It goes without saying that keeping your event attendees engaged is essential to a successful event.
While that is certainly a challenge, ensuring event engagement for virtual or hybrid events might prove to be even more complicated – with over 60% of surveyed event marketers struggle to keep their attendees engaged during sessions at virtual events. With the industry evolving and virtual events becoming the norm in the event space, how can planners enhance audience engagement?
Fret not! In this article, we will break down the most effective ways to optimise event engagement for your virtual events.
1. Designate Networking Spaces for Attendees
You should create an environment or space for your event registrants to mingle and network with others in the industry. This is a great way for them to establish connections and exchange information with like-minded individuals throughout the community.
Hybrid events should ensure attendees from both physical and virtual events can carry out their networking efforts.
Another great way to allow attendees to network is Braindate – where attendees can sign up and create or select topics they are interested in exploring. The attendees can decide whether they want the interaction to be private or within a larger group format. At the end of the Braindate, participants have the opportunity to connect with others in session on LinkedIn and other platforms.
2. Keep Sessions Concise
It is important to understand that remote audiences – be it a fully digital or a hybrid event – have attention spans far shorter than our previous norm. On top of this, webinar fatigue accumulates steadily amongst virtual attendees – which is why it is worthwhile to consider shortening your sessions to keep your audience happy and engaged.
If possible, keep all sessions to under 30 minutes, including Q&A, to maximize event engagement and avoid session fatigue.
3. Focus On User Experience
Planners must look to create a platform that is user-friendly and digestible for the attendees. The reason is simple: virtual events and platforms are still a novelty for most attendees so it is difficult to expect them to have the knowledge to navigate a virtual event platform from the get-go.
Planners should therefore focus on maximising the user experience and choosing a user-friendly virtual event platform that is easy to navigate. Planners can even provide attendees with an FAQ section and small video tutorials on navigating the platform and its features.
While virtual platforms may limit your event in the traditional sense, it invariably opens up other opportunities to showcase your creativity. Keeping your audience engaged at virtual events and virtual conferences can be challenging, but it is certainly not an impossible feat.
With cutting-edge technology at our disposal and with the rapid shift to digitalisation, 2021 is the perfect time to test out different ideas. Use these 3 tips as guidelines for your next event and you will be set to bringing your attendees an engaging virtual event experience.
If you want to take virtual engagement to the next step, come find out about our all-in-one hybrid event software! Reach out to us now for a free demo of VUE from NowEvents.