How to Turn Your Live Event into a Virtual Event
In this digital world, everything people do is virtual. Classes, conferences, seminars, meetings, etc are now happening with just a click away thanks to the virtual event platform. Now virtual events are trending due to the rise of the pandemic.
Whether you are hosting an offline internal employee sales meeting, large conference, or workshop, you can convert those into online events. It is the perfect time to discover different options for offering an engaging and interactive experience for participants. You can utilize 5 types of virtual events in order to convert your offline event. And they are hybrid events, virtual conferences, virtual summits, online summits, online workshops, and webinars.
Are you ready to convert your live event into a virtual event? If your answer is yes, you are in the right place. In this session, you will find the best tips to convert your in-person event into an interactive and engaging virtual event. Before we dig in, let?s understand what is a virtual event?
What is a virtual event?
In simple words, It is an online event that helps to bring people together at the same time digitally. A virtual event offers an opportunity for brands, influencers, presenters, exhibitors, and audiences to interact and communicate. In this event, people can discuss different topics, share ideas and share the experience virtually.
It can be as complicated or simple as one might need it to be. A virtual event can be done simply with virtual event software or via social media. If you want to go all out with trade shows, career fair, etc, you can use a virtual show platform in order to organize your online event.
Benefits of virtual event
There is a wide range of benefits to organizing a virtual event. Some of them are given below:
- Improve the brand value and reputation
- Helps to generate leads
- Improve sponsor and exhibitor value
- Showcases great programming
- Promote attendee growth
- Offer additional value
- Offer more networking options
- Offers improved attendee feedback
- Saves a lot of time
- Expands a global reach
- Decrease expenses significantly
- Offer greater flexibility for attendees
- Offer more learning opportunities
Quick tips to turn your live event into a virtual event
Decide what your virtual event needs to be
The topics you choose for your event need to accomplish three important goals: drive action, deliver value and attract an audience. Luckily, there are different ways to understand what your audience wants out of your event and gauge your audience?s interest. You can utilize the following strategies to choose virtual event ideas and topics:
Find out what is trending on social media: It is best practice to check out which posts in your industry get the most comments, shares, views and likes. By choosing famous and interesting topics, you can improve audience engagement.
Response frequently asked questions: What inquiries are most frequent in your field? Because they are subjects that your audience has already shown interest in. So FAQs play an important role to decide the topic for the virtual event.
Set up your virtual event platform
After this, you need a platform that makes it easy to live stream your event, communicate with attendees and share your content. In simple words, it is software that allows users to host virtual seminars, trade shows, conferences, sports, and more. It offers both one-to-many and peer-to-peer interactions.
There is a wide range of virtual show platforms available. You can choose any platform according to your requirement and budget.
Utilize a variety of interactive tools in order to engage your participant
In order to maintain your audience’s interest throughout the event, engagement-building is essential. Nevertheless, you may utilize a variety of interactive tools to keep everyone interested and even encourage networking among attendees during a virtual event.
The first option is using an online poll to determine audience interest in particular content and pose questions to them. During all different kinds of virtual events, live Q&A sessions can also be a highly useful tool. A customized event hashtag can be created on Twitter. It is another fantastic engagement tool that can help you to promote sharing and conversations at the moment.
Record high-quality videos
This is a fantastic tactic for turning a live event into an online one. You can upload and schedule content that has already been recorded. This makes organizing the event more simple for you and guarantees that your attendees will enjoy a top-notch experience.
Integrate essential tools
We all know that using a range of tools will be necessary to operate an event online. You’ll want to integrate your systems as much as possible, from marketing and email management to payment processing and attendee communications. Examples of the tools are as follows:
- Active campaign
- Unbounce
- PayPal & stripe
- Google Analytics
- EarlyParrot
Let your content live online afterward
Whether your event is public or private, make a big impression by expanding the audience for your content by inviting both new attendees and existing audiences. Making your presentations accessible online for viewing after the event in the hopes that people will continue to interact with and share your content is one method to achieve this. Audience members might be more likely to return in the same format than after a live event because they had remotely attended the event.
It could seem difficult to turn your virtual event into an online one. But if you stick to these pointers, you can rapidly organize a fantastic online event that still benefits your participants.