With COVID-19 placing in-person events on hold, businesses are jumping on the virtual train to engage customers and remain top of mind. Recent research shows that 90% of event marketers plan to invest in virtual events moving forward.
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What is a Virtual Event?
Simply put, a virtual event involves people interacting in a virtual environment online rather than meeting in a physical location.
Should You Have A Virtual Event?
While hosting a virtual event sounds like a good idea, it may or may not be the right move for your brand. Before stepping into virtual waters, here are some questions you need to ask yourself.
Is There A Need? There’s no value in having a virtual event unless there’s a specific need in your target market. For instance, prom was canceled for the class of 2020 due to Covid-19. As a youth culture brand, American Eagle hosted a virtual prom event called #AExME Prom, on Zoom. The event drew 17,500 attendees.
What Kind of Event Do You Want to Have? Not all events translate well in virtual environments. Some events that can be held virtually include product launches, online classes, conferences, and parties. However, you’ll have to think about how to create an experience that conveys the same feel as an in-person event. For its new shoe launch, Japanese sport, and footwear brand, Asics, turned to virtual reality to make journalists feel like they could reach out and touch the shoes.
How Will You Promote Products? In-person events are usually a good way to make sales. About 85% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service after attending a live marketing event. For virtual events, you can’t bully attendees with marketing campaigns. So, you need to find creative ways to deliver authentic brand experiences and convince attendees to purchase your products without being salesy. Kroger’s holds weekly stay-at-home celebrations called Kroger Social. To encourage people to buy its private label product, Kroger made downloadable recipe kits using its private brand.
Can Your Content Fit A Virtual Environment?
Capturing consumers’ attention online is difficult and too much information can lead to content fatigue. These problems mean your content and sessions have to be short. For its virtual event, Apartment Therapy hosted sessions that lasted from 10 to 30 minutes.
Before, planning a virtual gathering, research how your audience consumes content to find the length that feels right for your audience. If you have a lot of great content, you can convert them to downloaded assets and use them throughout the event.
Like in-person events, your virtual event has to be personalized for your audience to increase engagement. Therefore, you’ll need to brainstorm how you’ll create a 1:1 experience for attendees and build an experience that caters to their preference.
Some brands achieve personalization during virtual events by allowing attendees to choose their journeys through microsites. For its Small/Cool Experiences At Home virtual event, Apartment Therapy curated 20 shoppable spaces and attendees could select what space they wanted to view.
How consumers access your content is another thing you need to think about. Since not everyone will be able to attend all your live streams, you have to create on-demand videos to allow them to watch when it’s convenient. Some places you can consider hosting these videos include a microsite, your social platforms, or a mobile app.
How Will You Engage Your Audience?
A virtual event without engagement is just another webinar. You need to come up with exciting activities to keep your audience engaged throughout the duration of your virtual event. Therefore, one key question you should ask yourself is-can I have real-time interactions with my audience?
Real-time activities such as quizzes and polls make your event exciting and increase interaction. For example, during its Blend Together While Apart virtual whiskey event, Flaviar sent its community members Blend Your Own Whiskey Kits via email to enable them to recreate crowdsourced recipes themselves from home. Then members were invited to attend a live blending event and to vote for the winning blend in a poll.
You can also make attendees feel invested from home by having a Q&A or Ask Me Anything session and reward interaction with swags such as gift cards, streaming service subscriptions, non-profit donations. Going this route means you need to have a great moderator on the ground to take questions and ensure everyone is attended to.
Engagement doesn’t end after your event ends. So, you need to think about how you can keep the buzz going. This could be through a hashtag campaign or by selecting guests to receive exclusive gifts after your show.
Can You Deliver Exciting Online Experiences?
Good content is only going to go so far as to replace the physical event. You’ll have to figure out how to deliver unique online experiences to make your event memorable. Event marketing statics recently found that 33% of event planners would use additional budgets to invest in enhancing the attendee experience.
Rather than having attendees passively watch a live stream, think of how you can leverage technology such as VR to deliver immersive experiences. Keep in mind that to create a truly virtual event, you need to create a computerized event space, and doing so may be expensive.
One reason people attend events is to relax and have fun. You can recreate the fun feel of live events by hosting virtual after-parties that include a celebrity, have a musician live stream, a fun performance or live-stream sets from DJs. However, the activity you choose must align with your brand experience and attendees should be able to participate in it easily. To make its audience feel part of the fun, American Eagle’s virtual prom party asked its audience to show off their TikTok dance moves, for instance.
Virtual brand activations can also help increase product recall and make your event memorable. To support its live event program at Super Bowl LIV, Poo-Pourri created a digital “Let That Sh*t Go” experience. Attendees were invited to type a negative thought they wanted to “flush” away and got a graphic to share on their social channels. While activations are fun, you’ll have to make sure they make sense for your event, and you can create a shareable experience that resonates with your attendees.
Conclusion
Pulling off a great virtual event is expensive, complicated, and certainly not for everyone. If you decide to hold a virtual event, have a clear strategy, and track the right KPIs to ensure you reach your goal. Also, create a user journey to tie all the sessions together and ensure your attendees have fun.