With the pandemic hitting the world in the year 2020, the entire world has shifted online. All the citizens across the world, being digitally savvy or not, have started to embrace the digital world for almost all their needs. With the lock-down being implemented at several places and people no longer venturing out for a lot of things, everyone has started finding ways to conduct everything digitally. From having a live session, or conducting webinars, having a one-to-one meeting or discussing policies with all the departments in the office, everybody is using online platforms for their personal and official work.
Meaning of Virtual Event
An event can be defined as a place where people can interact with each other and discuss their points of view and listen to others. These can be seminars, a fair, or an exhibition.
With digital showing an increase in the lives of the people, these meetings and discussions have moved to online platforms. So, an online event can be any sort of interaction that takes place between the people in real-time. A virtual event would need the people who would be discussing their ideas, an online events platform where people can conduct their events, and then a good internet speed.
Why Move your Events Online?
With social gatherings being curtailed for the past couple of months, the seminars and meetings have moved to a virtual space. The various reasons why you should focus on moving your events online would be:
1. Connectivity with convenience:
For businesses to carry on with their work, organizations ought to connect with their employees. The meetings have to be there for the business to flourish. Hence, connecting with your colleagues and clients can be done conveniently through online meetings.
2. Tap the user behavior:
With almost everyone hooked over the internet in the current times, the businesses can tap on this behavior shift and target the people to build awareness. The online events can help spread awareness and create engagement along with initiating online conversations around your brand.
3. Budget-friendly deal:
Conducting an online event isn’t too costly. All you need is a good internet connection, proper marketing in place, and an online events platform to conduct a webinar. With minimal cost, you can reach out to anyone out there.
4. Traveling and physical boundaries no longer a hurdle:
Events usually involve a lot of traveling because people have to move around to attend an event. Online and virtual events do not put any geographical barriers and allow anyone to attend the webinar despite him being in any part of the world.
Steps to move your events online
1. Make people aware of your online event
The first step would be to reach out to the people and intimate them about the virtual event that would be taking place. The people who are part of your circle would be interested to know the time and the virtual events platform that you would be using to have the event.
The different ways through which one can make the people know about the online event that is being held are as follows:
- Get that out in the newspaper! Let the people know through news articles or advertisements in the newspapers about the online event that is being held.
- Advertise on your social media pages. Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; get the news out of the event that will be held. Create a constant buzz about it and create engagement with the people.
- Reach out to the people who have attended your offline events and let them know of the online event that will be held.
- The people who would be taking the webinars can be asked to put it on their social media platforms of the event that they are going to be a part of.
- Give out a word about it on your website and also advertise through your sponsors.
2. The registration process to be made smooth
The next step would be to make the registration process smooth and user friendly for the people coming to be part of the virtual event. There can be three different ways through which you can streamline your registration process.
- Open for all: Under this, you can give out the details of the virtual event that will be held and give a link some hours before the online events platform for all the people to join. This webinar can be open to all people.
- Only for registered members: You can ask people to register for the virtual event and a special invite with the meeting link and passcode can be sent to the registered phone numbers or email address of the member.
- Invitation only: You can make your event an extremely exclusive by only allowing people who would be having an invitation to join.
3. Ensure to cater to all your stakeholders
Give the people conducting the virtual events options to either take the webinars online, have them mix of online & pre-recorded, and can also just share a pre-recorded interview or speech.
Not only this, ensure that your sponsors are given enough limelight. The sponsors are given a virtual booth where they can make their presence felt online to the participants. This can be done by integrating the logos of the sponsors during the event, giving them a couple of minutes in the beginning or at the end to interact with the participants, and by also promoting them on your websites.
Making the participants feel important will also be extremely important. This can be done by letting them interact with the people conducting the webinars. There should also be a smooth way to ask questions, raise concerns, and pitch in a topic that they would wish to be explored.
4. Make people know of the features & seek feedback
The participants should also be tutored beforehand of the functions on the online events platform so that they become aware of the basic features there. For this, there can be a pre-recorded video of the virtual online events platform giving a guided tour for the dashboard and the functionality of it. The same videos can be shared with the people conducting the webinars as it would help them be saved from any technical and functional issues in between the virtual event.
It becomes extremely important to gather feedback from all the stakeholders to understand any shortcomings during the event and look for ways to cover them up in the next meeting. The feedback can be collected through a form that can be shared on the email addresses of the people. This would help you understand the basic challenges that the people faced and would give you enough time to solve them until the next virtual event is organized.
Online events platforms have gained popularity and huge traction in the last couple of months. It becomes essential to offer the facilities and options that solve the pain-points of your consumers so that better user experience can be provided to them.
