegates are tuning in from another location, be sure to send reminders and ensure they have the right email address or platform to sign into the event. It is ideal for preparing communications and checklists, for being distributed across all delegates and speakers. Hence, the entire event is well-planned and streamlined.
It is highly advisable to double-check all your tech tools and ensure that your contributors and speakers can use these tools effectively. Putting together a virtual event with remote speakers and contributors can prove challenging, but efficient planning and communication prove instrumental.
Summing Up
Once your event has started, be sure to assign team members to record the event and post snippets and video clips on various platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. This will expand your audience reach, encouraging new viewers to tune in after enjoying a small clip of the ongoing discourse.
Recording your event is crucial as it will help you add immersive content to your website and social media platforms. This content will help you expand your audience for future virtual events. Be sure to write an appealing post-event summary to increase your event’s value and offer value to the people who couldn’t attend.