PGi Blog Virtual Event Insights and Industry Trends
Whether you're presenting financial information at a shareholder’s meeting, spearheading a new product launch, or educating your customers on new product features, all great webcasts have a few elements in common.
Incorporating these elements into your virtual and hybrid event can help increase audience engagement, boost your brand recognition, and even encourage higher attendance at your next event. In addition, a compelling virtual event can pay for itself in both sales and customer loyalty.
So, what five elements should every successful webcast have to increase your ROI? And how can you incorporate them into all your virtual and hybrid events?
Interactive Features for Engagement
Today’s virtual events must compete with high-energy, in-person events with all the technological bells and whistles, plus the opportunity for in-person mingling and networking. But virtual and hybrid events can be just as good as in-person gatherings if you deploy the right tools.
On the other hand, they provide opportunities to reach even more people than an in-person event could, in even more compelling ways. To help your virtual event stand out, make sure you give your attendees plenty of chances to interact. Audience polling, Q+As, chat, and even virtual break-out rooms where attendees network can set your event apart.
Use Creativity in Your Marketing and Your Presentations
Technology, of course, plays an important role in how compelling your virtual event can be. But you also want to put your most creative marketing minds in charge of promoting your event through email, social media, and even in person.
Collect presenter bios to aid in your marketing campaigns. Agree on the content they will share in advance of the event and generate buzz with teasers. Consider interviewing one of the presenters in a Facebook Live or a recorded video to post on LinkedIn and other channels.
Personalize Your Content to Reach Audiences
From your marketing campaigns to the event presentations, ensure every piece of content you create speaks directly to your target audience. You’ll want to enlist the help of your sales and marketing teams to develop an audience persona — your ideal customer who will be attending the event.
Then, show them what problems and pain points they have that your virtual event can help them solve. It might help to poll your audience in advance via email to determine what aspects of your business, products, or solutions they hope to learn more about. Then, you can tailor content to address those needs.
Emphasize Your Brand Identity
Your marketing team and event organizers will put a lot of time and energy into creating content and producing an event that will speak directly to your audience. You want to ensure that your audience knows where all the great content comes from. That means focusing on your branding before, during, and after the event.
GlobalMeet Webcast offers personalized branding for landing pages, emails, marketing materials, and the event itself. You can customize your content to match your organization’s branding guide, including the colors, fonts, logos, and design styles that are unique to your brand.
Close with a Call to Action That Tells People What to Do Next
When attendees log off from your virtual event, they should be clear about their next steps. Your brand should be firmly planted in their mind. They should think of your company as the industry expert in your field.
Leave audience members with a clear directive. Maybe you want them to buy a new product or add a feature to their Software-as-a-Service subscription. You can provide a limited-time-only discount code only for event attendees so they can log off and save money by purchasing within the next 24 hours.
If you have a service that requires consultative selling, maybe you can offer a bonus to the first 10 or 50 people who reach out to your sales team.
Whatever incentive you offer to event attendees, you want them to log off your virtual event with a clear idea of what they should do next.
Keep these five tips in mind when you produce your next webcast. GlobalMeet Webcast has all the tools you need to produce a great virtual event. Schedule a demo today to learn more.
