Your Virtual Event Guide
There's constant reinvention: how you do business, how you deal with the customer.
-Indra Nooyi, CEO Pepsico
Much has been said about virtual events in recent weeks and it has been a great alternative for those companies that have spent months and even years planning their physical event. Now, many of us have decided to give a technological twist to the experience that our audience will have.
Even though there are many skeptics about the idea and many others open to it, there are still tons of questions about the benefits, advantages and how to do a virtual event. In this article, we want to provide you some guidelines that can help you organize and plan your virtual event obtaining the same results of a physical event.
Define Your Event Goal
Define what the objectives of your event are. If it is fundraising, presenting an achievement, recognition, financial presentation to investors, seminar, boot camp, understand what you want to accomplish with it. It could be to generate leads, raise money for a non-profit organization, close sales, get more investors, train your staff to increase company offer, etc. These goals need to be specific and quantitative. For example, defining your goal as: "Raise $70,000 for your non-profit organization meaning that's 80% of the total annual goal". Or "have an attendance of 100 viewers in the webinar or live streaming understanding that your closing rate is 2%". That will help you to forecast the return of investment, the number of people you will need to invite in order to get at least 100 guests.
Create Content
Combine pre-recorded resources with live presentations
Include:
Animated educational videos
Presentation with Music
Interactive platforms where you can develop activities, trivias, polls. chats and forums.
Use high-quality graphics, gifs, and infographics
Everything that can be used to engage your audience from the beginning to the end.
Select Your Technology Resources
Select the resources, platforms and/or broadcasting channels that best deliver your message and content.
On these days we can have many broadcasting tools for free or at an affordable price. Here we provide you some options:
Choosing the correct platforms is not all. It is important to deliver quality on the image and clean audio. For this, we advise you to involve your Audio Visual Partner. An AV expert will point you in the correct direction. At Karana AV we provide virtual event support with HD cameras, video switchers, broadcasting platforms, professional audio, lighting, video editing, and post-production.
Start Promoting Your Event
Use all your marketing efforts to do not only promote your event but also to give your audience a sneak peek of what they are going to enjoy and learn. Give them the opportunity to start interacting with your event before it starts.
Some examples can be:
Send e-blast with cool videos and weekly tips about your topic
Create polls and trivias on Social Media
Promote a giveaway for those who attend your event. It can be for the first 10, 20 or 100.
Include a video of an influencer or opinion leader to talk about your event.
Maximize Your Event
A virtual event has many benefits and among them is being able to extend its longevity and reaching more people.
A great way to achieve that is by recording your virtual event and have that final product add it to your website. In that way, more people can be impacted. You could also create content on social media to promote future events, to say THANK YOU, or create curiosity so your content remains alive.
And why not? ...depending on the goal, type of event and content, it could be a resource that generates passive assets.
About the Author:
Anabelle Roman is the Marketing Director at Karana Audiovisual Services. She has been working in the Virtual and Traditional Event Industry for more than 16 years. At Karana AV we pride ourselves to have the most complete one-stop-shop place for Corporate Technology Resources. We don't only take care of your audio visual rentals or needs, we also have the best team in Texas to develop your pre-production, marketing efforts, technical drawings, production, and post-production.