While talking about hosting virtual events, you need to be as creative as possible as it is the only way to keep the attendees hooked. Hosting a successful virtual event requires effective and efficient planning. But don’t worry! You can use this article as a virtual event planning guide to inspire your next virtual event.
Cut Short the Sessions
Virtual attendees are just a click away from exiting the event. This makes it hard to keep them glued to their screens. Therefore, you need a completely different strategy for online events. Moreover, as per studies humans tend to stay attentive for as long as 20 minutes at a time. This indicates that organizing awfully long sessions during your virtual event might cause you to lose your attendees. As soon as the attendees start getting bored, they might simply click away from the event. Dividing the event into short sessions will help the attendees stay focused on the content.
Conduct Ice-breaking Activities
As the name suggests, ice-breaking activities help break the ice between the attendees. They make the attendees achieve a general comfort level with other attendees and speak their minds. You can use ice-breakers at the beginning and in the middle of the event. This helps bring everyone on the same page and set the direction for the meeting. You can start by asking a funny question or organizing an ice-breaking activity. These activities also play a major role in increasing engagement.
Customization
Providing your attendees with a virtual event tailored and customized as per their needs will help increase engagement among them. Many virtual event platforms provide customization feature that enables you to play around with the design, icons, colours, shapes and sizes according to your preferences. You can identify the choices and preferences of your attendees and customize your booths and event according to them.
Provide 3D Event Experience
3D animation is a great way to replicate the in-person event experience into an online event. Therefore, many virtual event platforms use this 3D animation and design to provide a realistic event experience and make the online event more captivating. Therefore, make sure you look for 3D animation and design as a feature while in the pursuit of a service provider for hosting a virtual event.
Live Polls
Including a few live polls in your virtual event will help you take it to another level and boost overall engagement and interaction. Moreover, live polls could encourage the attendees to be more participative. If the virtual event you are planning to host is long and is divided into too many sessions, you can consider including 4-5 live polls and vice versa. Furthermore, if you plan and frame your poll questions smartly, you can gather important and useful information from your attendees. The live poll is a common feature provided by many online event platforms.
Plan Content Wisely
Create unique and compelling content that could help you boost attendee engagement. Plan and create pre-event content that could promote the event and make the attendees register for the virtual event. The promotional content should be able to amp up the excitement for the event. In addition to this, try to create humourous content for the event. Consider adding a few jokes here and there to keep the attendees engaged. Don’t forget to create post-event follow up content to stay in touch with the attendees and keep them informed about the latest developments.
Smart Use of Push Notifications
While push notifications might get irritating, if used smartly they can add value to the attendee instead. A unique idea to inspire your next virtual event in 2022 is to get creative with push notifications. Rather than sending direct and boring notifications, you must encourage the attendees to take a quick break or play the online multiplayer games available on the platform. You can also provide your audience with the event stats like shares and views.
Organize Q&A Sessions
Q&A sessions can never fail to impress as they allow the attendees to interact with the organizers and vice versa. Consider adding a quick Q&A session at the end of each segment. Moreover, you must have an expert to answer the attendee’s queries. Only listening can be quite exhausting. Q&A sessions are a great opportunity for the audiences to ask their doubts and share their ideas. This is a great way to keep the audience captivated and stay attentive throughout the event.
Include Online Games in Your Event
Gamification is an excellent tactic to improve your virtual event game in 2022. Consider gamifying your event’s website by adding the games that you think your audience might like. You can also increase the excitement by arranging rewards and gifts for the winners and top attendees. You can also include a leaderboard to further develop a competitive spirit. Consider using this opportunity to promote your organization’s products by giving offers and discounts on them.
Call Them by Their Names
Calling out the attendees individually by their names is another unique tactic to increase their alertness. You can ask the attendees to share their viewpoints on the subject matter. This is a great way to personalize the sessions and get the attendees to stay alert.
Use AI Matchmaking
AI Matchmaking is an advanced technology that leverages the power of artificial intelligence to provide the best match recommendations. It collects and analyzes the interests and goals of each attendee and recommends the right people to meet. AI matchmaking helps save the attendees and the organizers time and boost engagement within the event.
Virtual Photo Booth
An event is incomplete without taking pictures. But hosting your event virtually should not mean missing out on taking pictures. A virtual photo booth is a great way to let your online attendees take pictures at various event locations.
Summarizing
From selecting the virtual event platform to collecting feedback from the attendees, effective planning is the key to hosting a virtual event. Following the ideas discussed in this article to amp up the excitement of your virtual event.
