Switching your in-person event to a virtual one is this season’s must-have marketing move. Everyone’s doing it. So how do you make your webinar a showstopper? Here are our top tips to ensure success.
- Invest in getting people there. Send multiple, targeted email invitations and drive them to an engaging registration page with clear takeaways, ideal attendee personas, well-crafted session descriptions, and presenter photos.
- Practice makes better. A virtual event can still run into the same logistical kinks as an in-person experience. Be sure to gather all your presenters together for a dry run beforehand, and practice hand-offs between speakers.
- Agree on a presenter dress code. Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean we can’t see you! When you have multiple presenters, it’s nice to standardize the mood so someone doesn’t show up in a robe broadcasting from their closet, then hand it off to a colleague in a tie.
- Anticipate more attendees. It’s far cheaper to send 30 people to an online event than on a plane across the country, so make sure you track registration counts, confirm your online meeting platform can handle high traffic, and give your IT department a heads up—nothing says failure like a mid-session app crash.
- Keep sessions short. People get distracted more quickly when they have the whole internet at their fingertips, so limit sessions to 30 minutes.
- Plan for too short. Talks tend to tick along more quickly when the speakers don’t have the energy of an in-person audience. Presenters won’t know if their joke leads to chuckles, so there won’t be pauses for laughter. In case of wrapping early, keep your attendees engaged with a fun break experience and a note about when the next session will start.
- Tell breathtaking stories. Talk tracks and slides will carry a heavier load than usual, so don’t skimp. Here are our tips for what’s hot in slides.
- Share the screen. It’s most engaging to share a visual mix of the speaker, demos, and their slides—that’ll require a producer on the backend to do it well.
- Be ready for questions. Attendees will still want to ask questions and make themselves known to the presenter. Use a moderator to gather and share questions or schedule a Q&A where attendees can queue up to ask in their own voice.
- Give your content legs. Plan to share resources like event recordings, decks, whitepapers and other related content to capitalize on the momentum.
- Don’t drop the marketing ball. Capture and segment all engagement, then plan your next touchpoint, whether it’s a follow-up email, a private demo, exclusive access to an eBook, or something else.
We’d love to help make your just-turned-virtual event a worthy marketing investment. From start to finish—promotion, registration pages, speaker training, talk tracks, slides, follow-up, and project management—we’ve got your back. Drop us a line.