The recent Coronavirus situation around the world and the ensuing lockdowns and restrictions on physical activities have brought virtual event platforms and virtual events to the forefront of event marketing.
Event organizers are scrambling to adapt to the new turn of virtual events amid the pandemic stricken world. In the absence of meaningful, close personal meetings and face-to-face interactions, virtual conferencing, hybrid events, and interactive virtual events setup have experienced quite a boom in recent months.
Virtual event platforms provide a way for companies looking forward to hosting virtual events, with their range of interactive, engaging and effective virtual events solutions.
It isn’t very difficult to understand why virtual events are the only way forward for next few years. With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no tangible signs of slowing down, it’s not a far cry to think that virtual events platforms and hybrid events will become the predominant event format over the next few months and possibly, even a few years. Read more about the future of events post COVID-19.
Hosting Virtual Events
With that being said, hosting virtual events require virtual event planning, strategy and an exciting, interesting setup. After all, a virtual event is yet another event, with all the branding, networking and brand-related elements that are often seen in a physical event. In virtual events, you still need to engage your customers in a healthy, interesting way.
With the event industry slowly but surely coming to terms with the reality of virtual events and hybrid events, event managers are scrambling to find new ways to connect with their audience and give them an all-encompassing, interactive virtual events experience.
If you’re hosting virtual events, and are looking for interactive ways to capture your audience’s attention, then this article is just for you! We’ll tell you 10 creative ways to make your virtual events interesting for your attendees, and make them the most loyal customers of your brand. Read on to know more.
Make Virtual Events Interesting For Event Audience
#1. Showing real-time illustrations during the virtual event.
If you’re planning on hosting virtual events and are looking for ways to make your interactive virtual events setup even more interesting for your attendees, then integrating real-time graphic illustrations in the virtual events, also called digital live scribing, can be a great way to give your audience the experience of something different.
You can try graphically illustrating whatever point it is you’re making, through cartoon sketches, hand-drawn illustrations and many other ways to pique the interest of your attendees.
You can also try, with the permission of your speaker or host, creating a virtual event promo. Infect, you may create it with graphically illustrated cartoons or sketches of the presenters to make for a light-hearted, interactive and engaging presentation in the virtual event.
Remember to make the graphic illustrations engaging and shareable, so that your audience are able to share those across different channels/networks.
Digital Live scribing is a great, fun way to show key statistics and other otherwise boring information, to your attendees and make them have fun with it!
#2. Include fun live games and competitions.
Including real-time and fun live games and competitions in your interactive virtual events setup is always a foolproof, Sureshot way to make your attendees feel engaged and a part of the virtual event.
You can design engaging and interactive live games and competitions that will keep your attendees hooked and also provide them with valuable information in the form of competitive games and demos.
Games like spin-the-wheel, lucky draws, virtual ping-pong etc., always have the effect of engaging people for the longer run, as they keep coming back for more and checking your event’s social media pages to see if they won the competition.
You can also try keeping a short demo of your brand. Play it before the beginning of the game to make your attendees get a better understanding of your brand and intentions.
Including fun live games and competitions in your virtual events is a great way to get audience engagement and interaction.
#3. Streaming content with a high production value.
Although attendee engagement and interaction happens in the best way in live virtual events, however, to ensure that the production value of a virtual event is par for the course, some companies prefer to stream pre-recorded content that has a high production value to engage attendees.
Videos with a high quality of production are automatically more appealing to viewers. It tend to generate higher engagement from audience members.
Also, sometimes a company needs to put forward some information or announcements that can only be done in a high production value format, through a pre-recorded video.
Thus, streaming high quality pre-recorded videos are also another way event organizers make hosting virtual events more interesting.
However, if you do plan on taking this approach with your own virtual events or hybrid events, you must ensure to set aside a specific time for answering questions about the video to your attendees, and to host an interactive Q&A session with them about the pre-recorded event.
#4. Personalized Recommendations
If there’s something everybody loves, it’s personalized recommendations. It’s the very reason everybody is addicted to streaming services. Integrating an AI-based personalized recommendation engine with your virtual events platform, that gives all your attendees personalized recommendations based on their specific likes and activities, is a surefire way to generate organic audience engagement in your virtual event promos, hybrid events or virtual conferencing.
YouTube tried this experiment by integrating Adobe’s Sensei AI engine in its virtual event to give all attendees a personalized interactive virtual event set up according to their particular needs, likes and dislikes.
#5. Immersive Experiences
The key to getting attendees to engage with the hosts of the virtual event is to make them believe that virtual event is just another physical event, being held via virtual events platforms.
That means, to give them a physical, life-like event experience, complete with lobbies, virtual events walkthrough, meeting halls, auditoriums, personalized chatbots for enabling one-on-one interactions between attendees and other audience members.
Another cool way of giving your attendees an amazing virtual event experience is through utilizing virtual reality experiences. You can try having VR virtual events walkthrough, VR games, or VR enabled virtual events hosting experience for your attendees.
Try interactive engagement tools such as Photo Ops, Social Wall, Spin The Wheel, Photo Mosaic, Gif Booth, Web Games, Quizzes and much more, that guarantee interaction of the Audience/Attendee/Speaker/Exhibitor and keep them constantly engaged with the Virtual Event.
Whichever option you choose, giving event attendees an amazing virtual event experience is always going to workout in your favour!
#6. Include Entertainment Options
Just because your virtual event is taking place, well, virtually, and the attendees are attending it from the comfort of their homes or offices, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still include other entertainment options to keep them engaged and hooked.
These days, many companies and brands choose to begin their virtual events with a virtual concert performance of renowned artists. This way, virtual event organizers ensure that attendees stay tuned to and hooked on to the virtual event and have a wonderful experience in the virtual event realm.
You can also have other forms of virtual entertainment, like perhaps a virtual standup show, virtual games, etc. Also read these amazing tips for hosting a successful virtual event.
#7. Include health and wellness activities.
Due to the fear of getting infected at gyms/fitness centres, people have had to take virtual fitness classes. Most of the world’s population is always looking to get fit via online fitness classes and virtual fitness routines. Thus, this information is a useful tool for event planners looking to include more engaging activities in their virtual events. If you’re looking to fill in the time-slots between two virtual sessions, then try to embed a short fitness session. It will have people scrambling to attend. What’s more, if you are able to get a renowned fitness instructor to helm the online fitness class, then you might get even more people to sign up for the virtual event!
#8. Include virtual event promo videos.
Even though the world is quickly adapting to virtual events and hybrid events, there are many people out there who are not much aware of the workings and intricacies of virtual events.
To make such attendees acquainted with virtual events, it’s important to include a demo before the beginning of the event. Include useful information such as how to navigate the controls, how to take a virtual events walkthrough and how to start a chat with other attendees and with those hosting virtual events, so that they are able to have a wonderful, immersive virtual events experience.
#9. Include giveaways and prizes in the virtual events.
Giving away prizes and incentives to your attendees after the virtual event or virtual conferencing is over. It’s always a surefire way to ensure high levels of attendance at the virtual event, virtual conferencing, or hybrid events.
The gifts and giveaways need to be handled via virtual methods like email, virtual inbox, etc. It need to be thoughtful to make your attendees think about your brand as soon as they look at it!
#10. Make your virtual event adhere to a unifying purpose.
Another way to make virtual events engaging, is to unite behind a common purpose and make it event’s highlight.
Looking to host a splendid virtual event, virtual conference, hybrid event, or a virtual trade show or expo?
Then get in touch with Dreamcast Virtual Events. An amazing browser-based virtual events solution that integrates the latest technologies and interactive tools to help you give your attendees an immersive, incomparable virtual event experience, that stays with them long afterwards!
