was just getting back from our sales kickoff world tour. We started in New York and then went to Chicago; Los Angeles; Toronto; London; France; Malmo, Sweden; and our last location was Sydney, Australia. We flew home on a Thursday. On the following Monday I was asked to join a call with one of the largest online retailers in the world for their Entrepreneurial Fund event, where they were going to give $5 million in investment funding to the winners. They had decided to cancel their physical event in China because of the risk COVID‐19 was posing to the world. In under 11 business days we created their first‐ever virtual event, where they had over 45 presenters from all over the world who could not make the trip to China, or were down‐right prohibited from making it. Little did we know when we were helping them move this incredible event from a physical event to virtual event that this would be the start of a global movement that would take us from interacting in person with business associates and friends at physical events to a world of work from home, videoconferences, and 100% virtual events.
I haven't looked back since, and I expect virtual will remain a highly valuable channel for our future and a driver of revenue and profit growth, but success will depend on delivering truly innovative programs that educate and inspire your audiences and deliver meaningful and measurable ROI to customers and sponsors.
This book, your virtual events playbook, will give you the knowledge you need to navigate this new world of virtual events and to plan and execute a successful virtual event strategy! I tapped into some of the most knowledgeable professionals I know in the world of broadcast television, streaming, event production, design, and marketing and asked them for their secrets on how to make the leap into virtual events. I have incorporated these tips into this book; I cannot thank them enough for the invaluable input. I am excited that you picked this book to help you on your journey into the incredible world of virtual events and remember when reading it that this is your journey and you have to add your own creativity and look at this adventure as a blank canvas to create something memorable. I cannot wait to participate in one of your events!
CHAPTER 1 Understanding Virtual and Hybrid Events
The nature of events has changed forever. Companies are reconsidering their in‐person event strategies and shifting to virtual or hybrid events instead.
A little fact that I found in a recent survey conducted in early 2020 was that 78% of marketing leaders said they expected to significantly increase their budgets when it came to virtual events. That says it all; the need for virtual events continues to grow so if you understand and master them, you'll position yourself as a forward‐thinking asset in your organization.
You can't just take a physical event, make it virtual, and instantly expect the attendees to have an incredible user experience, or expect your speakers to be able to make an easy transition to virtual when they won't be able to look into the eyes of the attendees, know if their jokes went over well, or hear their applause. But don't worry, by the time you finish reading this book, I promise you will have all the information you need to produce a virtual or hybrid event.
In this chapter, you'll get a basic understanding of virtual and hybrid events, including benefits and challenges, and I will also clear up some common myths and misconceptions about taking your events virtual.
GOING VIRTUAL
A virtual event is a meeting or conference that either was originally held as a physical event and moved to be online or was created to exist only online. The only way that you can access and attend the event is via the internet from a computer, laptop, mobile device, or OTT (over the top) on a Smart TV.
Enterprise companies have been pushed to come up with new and innovative ways to connect with their customers, partners, and prospects. For years, large physical events have been a great way to network with these audiences and share new innovations, products, and services. Today, organizations have to turn to 100% virtual or hybrid events to extend the reach of their content, attract more interest in their company, and stay in touch with their investors, members, partners, and employees. The rapidly evolving event technology space has enabled companies to have thousands of additional people engage with a virtual event and keep them coming back to view on‐demand after the event has ended. So instead of being at a physical event they are now participating from their home or office from any corner of the world.
A major benefit of the hiatus from in‐person event delivery is that it has forced in‐person events teams to finally embrace virtual delivery in ways that would not have been possible if they'd been focused on the production cycle of in‐person events. Out of this hiatus has come an intense focus on how to integrate digital delivery of content: either as virtual‐only or (in the future) as a mix of staged in‐person and virtual delivery. The latter will be important because when in‐person events do return, social distancing measures will continue to heavily impact the way events are staged, requiring larger space footprints to stage them, which will impact revenue and margins and can only be offset by the thoughtful integration of virtual delivery to enhance reach and drive ROI for sponsors.
Like most of us who were forced by COVID‐19 to transition from in‐person events to virtual‐only and hybrid delivery models, you're going to learn a lot about this transition and the limitations of traditional program formats built around in‐person attendees. What works for an in‐person event does not necessarily translate to success online. You'll need to innovate and look at things differently, in terms of the types of content, the duration of sessions, and speaker and topic selection. Some considerations in this new virtual events world include:
Pre‐Event Research: gather questions to help shape the programs, and leverage integrated channel marketing to foster meaningful audience engagement.
Content Integration: work to align content produced at virtual events within your year‐round content strategy so you're able to continually nurture audiences.
Value of Curation: analyze what is the best way to capture your content. You may find it's better to record sessions with certain speakers so you can spend the time after the content is recorded to edit and create a more dynamic presentation. However, other speakers may be better captured live.
NOTE
“As an information services company, we have recently invested significantly in our virtual events products and platform, because we understood the value and importance of the channel in distributing content to our most engaged audiences. An analysis of our audience data revealed that our virtual attendees are among our most loyal and engaged audiences, often spending hours consuming and interacting with our brands and branded content, all the while generating unique perspectives and insights on industry topics, products, or trends. In fact, most of our top customers have grown with us through deeper adoption of our virtual events platform.”
—John Whelan, CEO of the Cyber Risk Alliance
You can leverage the brand trust that you've established among your attendees and customers to migrate them to virtual delivery in lieu of in‐person delivery without impacting revenue.
Virtual event attendees are a rich source of data insight to build programs to deepen the relationship between your brand and customers. You can also use the insight to cultivate market and customer perspectives, which can allow you to significantly enhance the value of your marketing solutions.
Having established the strategic value of your virtual event audience, you can make them the focal point of your content and audience growth strategy, seeking to expand the range of content and programming on your virtual event platform, and to position interaction as a core component of your customer's journeys.
