Around 30% of events hosted on Splash are virtual.
They’re low budget with often high reward since they allow marketers to reach audiences globally.
But because they’re lower stakes, it’s easy for marketers to turn on autopilot when it comes to production and audience engagement.
We set out to find the key features that have made, and will continue to make, virtual events successful.
This is our list of virtual event trends that’ll stand the test of time.
Virtual events naturally present a challenge when connecting with your audience because you’re forced to build a relationship through a screen.
The best way to combat it? Make your events an interactive experience.
It’s easy for attendees to tune in and tune out if they’re being talked at the whole time. They can quickly become distracted by Slacks, emails, and other tasks.
The goal is to keep them engaged and to do that, they need to be involved. Polls, chat, and surveys are a great way to keep attention, but can sometimes be short-lived.
Here are some others to keep engaged engaged long-term:
Pro move: Use the registration form to collect a list of questions guests have about the topic of your event. Structure your event around the top asked questions and save the rest for live Q&A at the end or for a future event or follow up content.
Virtual events are convenient and budget-friendly for companies. But they’re not always convenient for attendees.
With calendars packed with day-to-day work, meetings, and other responsibilities, taking large chunks of time out of their day to attend an event isn’t always manageable.
Instead of pulling them away for an hour, lean into the virtual event trend of hosting shorter events between 30 to 45 minutes long. In one of our past surveys, 93% of attendees said virtual events should be no longer than an hour.
That still rings true today. Our data shows the average attendee duration for virtual events hosted on Splash is around 42 minutes.
Pro move: Poll your audience in your registration form to see if they prefer a 30, 45, or 60 minute session. If they prefer shorter sessions and you have too much content to cover, consider breaking the topic up into a weekly or bi-weekly series where you can hone in on specific subtopics.
For many people, their calendar acts as a source of truth.
That’s why getting your event on attendees’ calendars immediately after registration is one of our favorite virtual event trends.
The calendar invite typically includes details like:
We recommend including calendar invites in on-page confirmations, email confirmations, and follow-up emails leading up to the event.
Pro move: At Splash, we use a sequence of four reminder emails leading up to a virtual event. This sequence includes a 1 week before, 24 hours before, 1 hour before, and starting now email. We consider the “starting now” email as the most important one of the bunch. Historically it has the highest open rate compared to all other emails.
For those who had to leave your virtual event early or who couldn’t attend, on-demand recordings are a huge value add.
It also gives guests who did attend the option to revisit something they might have missed live.
But the purpose isn’t just to publish the recording, the goal is to extend the value of the content by keeping it as relevant as possible for as long as possible.
Pro move: TikTok’s Nina Skoko uses post-production to clean up dialogue and edit out backgrounds and references to dates to ensure her on-demand event content stays relevant and evergreen.
Content is critical to every marketing team, which is why repurposing event content has a spot on our virtual event trends list.
Let’s say it together: No virtual event content gets left behind.
Tag in your content team to help extend the value of your event by spinning up social clips, writing blog posts, publishing the event to your podcast, sharing the video replay on YouTube, and more.
Pro move: Work with your larger marketing team to identify trends or common asks in your events for when you need ideas for future campaigns.
This one comes as no surprise — always ask for feedback.
HubSpot’s Kat Tooley told us she likes to send out surveys within the first hour of her event ending to maximize responses.
She uses those responses to fuel her post-event content strategy along with future event topics.
Pro move: Nina Skoko from TikTok told us she’ll use the feedback survey as a way to co-create future events with her audience. She’ll send out a couple of topics and let attendees vote on which one her next event should be about.
Virtual events continue to be a pillar in the event marketing playbook.
Since the beginning, these virtual event trends have proved valuable to marketers and guests alike. As time goes on, they continue to play a core role in making virtual events engaging for audiences and more impactful for businesses.
