Virtual Event Tips

Virtual v Physical Events and some ideas for a virtual event

Success is dependent on good planning and the following blogs give you some tips on how to plan, ideas for content and which is the right event for you and your audience, whether they are customers, employees or for training programmes. Going virtual provides an easily used medium for all of these needs. The collection of genuine customer/audience data (emails,names and locality)properly managed in a CRM, allows you to continue marketing to them and target future events/product launch.

Ideas for a virtual event

Trade Shows - To showcase and promote your product, individual products or services can be photographed or filmed, explaining how it works and comprehensive information added to the product.

Sales Meetings and Support - Sales staff, wherever they are, can see your latest offering, learn all about it and be back out selling, armed with all the information they need. Use your virtual event to provide your staff with all relevant information throughout the sales cycle so that they have all the knowledge necessary to close deals.

Virtual Marketplace - Let your virtual event be your marketplace where your products and those of fellow exhibitors can be showcased and sold.

Customer training - Provide your customers with virtual event training sessions, so they know how to get the best from your service and to keep them informed about any changes.

Community building - Build a virtual event to connect people in different locations with similar interests and build a community.

Annual Conferences - Knowledge of you and your business exchanged and always available to review, this will expand your user base.

Partner Events - Share knowledge and best practices with partners and provide a forum for team communication.

Internal training - Easily accessible knowledge base, used to keep staff up-to-date as regards policies and procedures. To ensure everyone in your company receives clear and consistent messages bring them together with a virtual event and develop a good employee relationship.

Committee Meeting - If the timing of general committee meetings is difficult for some could they attend via a virtual connection? The meeting could be recorded making minute taking easy.

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Your Virtual Event - where to start!

Your plan needs to consist of everything you want to happen within your virtual event:

Who will deal with the technology required to present it?

What exactly do you want to say?

Cost and how will you pay for it?

Who will create content?

Who will sponsor the event?

How will you promote it?
Although they are not so time consuming as their physical counterparts, you will still need time to put together the tools and technology to produce a professional virtual event. Research providers and communicate your requirements, working closely with them to ensure correct amounts of resources are available, so that things run smoothly.

With larger productions, you may need to hire a consultant to examine and advise on the look and feel of your presentation to ensure your information is transmitted effectively.

Check out previous events, ones that have worked and maybe ones that haven't so you can avoid their shortcomings and modify to your advantage.

The amount of resources that you need to produce your event will depend upon whether you are targeting a few team members or customers or promoting the next.

If you know your audience and understand the best way to reach them, use the facilities within the virtual event to specifically target individuals and groups, ensuring your message reaches the right people.

Another consideration is to hold a hybrid event, one that has one foot in the physical world and the other in the virtual. Make material available electronically for additional learning and to attract a larger audience of people who were unable to show up on the day.

The needs of your audience should dictate the direction you take and if you take notice of this, it will lead to success.

Timeline

Allow yourself plenty of time to plan, create content and promote.

ON24 recommends a 12-week plan to manage all the tasks and put together a professional event.

Content creation cycle - to contain a content review cycle, which allows time for everyone to see what the event will be about.

Teams can then offer comments, insights and advice ensuring all are on the same wavelength.

Always leave a little time in case of emergency, so aim to have the project ready before the date that it's scheduled for.
The event

Place your most compelling content at the beginning for maximum effect.

Don't keep your audience waiting too long before drawing them into your virtual event and open with your big news and lead keynote.

Schedule your event to begin on common workdays thus avoiding the loss of people taking long weekends.

Allow for time zone differences so try run at a time that is convenient to all involved.

Stagger start times when repeating sessions to assist with time zone differential.

Try not to overlap interests if you have a lot of activities planned. This may minimise participation and attendance if the target audience is the same.
Virtual Event-what's best for you and your audience?

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The decision as to what type of virtual event you need to host will be the one that directly addresses and engages your audience. If you provide great content then your attendees will leave satisfied and your sponsors will know that they have reached their prospective customers.

Selling your event to both attendees and sponsors

Supply your sponsors with screen shots of the event; tell them that this will be what attendees see and how they can interact within the virtual event.

Clearly explain the repeat benefits to both attendees and sponsors providing businesses with more leads.

For small businesses who may not have the personnel available for a physical event, the virtual event gives the company an opportunity to reach leads and prospects they may not have been able to reach otherwise.

These leads will come at a lower cost than those from a physical event, yet another advantage for small companies and their budgets.

Attendees need to be notified of the experts you will be bringing to the event and will require clear and concise materials of what you will be delivering.

Emphasise the money savings aspect of the virtual event over the physical e.g. no travel, no accommodation and no meals to pay for.

Spread the word on the information channels that your audience uses.

Encourage attendees to spread the word and make it easy for them to publicise the event on social networks e.g. Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

If they don't attend initially the virtual event will always be there, recorded for resale at a future date.
How to engage your audience and make it worth their while to attend.

Know your audience, their interests and how they like to learn, to be able to put together an interesting, educational and useful virtual event.

Recruit exciting and knowledgeable presenters to take part in your virtual event.
Content, whether developed by you or your speakers should be:

interesting - to hold the attention of your audience
compelling - to motivate to action
educational - to give them a greater understanding of the topics
Ensure the content will deliver value after repeat viewings. (ON24 research shows that 50% of attendees view at an events initial webcast, with 25% viewing on demand.) Keep the channels open and let audience and experts 'talk' with each other.

Learn all you can about your audience.

A Facebook poll or one placed on your blog will gather knowledge that you can use to put a virtual event together that will appeal to your audience.

You will have a large amount of data available after your event. Using all the information collated, demographics and feedback can be used to organise future events for your audience's participation. With the data collected, leads can be nurtured and kept informed of events, product launch and general news.

How it looks

Your event is similar to your website and similarly needs to be branded and to provide effective and compelling content, whether this is developed by you or your expert speakers. If you are using a designer or virtual event provider tell them what you want to accomplish to help them design accordingly. Your event will more effective if you are clear and simple with your communication.

Ensure that first impressions communicate are clear, concise and motivational. The initial reaction needs to grab your attendee's attention and make them want to stay. This won't be achieved with a messy and unclear jumble of information. Keep additional, more complex information for later so your audience are not overwhelmed in the opening pages.

It can be an idea to reward people but if the information you supply is exactly what your customer needs then your job is easier and such incentives may not be necessary. Your learning about your audience, what they want and what they are interested in and all previous research will have been put to good use. You have provided a virtual event that works for your attendees, your sponsors and yourself.

Into the future

With today's ever changing world of technology you need to stay in touch with these changes. The Internet world is changing to a more mobile one and more and more business is being conducted via mobile devices, so consider this when preparing and producing events.

Create a social channel to keep attendees involved and communicating.
Keep the relationship going by continuing the conversation whether it is with clients or team members
Improvements in technology mean better and less expensive costs for your virtual event.

As technology improves your virtual events can integrate the changes and produce better and more engaging content.
Understand that the world is your audience.
Content for your virtual event

Let your audience determine your content. Make your content interesting and cover popular topics. Find out what your audience likes to do both on and off line. Produce your event so that the content is familiar and comfortable to them.

Rewards or tokens in thanks for their attendance and participation can motivate them, giving them a reason to show up and as importantly, participate.

With the right potential audience in place, sponsorship may be easier to acquire.

In your search for sponsorship, know who appeals to your audience and supply your prospective sponsor with screen shots that show how the event will look and hard numbers of expected attendees.

Your sponsor will be looking for a similar amount of ROI as you are.

The same money saving advantages of virtual events will work for your sponsor in the same way they do for you.

Remind them of the advantages of not having to transport materials and products, in both directions, send out a sales team or construct and hire a venue.

Also, be sure to advise them of the specific data collected from virtual events and the ability to reach a much larger, targeted audience.

Ask for examples of sponsorship packages
Promotion

Once everything is in place, event planned, sponsors on board, your twelve week time line gives you plenty of time to publicise your event.

Start your promotion 8 weeks before your event date. The ability to track your promotional activities (campaign tracking) lets you know just how well things are going. You can take immediate action if your promotion is not working.

Experts agree that promoting to an in house list accounts for 70% of all virtual event registrations.

Send email campaigns to your existing customer and prospect database.

Encourage sponsors to promote to their lists too.

Don't be pushy.. it smacks of desperation, and can turn people away from attending.

Media - There are many media outlets available now to publicise your event.

Write a pre-event release to advertise your event and help drive registrations.

Advertise your event on your email signature.

Promote on your website.

Feature an article on your blog.

Create an event on Facebook, get it liked and invite all of your 'fans'.

Twitter the event and get retweeted.

Promote on LinkedIn

Target the right audience; expand upon the benefits of your virtual event with compelling content, whether from your event or your marketing team.

If you are using marketing and communication professionals, give them the information they need to do their job well. Let them use their expertise to make your virtual event stand out from the crowd.
Making a virtual event with impact

Training virtually

The virtual learning experience brings the necessary skills and knowledge to your audience when they need it with very little inconvenience incurred.

Virtual training removes the need for travelling and trainees will have all the information they need at their fingertips, again reducing time away from employment and reducing costs also.

Your training and trainer are always available and are never affected by illness or absence.
A virtual learning centre can be established as a permanent learning centre, with pre-recorded audio and video training merging with documents and live presentations. A live learning event can be recorded and become a permanent training session; the knowledge and presentation will never be lost. It will not matter where the experts are or where the learning is required, the two can always be brought together in a virtual experience.

High quality Internet connections allow employees to work remotely, in their time and at their convenience.

Data can be analysed from the learning sessions to confirm that the training has been 'attended' and tests produced to check on progress throughout the experience.

Virtual learning materials will remain effective as long as the information is current.

Video or audio recordings of your expert can be placed in your virtual classroom so that everyone can learn from the experts at any time.
Internal meetings

Whether a large or small company, the need for meetings, will always be necessary. The number or frequency will be your choice. Most companies need a meeting once a year to keep employees informed of the state of the company, what it has achieved in the last year and where it sees itself heading in the future.

Virtual events can be used to reduce time spent in meetings, inform employees of product launch, sales meetings and team updates.

Events can be used to motivate and inform your sales team of new promotions. Your sales team are responsible for getting your product to customers and need to be kept informed at all times, that way they can keep the sales coming in.

Removing your sales team from the field is not cost effective, providing the necessary information via virtual event is.
Being 'virtual' doesn't mean your team are unable to communicate and interact. Using modern communication tools within your virtual event (e.g. chat applications and social networking) allows knowledge and experience to flow through your sales office.

My name is Tamara Baranova. I run TJConsulting and I help small business owners grow their business by delivering effective online marketing mentoring, support and training. My clients see their business succeed, grow fast, and generate healthy profits through online marketing strategy that works.

Want to know more? Go to my website http://www.tjconsulting.co.uk to grab my free eCourse 7 Steps to Online Marketing Mastery and learn how to plan your unique social media strategy. Use our step-by-step jargon-free guides to master all popular online marketing tools: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, blogging, and more!