PGi Blog Virtual Event Insights and Industry Trends
Suddenly, overnight, every single in-person 2020 event had to go virtual. Now, two years later, virtual and hybrid events are the norm. Virtual events offer a ton of benefits to your business, like reduced costs, reduced payroll costs, increased efficiency, and flexibility for both employees and clients. Hybrid events also offer the best of both worlds with in-person components and virtual sessions. When your enterprise-level company runs the numbers, you may get excited about transitioning your business to virtual and hybrid events.
In the past, hybrid events have been live events with any kind of online component. These might have included shareholder meetings, teambuilding exercises, keynote speeches, conferences, and executive team speeches that were live streamed to other locations. However, modern hybrid events incorporate live components that engage both virtual and in-person attendees, offering tons of benefits to your team to adopt these new strategies.
3 Benefits of Transitioning to Virtual and Hybrid Events
1. Increased Flexibility
In-person events come with limitations around travel, budget, employees’ work-life balance, logistics, and safety concerns. Many of these problems can be solved when your business adopts a virtual or hybrid strategy. Employees with families can easily access events without having to travel, and businesses can save money in terms of travel costs and lost employee work time. Travel and the energy of moving from location to location can also drain employees mentally and emotionally.
2. Continued Engagement
In-person events are one and done. With virtual or hybrid events, there is an opportunity for pre-event engagement and post-event follow-up. Virtual event solutions offer attendee engagement opportunities through audience chat and opportunities for breakout sessions through any meeting app of choice, allowing attendees to connect and network.
3. Reduced Costs
Events are extremely expensive to put on and travel to, but hybrid events offer reduced costs on all fronts. You can spend your budget on the content and presentation themselves without having to worry about food and drink, set-up fees, booths, and all the other costs that come with in-person events.
Virtual and Hybrid Events Are Best for Enterprise Organizations
As the world becomes more dispersed, virtual events will increasingly become the go-to answer for large gatherings. Luckily, technology is also making this possible; solutions like GlobalMeet Webcast offer interactive elements like polls, Q+As, and audience chat to make participation possible in an organic way. Seamless audio and video capabilities reduce technology friction and allow attendees to focus on the content being presented.
To plan your next virtual or hybrid event, schedule a demo today.
