In case you missed it, top-tier organizations have been canceling their in-person events in light of the coronavirus threat. Event marketers understand how risky these investments can be, and we’re seeing the most innovative companies shift toward agile event programs.
This type of programming is designed to thrive in a world of fast-moving business priorities and unexpected change — sound familiar?
Agile event programs include an online component or embrace hybrid events — ones that happen both in-person and online. Over the last few weeks, hybrid events have seen tremendous growth.
For instance, Lattice’s Head of Events, Erin Flannery, is pivoting to either local, in-person events or virtual ones: “Though these are unfortunate circumstances, it is a great way to expand our concept of what makes events special and learn how we can replicate that experience over a digital platform.”
Our upcoming webinar, How to Move Your Live Events Online with Splash, demonstrates ways to pivot to a hybrid event marketing model. Make sure to register, then read on to hear from Perry Piep, Product Operations Manager at Splash, for how-tos on preparing your organization for this reality.
Events that happen both in-person and online are better for business, because they’re easy to scale up and down quickly, and you can move them to be entirely virtual if you need to.
Plus, there’s less up-front investment involved with an event that isn’t exclusively in-person, which means changing plans isn’t painful for your bottom line.
There are certain strategies that equip you and your team to better handle hybrid or virtual events, and quality event marketing platforms will help you execute on them.
Consider:
• Can you quickly update all your event marketing assets centrally?
• How do you disseminate information about virtual elements of your event?
• Can you embed live streams on your event pages?
• How can your guests indicate if they’re arriving in person or virtually?
• Can you send your guests real-time updates about your event, with clear next steps?
• Does your event marketing platform integrate with technologies that enable you to host meaningful hybrid events?
Splash has your back across every attendee touchpoint, and makes it easy to quickly update your event marketing assets centrally.
Pivoting to accommodate virtual requirements of a hybrid or virtual event strategy shouldn’t require a ton of extra work. Here are a few ways that Perry Piep, Product Operations Manager at Splash, leverages the Splash platform to its fullest when it comes to hosting hybrid and virtual events.
Did you know you can use your event page as a home for streaming? Take advantage of video blocks to embed YouTube or Vimeo streams. Or, add an iframe element to your page for almost any streaming service — we recommend Facebook Live.
If you want to boost engagement at your hybrid event, consider hosting a live Twitter chat and embedding the feed onto your event page. There’s no reason virtual attendees shouldn’t be part of the action.
With the power of stages, transform your site from collecting registrations to a place of viewership for your remote guests:
• Create a stage entitled “Streaming Site” for clean record keeping.
• Schedule the stage to go live at “Start Date.”
• Transform your stage into a home theater.
Pro tip: Create another stage — this time called “Post-Event” — where you can host a recording of the livestream, plus information about the next event and photo gallery recaps. This stage can be scheduled for the event end date.
To bake flexibility into your event strategy, set guests up with the choice between attending your event in person or virtually.
Using conditional logic, you can steer them along this personalized journey:
• First, create a new radio type question: “How are you planning to attend the event?”
• Set your radio options to “In person” and “Virtually.”
• Then, depending on the information needed based on your guest type, create a new question.
• Using the conditional logic icon, you can ensure this question only appears for those who have answered “In-person.”
By catering the registration experience to guests intending to attend your event either in person or online, you avoid showing preferential treatment to a certain type of attendee and can begin demonstrating the value of your event up front.
In the case of a hybrid event where virtual guests rely on a streaming link, touchpoints are the sure-fire medium for minding the details.
Use this checklist to make sure that guests always have access to your webinar link.
Include the link on:
• Your event page.
• On-page confirmations.
• Follow-up and reminder emails.
• Post-event stages.
By double-checking that every touchpoint includes a way for guests to access your streaming location or resulting recording, guests will always have all relevant information before, during, and after your event.
Your Splash guest list has more power than you think to guarantee that your organization can adapt to any event environment.
Get started by learning how to filter your Guest List by their registration answers. Once you’ve segmented out your in-person and virtual guests using filters, create lists that will help you streamline and personalize communication for different types of guests.
With a series of targeted email campaigns created in Splash, you can provide specific “know before you go” tips for all audience types — whether you’re suggesting a comfy couch for viewing, or parking tips for those attending IRL.
You can also gauge and combat IRL drop-off sooner by giving guests the ability to modify their RSVPs. Create an email campaign specifically for your “In Person” list with the “Modify RSVP” button. Guests will be able to adjust their response to the “How are you planning to attend?” question, ensuring they don’t miss out on the content and you don’t overestimate attendance.
No matter where you’re hosting your virtual event, ensure that attendees can get the information they need — and that their registration data is up to date in your CRM and MAP systems.
If you’re using BlueJeans, Splash automatically creates a BlueJeans webinar when you create an event, and attendees are automatically marked as attended in the Splash event when they join the webinar.
Integrate your ON24 webinar with Marketo and Splash. Event registration and attendance information will be shared across all three systems — just associate your ON24 webinar with the Marketo program connected to Splash.
Using other technologies? Leverage Zapier to automate your tasks and plug into existing workflows to sync event data in real time with over 750 platforms, including GoToWebinar.
In this example, check out Senior Product Manager, Tim Alexander, connect Splash to GoToWebinar using Zapier.
By the way, if you’re not keeping your guest information up to date across CRM and MAP systems, you’re doing it wrong. Good news: Splash offers integrations for Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and more to make sure that contact records are accurate with attendance status for optimal follow-ups, and accurate prospect and customer engagement analysis.
We’re just getting started with pro tips. Why not give our virtual event a go to get pro tips from the Splash experts?
Join Zach Napolitano, Director of Customer Education, and Faisal Mawani, Technical Solutions Consultant, on 3/26 for a webinar about How to Move Your Live Events Online with Splash.
You’ll learn:
• How to create and market a webinar or online meetup.
• Tools and strategies for promotion and post-event engagement.
• How to use Splash to host a "hybrid" live/virtual event.
• Embedding a live video feed into your Splash event sites.
• Implementing webinar integrations, such as BlueJeans, ON24, and Zoom.
Piper is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Splash. His goal is to shine a light on new product functionality and help the world understand what's next in event marketing. He brings a love of analytics to his work from a previous life at Tableau, and a deep fixation on ROI to every piece of content he slots into your funnel. Piper is a backpacking fiend, playlist hobbyist, and dreams in data visualizations.