I know I’m not the only one guilty of watching a webinar on one screen and answering email, scrolling through social media, or just generally multitasking on the other. When hosting a virtual event and having your audience behind a screen, you’ll always have to work harder to get and keep them actively engaged. Here are some tricks I’ve learned after both hosting and attending countless virtual events.
If I’ve learned anything about the virtual events, it’s that the content you prepared for the live event will not resonate in a virtual environment. When presenting to a live audience, you have their undivided attention. When presenting to an audience behind a computer screen, you have to work much harder to keep their attention.
Short snippets with tons of visuals and interactive content work best (keep reading for more on this later). If you think for one minute the 45-minute keynote you prepared for your live event with no visuals is going to keep your audience on the edge of their seats, you’re wrong –– they’ll be scrolling through Instagram before you’re finished with the welcome address.
When you’re creating a content plan for your virtual event, assume your audience wants to connect with fellow attendees just like they would at a live event. Think about the exercises you would have prompted: greet your neighbor, raise your hand if you’re using a specific solution, stand up if this is your first time visiting the hosting city, etc.
While replicating the exact same prompts at a virtual event might not be feasible, you can still create an interactive environment. Insert frequent polls into the content flow to keep attendees involved (bonus points for simultaneously gathering attendee data), or even call on attendees to share insights.
Pro Tip: As you watch registrations pour in for your virtual event, connect with a few attendees ahead of time and ask them if they’d be willing to share insights on the virtual event. This allows you to have some seeded questions and committed attendees to get the conversation going.
If you want to get really creative, give your attendees some homework before they arrive at the virtual event. On the Splash Community team, we’ve been asking our attendees to bring their best and worst event pages to specific virtual events so they can share how they created their favorite pages, and ask the audience for help to up-level their least favorite.
Here’s a tricky one: Do you record your virtual events? At first, you’re probably thinking: Of course I would record. I can use the recording as gated content and score leads after! Not so fast.
While it’s true that recording and repurposing your virtual events can be a great demand generation tool, think back to how many times you ditched a webinar or other virtual experience because you knew you could watch it on-demand at a later date. I’ve found that explaining an event won’t be recorded (or recorded for internal purposes only) prompts registrants to show up and participate.
Having clear goals prior to promoting a virtual experience is key here. If your main goal is to share content and educate your audience, then recording makes sense so you can repurpose into demand generation content. If your goal is to have a collaborative, virtual, hands-on experience, your best bet is to hold on recording.
Having a plain old slide deck isn’t enough when it comes to hosting an engaging virtual event. Your audience needs something to look at that captures and keeps their attention. Try not to keep one visual up on the screen for more than five minutes, and pull in as many visual examples to support the presentation as much as possible.
For example, three Splash User Group chapters held virtual meet-ups in March, and each speaker toggled between their bright, animated slides to examples of event pages they’ve created. Using examples and giving the audience something fresh to look at every few minutes not only kept attendees present, but cultivated more collaboration and audience Q&A.
Just like every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square, virtual events and webinars are not interchangeable terms. While you can categorize webinars under virtual event programs, it’s misleading to promote a run-of-the-mill webinar as a virtual event. I would argue that the only similarity between a webinar and a virtual event is the page setup and registration process.
Virtual events have unique elements that engage the audience with interactive touchpoints and should bring a more human element to the table. Webinars are typically more rehearsed and educational, with prepared slideshows and only a handful of people talking. All attendees are muted and typically do not have the option to come off of mute and interact with the speakers. When creating and promoting the program, be sure to clearly explain what experience you’re creating for attendees so expectations are reasonable.
The most important piece of the virtual event puzzle is knowing that they cannot and will not replicate the exact experience a live event provides. And that’s okay. Today, virtual events are what we have, and they are a great way event marketers can reach their audience and create value during times like this. And when in-person events come back with a vengeance, remember that IRL + URL will be the right recipe, not URL instead of IRL.
Hannah is the Community & Customer Marketing Manager at Splash. Her goal is to empower Splash customers to showcase their expertise with the rest of the event marketing community. A former event marketer, Hannah understands the effort it takes to pull off a seamless event and understands how imperative the Splash software is to an event marketer's success. Hannah is a Rhode Island native/glorified beach bum, equestrian, and mother to the world's most perfect corgi, Wilbur.
