Give an incentive for users to attend your virtual events
Why should someone participate in and engage with your virtual events? There are several ways that you can incentivize event attendance, from providing gifts to offering promotional goods and special offers.
The scale and type of incentive will rely on whether or not there is a fee involved when it comes to registering for the virtual events.
If the virtual event is free then you could incentivize the actual event.
For instance, if you are hosting a webinar for startups on how to set up and run ad campaigns on Facebook, then the incentive is the guidance and information you will offer in the virtual event.
If there is an attendance fee you could offer incentives that are relevant to the event.
This could be something like an eBook or a PDF tutorial that the users can download after subscribing to the event. If you are using the virtual event to leverage a new service or good, you could offer a discount code or free trial for all users who attend.
Have a plan b in place if you encounter technical problems
When you are setting up and planning a virtual event, you should have a plan b in place. Just in case, during the launch of the event, you encounter any technical issues.
If your live stream has problems with the live feed, then you should either have a secondary platform prepared and ready to go. Or you could have to reschedule your event for another day.
What do you do if the guest speaker doesn’t turn up? Depending on their role in the event you could get the event host cover the information the guest speaker was going to expand upon.
What happens if your attendance numbers are more or less than what you expected? With the right preparations in place, this problem can swiftly become a non-problem. For example, you end up with more people joining. You could reduce the tutorial segment and expand the Q&A session. This gives more attendees the chance to participate in the event. If fewer people than expected show up, then you could adjust your event layout to create a more valuable virtual event.
Carry on promoting the event before, during and after
Carry on promoting on social media before, during and after your event.
Use hashtags on Facebook and Twitter to encourage the participants of the event to live-tweet and post Facebook live videos. Facebook live, live-tweeting and live stories on Instagram are an effective way of increasing engagement all round. Furthermore, it’s cheap publicity, seeing as news of your event reaches new audiences.
It’s worth mentioning that live-tweeting ought to be supported during paid events. A participant won’t cover your whole event, which implies that they will promote enough data to improve your brand awareness.
Get feedback from your audience
To assist you with planning and improving your next event and to deciding whether this virtual event or the platform picked worked for your participants, you have to get feedback and reviews from all attendees.
This can be as straightforward as a simple follow up email. But do not wait too long to request feedback. It’s best to follow up while the event and information are still fresh in mind.
Truth be told, you don’t need to hold up by any means. For instance, SheetsCon—a virtual gathering about Google Sheets—surveyed its participants during the event. This was SheetsCon’s first event, they understood the importance of customer feedback when it comes to improving. By surveying during the event, measuring their participants’ understanding of the occasion, and dig important information for their next occasion.
Make sure that you review and evaluate all the feedback from your audience to improve the event experience for your customers.
Host relevant and engaging virtual events
Virtual events are a win-win for both the brand and the attendees. They are cheaper to run and have a higher rate of attendance. They are convenient and offer a chance to interact with the organizers.
Whether it’s your first virtual event or you are an experienced virtual event organizer you need to identify the main objective of the event and target audience. From there, you should follow Ben Givon’s tips on how to plan and create virtual events that offer value to your customers.
