Tips to Turn Your Cancelled In-person Event into Virtual Event
Before starting with the blog, let me bring to your notice some of the noteworthy events that were canceled or postponed due to the outbreak of this deadly novel corona-virus.
Starting from Austin’s annual South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival, Facebook’s annual F8 conference, Adobe annual summit, Facebook’s annual Global Marketing Summit in San Francisco, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is the biggest smartphone conference of the year, Google’s annual news conference, Shopify’s annual developer conference, etc. These big conferences are to name a few from the long list of canceled events.
This pandemic is yet another challenge that every industry is facing. But have you ever given a thought about how to protect your event strategy from these chaotic and challenging situations?
Well! The solution is here in this blog. So, let’s dive in!
The Paradigm Shift From Physical Event To Virtual Conference
This transformation in the event strategy needs an hour for every industry, big or small. Event organizers are increasingly harnessing virtual platforms’ privileges and are shifting the venues of their live in-person events to the online virtual events.
Virtual conference platforms are a great way to host your events as it provides an engaging and customization environment for the event organizers. It lets them bring all the attendees from every corner of the world onto a single platform with all the safety measures and without any risk of traveling.
As an event organizer, you can event adopt Hybrid events, where you can have a balance between the physical and virtual events.
Both these options are beneficial for those attendees who are restricted to travel but want to attend the event.
It is essential to understand that hosting a virtual event is not an easy task to perform. It involves a lot of planning and preparation in advance to have a successful event.
The Forethought To Set Up A Virtual Conference
The plannings for a virtual conference are almost the same as that of a physical event. Be it event registration, event monitoring, goals and objectives, promotional activities, etc.
The main point of difference is the venue of the event and the execution of the event plan. Also, it requires a lot of creativity and technical knowledge to deliver a successful virtual conference.
It often takes a reasonable amount of time to set up a virtual event. Depending on the objectives of the events, the preparation time varies from one to six weeks.
Prerequisites To Change A Physical Event To A Virtual Conference
- Choose the virtual conference provider according to your goals and targeted audience. It’s better to check the working of the platform in advance.
- Consider the data privacy concerns of the attendees.
- Assign specific roles and responsibilities to your virtual conference team
- Adjust the timings of your conference according to the geographical locations of your attendees.
- Add the opportunities for the attendees to engage in the event.
- Use visual content for the presentations to enhance audience engagement.
Also, it would be best if you had a well-designed environment for your virtual conference. To make this happen, you need to have coordination with your virtual conference platform provider. It should provide you with multiple options to display customized screens and design templates.
Ways To Boost Your Virtual Conference
After considering all the prerequisites, you need to add a pinch of interactive content to your virtual conference to make it even more engaging and successful.
The best way to do it is by displaying your social wall with live streaming during your virtual conference.
Seems interesting, right?
It is a cost-effective way to boost your event. All you need is to place the social wall and the live stream on the same page. This fantastic concept can help your attendees to have an out-of-the-box communication experience.
This way, the attendees can communicate with each other and with the speaker without disturbing the live stream and can post their photos using the dedicated hashtags. Using the same hashtag, they can post their queries on social media and have an interactive session with the speakers.
Many tools, such as Taggbox, can help your company create a customized and moderated social wall with real-time updates.
Apart from social walls, you can even provide the customers with live chats and talk shows to encourage their participation in the event.
Benefits Of Hosting A Virtual Conference
These virtual conferences have ample benefits to serve the event organizers as well as the attendees. Some of them are
- Easily accessible from all over the world, with no risk of traveling.
- Increased participation of the exhibitors with the reduced cost of virtual exhibiting.
- Hassle-free setup as compared to physical events.
- Enhanced audience participation with high audience reach.
- Cost-effective with high ROI.
- It helps the company to understand the behavior of the attendees.
- Boost audience interactions with live chats and talk shows.
- Encourage the audience to engage with the event using social walls.
Conclusion
Virtual conferences and events are a rising trend because of their global reach and easy accessibility. Their ability to generate tremendous data reveals much about the attendees’ intentions and interests, which helps the event organizers and sponsors in the long run.
