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You poured your heart and soul into an online event. From developing the perfect registration page to ensuring the webcast ran smoothly, you took care of every little detail.
Now that it’s over… was it a success?
To determine how successful your online event was, we need to look at five key characteristics.
But First, Did You Set Goals?
Before you can evaluate the success or failure of an online event, you need to have goals.
Setting goals for each webcast and online event provides you with a baseline for judging your event’s progress. Without these goals in place, you won’t be able to determine if your webinar or virtual event was a hit.
After setting your goals, you can assess if your online event by comparing:
1. Attendance
Did you meet or surpass your attendance goal?
While meeting an online event registration goal is key, it’s more important to ensure that you attracted the right audience. Meaning, were those who signed up to attend your virtual event part of your target audience?
If so, excellent! If not, take a look at your marketing tactics and messaging for the next event and identify what you can improve to capture the attention and interest of the correct market.
2. Participation
Online event technology, such as GlobalMeet, provides hosts with a wealth of interactive features. From polls to chatrooms, there are ample ways for participants to engage with a virtual event and/or webcast.
Using the analytics and reporting features, you’ll be able to see how often attendees participated in the opportunities presented during the event.
3. Brand Engagement: Before, During, and After the Event
Not to be confused with event participation, be sure to also measure how engaged registrants were with your brand before, during, and after your online event.
The best place to assess this is on social media by determining:
- Did participants tag your brand on social media?
- Did attendees use your hashtag when talking about the event?
- Were social media conversations about the event positive or negative?
Also, be sure to review the analytics from your email marketing efforts. Did participants engage with your email content before the event? Did they return to the emails and related links after the event? All of these crucial data points paint the story of an online event’s success.
4. Lead Generation
In addition to soft leads registering for the online event, a good measure of an online event is the number of qualified leads it generates for a sales team.
If your leads are lackluster, consider what changes you could have made to the event registration, participation, and engagement processes to improve the quality of the leads.
5. Sales
Depending on the type of company you operate and the type of online event you ran, you may be able to directly correlate sales to your event. If this is the case, did you meet your sales goals? A successful event is always tied to the bottom line.
So, was your online event a success?
