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Different events fail due to different reasons. But all great virtual events have a few things in common. Our customer success team has seen the behind-the-scenes action of 6,000+ events. And they uncovered the common denominator of successful virtual events. So we asked our customer success managers about the best practices of planning an event. They revealed 13 event planning tips they have seen outstanding event organizers use.
Choose technology based on your event goals. When selecting a virtual event platform, keep in mind the structure of your event and your specific requirements. Conduct detailed research of the platform to understand how it helps your use case.
Creating a buzz around your event is extremely important. All successful events have excellent promotional campaigns running on all possible marketing channels. Don’t wait till the last minute. Start preparing your event marketing plans months before the event.
Make the most of your event platform. Open it up before the event day. Let your attendees, speakers, and partners explore it in advance and get comfortable using it. This will also them get familiarized with the event layout and agenda.
Provide attendees quick text or video instructions on how to log in, use different features, and make the most of various event areas. Highlight the event segments you want attendees to interact with the most. You can play these videos at the start of the event as the audience waits for it to begin.
Post polls, pictures, open-ended questions, and more on the event feed to encourage attendees to do the same. This creates an intuitive experience for attendees to engage if they join before the event starts. Many attendees use the mobile app to explore the event days before the actual event dates. Focus on optimizing their app experience so they feel like posting on the event feed, commenting on other posts, and initiating 1-1 chats.
People are more likely to join events that tell a story through their agenda. Plan your event narrative, reflect it in the agenda, and curate session content accordingly. This will get your audiences excited about the event. All great events have an intuitive agenda, relatable content, and an immersive session experience. When you use Hubilo, you get to use logos, banners, overlays, and background images to narrate your brand story visually. The Hubilo Broadcasting Studio offers multiple opportunities for creating immersive sessions.
Make time to educate your team, partners, and presenters on the functionalities of the virtual event platform. Onboard all stakeholders to the platform in advance. Clarify all their doubts. Seek help from your customer success managers to make onboarding easy for everyone.
All successful event planners have one thing in common: clarity about their event goals from day one. They share the goals they want to achieve with their entire team. They know which metrics are important to them, what ROI means for them, and how will they measure it.
Meticulous pre-event prep and a few detailed rehearsals are key to smooth event execution. More dry runs mean less event day stress. Apart from the usual run-of-show, use dry runs to:
Most great events achieve high audience and partner engagement. Event planners dive deep into the platform features to figure out how best to translate their engagement ideas into reality. And they incentivize attendees for interactions with rewards. The three most common questions our customer success managers get about engagement are:
Plan how you will use the event content and distribute it post-event. Most event planners use social media, newsletters, and email campaigns for this. They also use platform notifications to communicate to the audience:
Successful event organizers have befriended virtual event data. They make use of real-time as well as post-event data to improve event performance. Before the event, they make time to understand what’s readily available to them. During the event, they track data important to their event goals. And post-event, they dive deep into the event analytics. They not only look for quantitative data but also try to get qualitative data. They look at what attendees talked about in chats, on the event feed, in comments during the session, and more.
Find ways to extend the life of your event. Decide on a CTA and keep the discussion going around it. Let audiences know of the next steps and how they can continue to engage and educate themselves.
Implement all these virtual event best practices when you plan your next event to set yourself up for success. We understand how busy event planners and organizers are. And they’ll need all the assistance they can to pull off a successful event. That’s why Hubilo’s designated customer success team is always hands-on to ensure your event goes without a hitch.
Kirti is a self-taught content strategist and editor. She is a computer science engineer by education who bid adieu to code because she fell in love with words. After 6 years of working in the digital media space creating editorial and branded content, she took to B2B content marketing. And she has been geeking out on it for 3 years now. She loves hiking in the mountains, reading psychology, and making a good cup of coffee.
