The past two years have inspired a transformation in reaching audiences, completely changing how we look at events. To survive as an event professional in 2022, you need an incredibly creative vision and a strong work ethic. This is especially true for projects as technically complex and limitless as virtual and hybrid events — they require immense creativity and technical know-how to be successful.
Before 2020, events were, in many ways, the last analog channel of marketing. Today, they have been digitized and are growing to become the epicenter of marketing strategies, driving not only brand interest but also meaningful community and brand loyalty, growth in demand, and revenue. Seemingly overnight, we were able to acquire good, real-time data about our audiences: what interested them? Why? When? How?Â
See More: In a (Still) Virtual World, How To Perfect Online Events
How Are We Working on It?
Quality data gives you insights into what your audience really wants. For example, you can see if the audience attendance or engagement rate is dropping on certain sessions or speakers immediately. That kind of data helps you understand what content you need to be serving your attendees — or not — at your next session or event. Driving every event’s ROI is the number of leads, prospects, or customers and how they are engaging with content and each other. A robust event platform can take all the data gathered at your event and share it with your CRM and tech stack, ensuring you are tracking and hitting your ROI goals. In-person events are almost like a black box where you can never quite know for sure what is happening because there’s no way to monitor every interaction between speakers and the audience, vendors and customers, or between event attendees. With virtual and hybrid events, all those interactions are digitized, providing a wealth of data to improve and ultimately create incredible events.
The data resulting from a virtual or hybrid event allows strategic event planners the ability to craft personalized event journeys and hyper-targeted post-event campaigns that drive community and revenue. Event data leads not only to overall event success, but it can now also inform your customer follow up to the highest levels of your business strategy. Insights from your events are no longer just interesting to the CMO but the entire organization.
Creating a personalized, engaging, and immersive digital experience is easier and more innovative than the basic Zoom webinar or in-person VIP lounge. Before the pandemic, when we were all doing large-scale physical events, VIP attendees were given an usher who took them to their seats or special registration forms in which event organizers personalized questions for these star attendees. However, virtual events give organizers the power and ability to analyze and personalize everything happening at an event, making every attendee a VIP. By creating personalized journeys for different groups of attendees, you can create a seat at the table for everyone to contribute during a virtual or hybrid event.Â
The rapid digitization of events has not been easy. Much of the technology and many professionals themselves were not ready to adapt to this new style of hosting events. Pandemic quarantines and isolation forced our hands, and over the last two years, our industry has focused on creating an effective and intuitive format for virtual audiences. The last thing professionals need or want to worry about on the day of a big event is if the technology will hold up to their plan. A platform that makes it easier for you to produce incredible results for your audiences should be equally reliable. Marketing professionals have so many options; you should select a platform that works with you to support your team and your vision, not one that forces you to become a member of technical support.
How Do You Bridge the Gap?
As we move to post-pandemic life and can return to in-person events, we face some new challenges in creating exceptional hybrid events that blend physical and virtual realities. For in-person, it’s about the venue and the shared experience in a particular venue. For virtual, it’s about the quality of your content and the audiences’ options to engage with it. Hybrid events are the best of both worlds. Choose a platform partner that can guide you through planning and executing your whole vision for your event to create incredible experiences for attendees with data to analyze ROI and guide future events.
It is extremely difficult to create wow moments simultaneously for in-person and virtual attendees because each audience has different needs. For in-person attendees, it’s more about the experience you’re providing through your venues — the buzz of the other attendees, the décor and vibe of the location, and the technology you’re using at the event. For virtual attendees, you create wow moments around the content and the ways you give your audiences to interact with it and each other. Great speakers are a must because audiences want to hear and see great content in a virtual setting that provides liveliness, excitement, and community to create the wow factor.
We love events because they bring together people from different cultures, backgrounds, work styles, cities, and countries for a common purpose. However, It is hard to break the ice because attendees don’t know each other, especially in a virtual setting that allows more people to join. Gamification through the event platform is a strong tool to ensure that you can engage audiences and create more connections, setting your sessions up for success. Many times, at in-person events, someone can make one or two connections, but virtual events that effectively utilize gamification can create many more connections through fun and engaging means.Â
See More: Will This Be the Year Event Marketers Step up With Truly Immersive Experiences?
Creating a memorable event in the virtual and hybrid era of events comes down to effectively using the data generated at your event, personalizing the experience for each attendee, and prompting their engagement through gamifying the experience. The past two years have undoubtedly been a challenge, especially for the event industry. However, we now have an incredible opportunity to bring together the worlds of art, design, and technology in this new medium, summoning the diligence and brilliance of marketing and event professionals. Their creativity to overcome the impossible and pull off the miracle of incredible events that are memorable, engaging, and immersive — in-person, virtually, or hybrid — will set the future course for the industry.
How are you making your virtual and hybrid events more engaging to the attendees? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .