Virtual Events: Timeline and Marketing Considerations

Virtual Events: Timeline and Marketing Considerations

Rome Was Not Built in a Day. Neither are Virtual Events.

If you’ve been following along chronologically in this blog series, you’ve read our introduction to virtual events, including an overview of objectives, audience, and technology considerations, and you’ve read through the details we’ve shared on the virtual event location, content types and considerations, communication tools and their not-so-traditional uses, as well as our insights into how to prove ROI.

Now, we want to take a moment in this last blog to talk about timelines. ​Because we get it; we’re all in the same boat. We’re all in uncharted waters, being asked to solve new problems and create new solutions—and we have to do it fast.​

But as the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Even though virtual events do not have the same building requirements as physical ones, there’s still a timeline to consider. Sure, it won’t follow the typical six months needed for a physical exhibit, but, creating a virtual event is not like flipping a switch.​

We’re working with our vendors to create new services from their existing range of products on the fly. (Which is a good thing, by the way, because we’re all helping each other to pivot our offerings and our strategies in this ‘new normal.’) But we’re typically seeing and hearing an estimate of six to eight weeks for turnaround time from the moment content is received. And that’s a good thing, folks, because it gives you the time you need to market and promote your event and draw a crowd to your virtual space. ​

As illustrated below, what we’ve talked about so far in this blog series is what falls under the middle bucket here—your during-show efforts. From the development of your virtual space, to the content experiences and interactive activities, to the live chats and leave-behind downloadable content.​

Let’s quickly touch upon marketing the event. Because you’re putting on your own event, you need to make sure you have a strong pre-event marketing campaign in place. There’s no show organization to rely on, so it’s important to create as many touch points as makes sense to your audience…and your budget.​

Ah, the hot-word: Budget.

We realize virtual events have different costs than physical events. But, there is still a cost. Virtual events are developed with technology partners, web developers and app programmers, designers and writers, video producers and digital strategists…you get the point. So, there’s a lot of tech, and that comes at a price. Yes, it’s typically less than a physical event, but it tends to scale based on the same way as your physical event. ​

From a recent survey we conducted, a majority of companies pivoting to virtual events are planning to allocate somewhere between a quarter to a half of their budget to the virtual space. That’s a great start, and we suggest if you’re in a similar boat, that you take some of that cost savings from going virtual and reinvest and reallocate it to your marketing efforts. ​

Perhaps you want to mail your attendees some pre-event swag like a margarita making kit for the cocktail hour you’re going to host after that final presentation. Or, in our first whitepaper we discussed mobile marketing solutions—you could invest in some sort of trailer or RV you can take on the road to follow up with attendees as part of your post-event marketing.

Imagine setting up follow-up meetings with prospects and showing up to their facility for an in-person, small-group meeting where they come outside and demo your product! Instead of swiping through to spin around your product in 3D, they can literally pick up your product to spin it around to finally get that hands-on experience.

Not to mention, there’s a scalability factor. Your virtual event space is a website, it can be repurposed and reskinned for future events or to allow post-event access and use as a sales tool for quite some time. (Even that mobile marketing solution can be repurposed—you could even drive that RV right into a trade show floor when events do come back!)

The point is, virtual events do have a cost, but there is still cost savings you can take advantage of to make sure your event is successful, and your business goals met.

Ready to get your own virtual event rolling?

Virtual Events Details: Sales, ROI & Justifying the Virtual Event

Because we can’t gather in person, embracing and understanding virtual events right now is crucial to your sales strategy and business goals. In the end, we’re all attending and planning virtual events to make up for the inability to sell and develop customer relationships in person, right? Let’s figure out what you’re doing about sales in this virtual world, starting with your event website metrics.

Depending on your product line and sales strategy, you’re going to have different key performance indicators, or KPIs, to judge whether the event is a success. So, you want to look at what types of information you can get out of a virtual event, and what makes sense for your goals to prove ROI.

For one, there’s direct sales to consider. Could your product or service be sold through the event, using traditional Ecommerce? Should we build out a limited time run store, specific to this event? Can we actually sell access to this event?

Or, would a series of complex forms help to complete your sales process? And does your event feed into an existing sales portal already created elsewhere? This is, again, a website, so the data it contains can be passed over when necessary.

Obviously, we’re going to want to pull customer data at the end, but we want to know first what statistically is a KPI to you and what’s irrelevant data.

Is there an automated marketing platform synced up to this virtual event that we need to be able to pull and push data from? What from this event needs to feed your Salesforce, Hubspot or whatever CRM tool you use? How much of this data do you want in your CRM? Since there’s so many different things that we can track, we’re really going to need to fine-tune those KPIs.

Information like: How the attendees used the site, the total number of minutes spent in live webinars, live chats, live web calls, and who downloaded what information is pretty much table stakes in our minds. These are just a few of the metrics we can typically get from all live events. Depending on the complexity of your event, there’s other things we can see from the virtual event space. It really depends on what tools you pull in to best meet your audience needs and your company goals. There’s so much information that is available, depending on what you put into your virtual event, that it requires a long discussion when you start building.

We may read like a broken record in this blog series, but you’ve got to spend some time looking at how to measure your goals, and that should help you determine the tools you need to fill your virtual event space.

So, what’s the last piece of the puzzle to planning a successful virtual event? Check out the final blog in this series covering timeline and marketing considerations for virtual event planning, here.

Virtual Events Details: Other Communication Tools

Even though it’s a virtual event, you can still recreate those moments for conversation and networking (even the random ones)! And while everything we’ve discussed in this blog series so far is communication in one way or another, now we’re talking tools that are a little bit more ‘talk show’ and a little less ‘broadcast news.’ ​

Let’s review some quick facts of the communication tools that you should consider besides the webinar route.​

Forms:

  • Great for polling attendees and starting complex sales funnels.
  • Relatively easy to execute.
  • Tried and true.

Simulated Live Chat, AKA Chatbots:

  • Everyone uses them (even though we often find no one likes them…) and for simple, “How do I get the link to work?” type of questions, they have their place.
  • Typically, they also require a lot of quality control examiners to find the appropriate questions that users will experience, so do not expect these to work well for short-term virtual events. However, if you’re looking to have a large attendance, they are almost a requirement before even getting to an actual live chat, to weed out some of the work placed on your operators.​

Live Chat:

  • When you want to talk (sort of), live chat is great as multiple operators can handle several chats at a time and can provide the back-and-forth necessary to keep the conversation ball rolling.
  • Of course, you need staffing for those operators, and the operators must be familiar both with the technical aspects of your products and services as well as the actual virtual event, as some of the questions they will be fielding will always be about the tech of the virtual event space.​

Click-to-Call (i.e. Skype):

  • Getting an operator on the phone who can see the attendee’s screen and answer questions requires manpower.
  • However, if you’ve got the staff, it can provide a great person-to-person experience like that of a physical event one-on-one.
  • Depending on what your current communications tech stack looks like, there’s some excellent ways we’ve been able to implement these into virtual events.

When it comes to recreating random conversations, there are tools for that, too.

At a physical event, sometimes the best conversations and networking opportunities come from those random hallway excursions, or by sitting at a table full of strangers for lunch.

Our favorite tool for emulating this in-person experience is the Instant Meeting. Because there’s nothing like those accidental networking incidents that happen at lunch in a physical event, where you end up talking to someone you’ve never met at your lunch table; we want to do everything we can to keep some of this person-to-person connection during the virtual event.​

Lately, we’ve been referring to this as the ‘lunch room chat’—for pretty obvious reasons. No more than eight people can join, but you can have as many of these live lunch room chats set up as you want. ​We’ve had prospects want to actually pass these out to exhibitors when they’re planning an entire exhibit event and not just a show for themselves.

Simply allowing your virtual attendees to randomly chat amongst themselves is pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves. ​(And all you have to do is click a link, there’s no extra sign-up!) There’s also no moderator here, so the conversation flows just as it would in the hallway or lunch room. You don’t even need to give them a topic like dear Linda does (for those of you who understand this pop culture reference):

Now that you’ve gotten an overview of virtual events and how to determine your three base needs, as well as detailed dives into the event website, content types, and communication tool uses, you’re likely wondering how you’re going to justify hosting a virtual event to upper management and key stakeholders.

We’ve got you covered—check out the next blog in this series on sales and ROI measures to ensure your virtual event meets your goals, here.

Virtual Events Details: Using the Communication Tools

More than just an introduction to virtual events, including an overview of objectives, audience, and technology considerations, our blog series on this timely topic has so far covered details on the virtual event location (hint: a website!) and how best to frame your event content. So, what happens next in the process for planning your virtual event? Figuring out how to put the right communication tools to work, to share your content.

You’ll likely have several goals specific to your virtual event. However, there’s one main goal for all virtual events that should be included in your list of objectives: The goal of driving interaction at your virtual event by using the appropriate communication tools.

Take webinars as an example. We’ve all been to numerous webinars by now​. But, did you know the webinar tool can be used for something other than an educational-based broadcast?

Webinars: Best-Use Practices

  • Long format = Breakout sessions
  • Short format = Demonstrations
  • The ‘Almighty Registration Page’

A webinar is a tool. As is a drill. With a drill, you can put holes in things. You can also use it to place screws. We’ve seen videos on YouTube where people peel buckets full of potatoes in 30 seconds flat. Or, hey, stick a corn cob on the end, and you can become TikTok famous by eating corn on the cob. (Really, it’s a thing, look it up later.​)

The point is, webinars can be used for your standard long-form session, but they can also be used for short, five- to 10-minute mini-meetings. You can schedule a lot of them, and if you have a good sign-in process (one like ours that doesn’t require you to sign in to each one individually), you can start to break up the day, similar to how you do with trade show scheduling apps on your mobile device. In short: Don’t look at any one tool, and think it only has one use.

We’ve talked with clients about building out a whole day event, where there were different, small-group webinar live demonstrations happening every five minutes, and with larger breakout sessions scheduled every 45 minutes. The registration form built out the attendee’s itinerary and allowed for some structure for their event day. And when the person wasn’t in either a breakout session or a live demonstration, they were able to do some self-exploration through the available free flow content (both passive and active). ​

Rethinking your use of the various communication tools can also help you to repurpose existing content. Especially if you’ve been planning a physical event that was postponed or canceled, you’ve likely already created some content. Thinking about a typical trade show booth, and what’s presented there, often there are wall-mounted TV monitors playing video loops. There’s also pamphlets and flyers and business portfolio handouts. Not to mention, some cool swag that’s been designed, if it’s an industry that allows for that, or a planned activity to engage visitors like jeopardy or a photo booth.

Repurpose Existing Content, like:

  • Video​
  • PDFs​
  • Planned activities​
  • Content from your ‘archives’

Ask yourself of these pieces of content: Is any of it still usable? And more importantly, looking at how it was used before, is it still useful? Just because it exists doesn’t mean its usability or usefulness in this new event setting hasn’t changed.

Let’s look at a video that was used in a loop as a background video at the show, for example. This video may have been created to bring people in from the aisle, but to actually sit and watch it for a long time may not present the information the best way. And that flyer was information you wanted the attendee to leave with, it wasn’t the main piece of content that you hoped to draw them into the booth to get. So, let’s make sure that your content is repurposed intelligently.

Perhaps that video becomes the background to your website to add layers of visual appeal. Or, it’s turned into a ‘choose your own adventure’ style presentation with pauses for multiple choice questions that the viewer can answer, and which would play a different video for a custom-tailored experience. You could leave the flyer as a downloadable PDF or turn it into a set of infographics to encourage social sharing of the information. And you could still recreate those in-person activities, by developing a web-version of your jeopardy game complete with public facing leaderboard to allow for competition between visitors or adding greenscreen-less camera tech that allows users to pick their custom background and snap a shot to post somewhere in your event site space.​

Just because your physical event canceled doesn’t mean you have to throw out the baby with the bath water. Figure out what’s still useful, or if tweaking it would make it useful. Just be sure you’re not pushing content to the forefront if it’s not going to help you achieve your, or your audiences’, goals and objectives.​

Check out the next blog in this series detailing more communication tools that you should consider for your virtual event, to drive interaction, here.

Virtual Events Details: Framing the Content

In order to develop and design the structure of your virtual event website, you need to first figure out your content and how to frame it. Going back to the flipped golden rule we mentioned in the second blog of this series, how your audience prefers to consume their content will help you determine the ‘container’ you need to build.

Because there’s lots of different ways to slice and dice the term, ‘content,’ we’re first going to share some agreed upon language for types of content.

One of the ways we can do that is to separate the content types into a few different categories. Now, there are a myriad of ways I’ve seen of content broken into categories, but we’re going to use the one that we like best. (If you’ve been through some other webinars on virtual events, you may see different ways of defining content, or see the definitions that I’m about to throw out used differently. That’s fine; each of us content strategists use a variation and personalize our terminology.)

For virtual events, we define content as passive versus active, and scheduled versus free flow. Looking at how these vary, often we want to keep things straightforward and black-and-white, putting content into one of two buckets…but it doesn’t really work like that. Content often fits in more than one bucket, and so it’s more important to think of variations like digital tags. All content can be tagged with more than one tag.

For example, look at a live webinar. It isn’t timeless—it only happens at a scheduled time. If you’re not there, it isn’t a live webinar. However, webinars in a lot of ways are extremely passive. As a presenter, we can look at the analytics of a webinar we’re livestreaming and see what percentage of the audience have a different screen loaded up and are working on something else at the same time as watching the webinar. These people are listening, we assume, but they’re working on something else. But a webinar can also be active. When polls are launched or the presenter asks for hand raises, the audience is being involved, and are actively clicking on things. Questions are sent in as they’ve come to mind, and some attendees have been actively engaged the entire time, ignoring emails, texts, instant messages, kids walking in to home offices, and so on.

A PDF or a video file can be passive content. Conversely, a 3D product demonstration or a 360-degree video tour tool, although completely free flow in feel, can require heavy engagement, so we’d consider it active. However, a live-hosted, hands-on product demo from a sales person in a small chat room needs to be scheduled and is also active.

Isn’t content fun?

Here’s just the beginnings of a ‘list’ of content types:

  • Video
  • Webinars
  • Chat rooms
  • PDF downloads
  • Text
  • Slideshows
  • Virtual tours
  • Walkthroughs
  • Augmented reality
  • One-on-one calls
  • Image slideshows
  • Virtual Products
  • Audio/podcasts
  • Interactive games
  • Virtual lunch
  • Keynote presentations
  • Forms
  • Polls
  • Note panels
  • Image galleries
  • Offline tie-ins
  • 3D Tours
  • Virtual product presentations
  • Electronic sales
  • Gated content
  • Simulated webinars

As you can see, there’s a lot here, and depending on your initial goals and objectives, as well as the content that you have already, some of these may be appropriate, where others won’t be.

The sky is the limit. In fact, determining virtual event content feels like a daunting task for many; it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the different possibilities. That’s why you need to start with your objectives, and the content you already have in your marketing communications archive, before starting to plan on how to frame your content into the website. Working from the containers first is an almost impossible task—the containers are limitless! That’s why this section is just called, “Framing the Content.” Remember, content is king; the frames are not.

Something important to note: We all want something cool and flashy, our brand’s ‘it’ factor needs to come through and be felt through the screen, and we don’t want to present something without a big ‘WOW’ factor. However, at the end of the day, the content’s value comes from what that audience can take away. So maybe the cool 3D-rendered spinning booth is exactly what you need. But, maybe the streamlined linear website with only one main graphic is a better container for your content.

If you take away one thing from this entire blog series, remember this: A virtual event is thrown by you for your customers. Not for you.

Check out the best-practices insight we’re sharing on how to utilize certain communication tools for your virtual event—outside their typical use, here.

Virtual Events Details: The Event Website

As we mentioned in blogs one and two of this series, virtual events share similarities with live events.

When it comes to virtual events, the website is really like the event location. Inside the event, different things are happening, from seminars to breakout sessions and live demonstrations. There may be some self-exploration of content, like wandering around the trade show floor. Perhaps there’s some virtual rooms that allow you to chat with random attendees.

All these aspects of the event require different tools, programs, and applications. The same way that a physical event may have several rooms, with completely different technical needs, your virtual event needs to be able to include a slew of different tools. The only way to get all the different applications into a cohesive environment is to house them within a website.

Why? A comprehensive website that houses all of the different tools allows you to control all of the different components of your event from one place. Imagine if a puppet had four different people pulling on each of the strings. How hard would it be to make it dance? A website gives you control over every technical aspect that the different software tools bring to the table.

However, this cannot be your regular website. We can’t mention this enough. Your website is going to have information on everything you do. Therefore, sending this targeted, specialized audience to your full website is a great way for your audience to get lost. Instead, this is a precise, targeted, narrowly focused website. (A ‘microsite,’ if you will.)

For those of you who’ve had a show organization invite you to ‘present’ in their ‘virtual show’ by providing you a page to upload your sales material…be warned. We’re sure some of you reading this have already had events that have been canceled that have been provided with these ‘virtual event’ pages that are simply a place for you to dump literature by way of PDFs, add a single video and some text, and a graphic of your logo with a link to your website.

Working with those event spaces is not a bad thing. The caveat is that there’s very little analytics that you’re going to be able to pull out. What we recommend is creating your own virtual event to drive traffic from the show virtual event space to your own, and which is something more than just one individual page. It makes more sense to send people from these virtual show halls to your own virtual event space, so that you can create a more immersive and interactive environment and get those deeper analytics. Moreover, by creating your own virtual event, you can leverage the traffic being driven by the show event space as well as drive additional outside traffic to it (by marketing it!)

Where things start to deviate in the similarities between virtual and physical events is in the varying event logistics. Moreover, a lot of new considerations and questions that come up when trying to plan out a virtual event occur because there’s a lot less limitations—because there’s no size limitations and there doesn’t have to be any time limitation, there’s some extra logistics that you’ve never had to think about when planning a physical event or exhibit.

Functionality logistics to consider for your virtual event website:

  • Will this event be available to anyone or accessible only via login?
  • Is this site going to change throughout a specific period of time:
    • Are you running this for the length of the event, and then it is gone?
    • Is it going to start with everything, and then have some of the content go away, leaving a shell of what the site was during the event?
  • Will this event site be a one-time use or reused with content updates?
  • How large a roster will you need for personnel and staffing?

If you’re planning on having live demonstrations or fully livestreamed webinars, there’s going to be specific times that these occur. You then have to decide if the virtual event is only ‘open’ during those live times or if you’re going to want to keep this event space running after the fact and, if so, swap out those live demos for some video content or simulated (pre-recorded) webinars.

There’s also one major logistics question we haven’t seen anyone address: Who are your event personnel and what’s your roster count? You’ll need operators for live chat, sales people ready for phone calls and video conferences; remember, only the venue should be perceived as virtual. That means we’re trying to make it as real as possible—which means you need real people at the other end of those communication tools to drive real conversations, not just chat bots who can only take the conversation so far.

And don’t forget, since your virtual event space is a website, it has to ‘live’ somewhere. Is it going to be hosted on your current web servers, or should this live elsewhere? Who’s in charge of the building, security, and maintenance of this website? And finally, when you’re looking at the tools you’re going to plug into this website, who’s taking ownership of that process? There’s a lot of things to consider, and some of it can’t be fully decided until you know what you’re going to include in your event.

But, if we’re going to talk about structure, and what’s going in to the website, we’d better figure out content.

Check out the insight we’re sharing on how to frame your content for a successful virtual event, here.