The event format & event goal
Are you ready to leverage all the advantages of virtual events to boost your business and are you eager to start planning? Great. But make sure to match the event format to your event goal before planning anything else.
First and foremost, you have to figure out your event objective. You need to be crystal clear about what you want to achieve with your virtual event and why you are running it.
Having your specific goal in mind helps you find the right event format
Remember that your chosen format should always support the main intention that you follow with your event.
Generally, when going virtual, you can decide between running a rather short, one hour webinar or a more lengthy, full-day or multi-day virtual event (conference, seminar, workshop etc.).
What’s best for you depends on what you set out to achieve.
So read on in order to get smarter – and learn what suits your special needs and goals.
Webinars are more about educating.
If you want to educate or train your audience, like introducing them to a new product of yours or giving them insights into recent market development or best practices, then a webinar is the right format for your event. Or from an internal perspective, webinars can be used for employee training.
At the most basic level, a webinar is a powerful tool with which you, as thought leader of your industry, can give away knowledge to your target audience (mostly for free). And done the right way, you will get a lot back.
A webinar can bring value to your business in several ways.
1. Create brand awareness and brand image
To compete and to grow your business in the long-term, you have to get your name out there. You want your brand to be top-of-mind when people search for solutions like yours. In the online space, you can reach a massive audience across the globe. Use this potential!
But instead of scaring people away with an intrusive and boring sales pitch, webinars can help you entice attendees to become your customers in a more subtle and promising way.
With the webinar format you can:
- Feature other industry experts, giving you and your brand additional credibility
- Team up with strategic partners, again letting some of their good reputation rub off on you
- Build a positive brand image in your attendees’ minds and entice them to further engage with you
- Present the unique value of your brand
2. Set the stage for your product or service
People make confident buying decisions when they are sure that your product or service perfectly matches their individual needs.
But instead of just relying on your prospects to know all of their needs in depth, with a webinar you actually get a chance to present the true complexity of their challenges and consequent needs. And thereby you basically define them.
Forget about intrusive sales pitches. Consider a strategy instead in which you educate the crowd, give them all necessary information needed for purchasing a solution like yours – indirectly framing your offering as the optimal choice.
And furthermore, instead of being regarded as just another sales-focused entrepreneur, people will remember you as a knowledgeable adviser and thought leader.
3. Establish consumer trust and drive sales
No one will ever buy from you if they don’t trust you or your product (or service). Through a webinar, you can offer content that is generally meaningful for your audience AND showcase how your product or service can be beneficial to them at the same time.
This does not force your attendees in a business relationship with you but they get the opportunity to educate themselves on a specific topic and they can get an impression of your offering’s quality and features.
Make sure that this impression lasts!
Further down the funnel, this will tremendously help convert your webinar attendees into customers – removing any doubt for them as to whether your solution is the right one or not.
Plus, through the webinar Q&A that is usually held at the end of the session, attendees get the chance to interact with you and have their questions answered directly. Nothing beats the sense of reassurance conferred by a direct interaction with someone being present and helpful.
Ultimately, your webinar attendees will be confident and trusting enough to choose you as their business partner – driving your sales and business growth.
4. Build strong relationships with your customers and employees
People want to feel special and appreciated. That’s the secret to maintaining long-term business relationships with your customers.
You can create strong bonds and ensure the loyalty of your customers, when they see you walking the extra mile for them. By providing powerful content via webinars to your existing customers and educating them within your area of expertise, they will feel that you truly have their best interests and needs at heart and that they receive maximum benefit by doing business with you.
From an internal business perspective, the very same applies. By showing your staff that you care about their ongoing education, they will get the feeling that you are all in it together and that you are dedicated to invest in their professional and personal growth.
Extended virtual events are more about knowledge exchange and networking.
This format goes much more into depth than a webinar. It is designed for a much higher level of active engagement, meaningful conversation, and networking. Simply putting together a bunch of webinars and calling it a virtual conference won’t bring you the results you are looking for.
Like with any kind of on-site event you ask people to spend their most valuable resource on you: their time. And the more elaborate and time-consuming your virtual event is, the more you need to focus on: what is in it for my audience?
So if you are planning a virtual event stretched over an entire day, multiple days or maybe even longer, you definitely need to justify why your content cannot be delivered through a couple of short webinars.
The majority of people attend events because they want to connect and share ideas with like-minded people, get inspired, and learn about relevant topics that resonate with their needs and interests. This goes both for on-site AND virtual events.
Just because it is cheaper and easier to produce and reproduce digital content, you shouldn’t just compile everything you’ve already got and call it a virtual event.
People will have high expectations. You want to meet and exceed them.
So what you should do instead: Provide a full-on, well-curated, and unique experience for your attendees to keep them coming back for more and actively engaged (especially when your event goes on for multiple days).
For this experience and to deliver on your virtual event objectives, you need to have adequate digital features and structures in place for exchanging knowledge, facilitating networking, as well as establishing and maintaining business relationships.
Sounds like a lot of effort. And it definitely is. But here is why it will all be worth it.
1. Drive impact, learning, and fruitful engagement
A longer virtual conference gives you enough time to engage and connect with your attendees on a much deeper level during the course of your event (as opposed to a webinar, where interaction is mostly limited to a concluding Q&A session).
Besides including common features like live polling, chat and emoji responses, you have the option to dedicate entire sessions to interaction and engagement: offer live chat sessions with keynote speakers, 1:1 virtual consultation with selected attendees, 1:1 virtual networking meetings among attendees, …
Simultaneously, there is more time for your attendees to take in and reflect on the content that you are providing. This will leave them with an enhanced learning experience and this in turn will spark more meaningful conversations and discussions at your event.
As a positive side effect, your audience will regard you as a credible thought leader of your industry. You will gain their trust and they will be much easier to convert into buying customers.
2. Let your attendees take centre stage, make them your collaborators, and innovate
At virtual conferences and other lengthy online events the learning can go both ways! You teach your audience just as much as they teach you.
There is a lot that you can learn from your attendees. Their opinions and feedback are crucial for you to improve your business, anticipate their future needs, and develop innovative solutions for them.
Include your attendees as collaborators of your virtual conference. Give them a voice and let them take centre stage!
Facilitating pre-event audience engagement is key here! For example, let your attendees comment on your planned event sessions before the event so that you get useful and relevant input to shape your event program. Or let your attendees vote for specific topics, workshop contents, etc.
Taking it a step further, you can also ask attendees to volunteer as case studies for your event. Making your content much more personal, relevant and meaningful to your audience.
Since most of your attendees are likely to face quite similar challenges or opportunities, discussing one of your attendees’ particular situation will lead to an inspiring and helpful outcome for everyone.
Maybe you can even activate your case-study-volunteer(s) as speaker and other people in the audience as panelists for a panel discussion? Have them join on video and make the experience even more lively and engaging for everyone.
We often tend to forget that there are actual people sitting behind their screens when all videos are turned off, so this could be a great opportunity to remind ourselves that we are still communicating with real humans even if it’s all happening in the online world.
From an overall event strategy perspective, make sure to create an ongoing feedback loop! After each event, no matter the event format, use all the valuable input that you have received from your audience to enhance your business and innovate to always stay on top of the game in your particular industry.
Conclusion
So there you go! Short webinar sessions and extended virtual events both bear different potentials and it really all comes down to what your objectives are when deciding on an adequate event format.
As a general rule of thumb, remember that webinars are ideal for educating while virtual conferences and other longer virtual events are great for knowledge exchange, networking, and innovation.’
Read more
Looking for inspiration or ideas on what event format is best for you
Check out this list from Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/70-event-ideas-and-formats-to-inspire-your-next-great-event-ds00/
