Events took to online due to the pandemic, this changed up the marketing mix for many companies as they had to move a lot of their events and marketing online to a new online audience. Virtual events gave people the opportunity to attend more events and have more normality within their life during a time where people didn't know what was going on. This helped audiences get used to the online world and understand how virtual events worked, it has now become something that many people prefer as they are able to attend the events from the comfort of their own home or office space.
Now live events have started opening back up. You want to be making sure people are still feeling comfortable with what you are putting on. People are able to go to bigger networking events and are allowed to meet new people they weren't able to during the pandemic. Making sure you are still keeping a virtual aspect will mean you are meeting the needs of a much wider audience as you are giving more people the opportunity of attending the event. Here are a few reasons why hybrid events will still be playing a role in 2022.
Virtual events have a worldwide reach, it allows your event to have maximum attendees with a single click. As live events are restricted to a number of people due to this being based on rules because of covid or just because the venue might be restricted to the amount of people they are allowed to host. By making sure you offer a virtual side to your event will help allow you to invite more people and reach a much broader audience compared to only having the live event running. It will benefit your brand more doing this as you are able to show you want as many of your clients there as possible even if they aren't attending in person.
If your clients are based in various locations online events allow everyone to be in attendance, by sending everyone you have worked with a link to the virtual event will show you have put everyone in mind which can make you more popular with your customers. You want to give everyone the opportunity to attend and show off what type of events you put together for your customers, this can encourage people to come to more of your events and even come to the live events. Holding hybrid events will really help connect you with more of your clients as you are able to show everyone you work with that you can meet their needs and put on events they are able to attend.
Promoting online events can be really easy as online events never sell out, promoting live events can sell out due to capacity and once they sell out you have to stop prompting it. With hybrid events you will not have this issue as you are able to make sure as many people as people can get the link to the virtual side of the event. Therefore, even if the live event sells out you can make sure your clients are aware that there is still space on the virtual event and get them to attend that side of it.
Events are a great source for grabbing new content, you are able to turn your event into blog posts, short clips for your social media platforms and on your website landing page. By filming the day allows you to grab as much different content as possible that will work for all different platforms. Building a strong amount of content will allow you to post about the event after and show off to your followers what you can put on for them. You can turn moments into blog posts, writing about how you set up the event or the event's journey and why you decided to set up an event for your audience. When creating content you want to make sure it’s topics that your audience are interested in, if it interests them they will more likely interact with it and even attend the events in the future.
Capturing new content can help you build more hype around future events, you will be able to take this content and promote other exciting events you have coming up. It helps your company show off the brand and give everyone that follows you or researches you an insight into what you do and what you have out on in the past for customers and audiences. The content you capture can be posted everywhere you just need to make sure you know the correct layout for different social media social videos. Content that you capture live on the day as well as screen recordings from moments caught online, this will help show to your audience that you are catering to an online audience as you are giving the online audience the same as what the live audience are viewing.
The more content you collect the more you'll have to give out to your audience, it's important to build a bank of good photos and videos as you want to be able to build excitement around your next events. Using old events to promote new events will help sell it to your audience as they are able to experience what you have done before.
80% of people participate in virtual events for education purposes (source), people are now becoming more interested in building new relationships within business and strengthening business connections as it's good for their companies. Knowing people in different industries can really benefit business owners as they might need to use these industries at some point. By setting up events that can be hybrid is offering businesses owners who might be too busy to attend the live event to join the virtual event and still be able to network. Networking can help businesses build more business opportunities and help increase their leads which is important for increasing sales.
Professional networking is a great reason for joining online events, it can help companies stay ahead in the industry and keep up to date with the trends that are going on within their industry. By joining events will help get to know more people and will help businesses find out what is going on within work. Creating these networking events as a hybrid will give everyone across the country that works in the industry the opportunity to be a part of what is being put together and help grow their own brands. Business owners who are attending the event and the event host can all interact with each other and everyone can easily connect with one another, if that is just online or in person.
When holding events you want to be able to know the number of attendees you get, if you are deciding to make your event hybrid you want to know the amount of people coming from online as well as coming into the live event. This is easy to do as you can see how many people are joining the virtual event by having a count, and you will know how many people are at the live event through the amount of tickets you have sold.
As well as numbers you want to be getting feedback from your event, did people enjoy what you put in, did they feel included in the event. You want to be able to get answers from your audience and feedback so you know where you can improve for next time as you don't want to be making the same mistakes you have made before. It will also help you put on a better event next time you hold one.
When holding live events you can get people to take surveys during the event or when they leave, this is always important as you want to be getting the right feedback from people while they are living in the moment or just as they have left. This means the event is still fresh in their mind and they should remember everything that has happened. You want to be receiving the right feedback at the right time. These forms can either be done in digital format, through email or in paper form which you can then collect once they have been filled out. By asking attendees for their honest opinion will make them feel more valued as you are asking for their advice for next time and it will make your audience appreciate you more as you're asking their honest opinion.
With your online audience you can get specific feedback in real time, audience members can leave comments during the virtual event that people will be able to see and take note of. You can also have specific timings for attendees to ask questions and give feedback on what's going on, this will help you collect information for you to then build an understanding of what you need to be doing next time. Feedback from your audience can help develop strategies and improve your events next time, it can help your business build on what you put together and make it even better next time.
As a business you can create surveys, quizzes and polls to measure how the event and if people enjoyed it. This will make it easier for you to understand the feedback and make improvements.
When holding your next event you want to be considering making the event hybrid, you want to be showing your clients that you can include everyone on the day and everyone can be a part of the event you put on. Being able to cater to a much wider audience will help you get a wider range of feedback as well as more content for other platforms which can help you in the future when putting together future events.
As a company you want to be making sure you're always putting your audience first and you want to be able to make everything easier for them. Hybrid events are perfect for this as it opens opportunities up for everyone and business owners are able to meet other businesses owners creating bigger opportunities for everyone.
If you're considering creating hybrid events in 2022, get in touch with one of our team today to find out how we can help.
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