It won’t be wrong if we say that virtual meet-ups have become an integral part of conducting not just business but also personal events, given that it takes care of hindrances created by travel and worldwide connectivity.
Virtual conferences help enhance the involvement of the employees, speed up the process of decision-making, and get more employee engagement.
According to statistics, 87% of the remote employees felt more associated and connected in the team and projects through virtual conferencing. While 67% felt they are more likely to contribute in a meeting. However, the cons of it need, like holding onto the attendees’ attention, need focus too.
Knowing and understanding more on what ideas and tips you can include to make your conference better, make your way ahead to the end.
What Do You Understand By A Virtual Conference?
It might look close to a virtual meeting or a webinar, but it is not just that.
A virtual conference is an activity conducted in a way that the attendees can meet and conversate with themes of common interests through communication tools.
Corporate virtual conferences can include award shows, parties, product launches, meet and greet, annual meetings, discussions on the company’s growth, inter-company conferences targeting a problem, tactics, or product.
The main motive of organizing virtual conferences is to generate leads, raise brand awareness, build and retain relationships with customers. They are a great alternative to in-person and hybrid events.
Add Social Wall in Virtual conference
Why Conduct A Virtual Conference?
The virtual conference is a perfect choice when the people are spread across the world, and meeting in-person is not a viable option.
1. Better Audience Reach
While conducting an offline event, many factors have to be kept in mind, like convenience, location, accessibility, audience participation, etc. Conducting online events significantly reduces all these concerns, as people will be able to join the conference from their homes’ comfort.
Moreover, they are easy to attend. All that the attendees need is a device and internet connectivity, which also increases their count.
2. Lower Operational Cost
While conducting a virtual conference, the operational costs are well taken care of. You don’t have to incur expenses related to the venue, audio-video production, service staff, transportation, accommodation of the important guests, F&B or logistics arrangements.
3. Lead Generation & Quick Feedback
Virtual conferences are followed by interactive sessions like a round of questions and answers where the organizers raise questions, take their feedback regarding the conference. Alternatively, they can also choose to send a feedback form on the e-mail to have future reference records.
Due to their accessibility, virtual conferences might be a feasible way to acknowledge your audience’s profile, the concerns that they deal with, which further helps the companies improve their processes.
Moreover, the individuals who sign up for the event from across the globe can be added to the company’s CRM systems, newsletter mailing lists, and other lead generation platforms in the future.
Add Social Wall in Virtual conference
Best Virtual Conference Ideas
It might look intimidating to conduct a virtual conference because the biggest challenge is holding onto the audience’s engagement.
Also, your conference need not have a hefty theme to outdo itself; it just needs to be plain-sailing, innovative, fun and must include something that the attendees take back with themselves.
A few ideas that you can put to your use are:
1. Virtual meet-ups
Virtual events can facilitate meet-ups of people from across the world. The meet-ups can happen in two ways:
Internally: When you hire internationally, it can be a challenge to foster and motivate a team that logs in from different parts of the world. Internal virtual conferences help build relationships between the employees, let them understand the functioning of the company, policies followed, on-going projects, the introduction of new employees, solving the problems that the employees bring forth, etc.
Just like social media meet-ups, virtual meet-ups are away to meet like-minded people in real-time.
Externally: Conducting conferences outside the organization generally helps the attendees with common interests come together to facilitate an exchange of ideas, discuss upliftment strategies, display products, make announcements, that matter, share knowledge with a common base, discuss tactics that help uplift an industry, etc.
They can take place in any form, be it conferences, summits, etc.
2. Digital Corporate Parties
Corporate parties held digitally are an amazing way to break the ice amongst individuals and departments. It makes the environment light and easy-going for everyone involved.
All that you need to do is to think of a theme, include some games and fun contests that can be played online, arrange for systems that facilitate it and you are all set.
3. Online Trade Shows
Hosting virtual conferences bring multiple benefits to the companies launching new products as they can grab the audience’s attention from across the globe.
Such conferences also help in building a network with many industry partners. The organizers also get an opportunity to get live feedback from the attendees of the virtual trade shows.
Tips and Best Practices For Organising Virtual Conferences
The preconceived notions around virtual events have been undergoing constant changes as the organizers are having an open mind about its conduct.
Before the virtual conference became quite like the norm, organizers utilized micro and organic interactions to create an appealing experience for attendees.
But, with virtual conferences, keeping the audience engaged is rather a challenge. So, below are some tips and practices that can help you in organizing virtual conferences.
1. Choose A Right Platform To Host Your Virtual Conference
Virtual conference platforms have emerged to be exceptionally helpful in their conduct. Bridging together many webinars is not the right way to host a virtual conference, especially because it is already difficult to maintain the audience’s attention in virtual conferences.
Some of the platforms that you can choose from would be; ON24, Cvent, Bizzabo, vFairs, etc.
2. Take Polls To Understand Your Audience Better
Polls can ignite audience engagement. Hence a lot of marketers use them for their B2B campaigns. Taking a poll before the event can help alter the content and display it as per the liking of the audience.
They make audience interaction easy. A successful poll happens only when the data derived is utilized; in that way, the audience also feels valued about their contribution.
3. Live Streaming To Fetch Attention Of The Attendees
Gone are the days when showing the same; bland videos still got the attention. Now, the audiences are active and constantly looking for something that they can take back, be it learning or memory.
By live streaming, companies are not just able to fetch the audience’s attention but also ignite a spark in them.
You can choose to stream a video of any keynote speaker or any presentation depending upon the conference’s flow.
4. Use Virtual Photo Booths
A virtual photo booth is a great way to keep your audience engaged, especially during breaks.
For example, you can create a predefined template having the conference theme that inspires your attendees to click pictures and post them on their social media, using the hashtag exclusively curated for the conference.
This process will instigate other attendees to post about the conference using the theme too, which will, in turn, improve brand awareness.
5. Use Social Walls To Attract, Engage & Create An Impact
The social wall has become the best tool for engaging the audience in a virtual conference. It showcases the social media posts shared by the attendees, speakers, organizers, and sponsors.
The benefits of doing so would be to enhance your promotional reach, create a sense of community, attract your audience, enhance your virtual events set up, customize it as per your need, and moderate the content to filter out what is not needed.
How can you build a social wall using Taggbox?
Taggbox’s Social Wall can help you conduct a smart and gripping virtual conference by enabling you to create authentic and purposeful content with utmost efficiency.
With its robust moderation panel, you can eliminate the irrelevant data and showcase only what adds to the value of your conference.
You can display a real-time ticker with the live stream, collect all the posts shared by your attendees, curate them into a feed, and showcase it on a social wall.
The platform facilitates a pool of exciting and virtual-friendly themes, eye-catching layouts, fonts, colours, stickers, banners, etc.
Some brands that have used Taggbox’s result-driven Social Wall in the past to enhance engagement:
VPC Inc., a virtual event production company, lately used Taggbox virtual event solutions to push their engagement and make it more accessible and interactive in their series of virtual events.
UAE university, similarly, organized their 40th graduation ceremony virtually and employed the Taggbox Social Wall to engage and interact with their audience.
They displayed the content curated by students, parents, and staff on their social media using the exclusive hashtag on the social wall. It helped them hold the attention successfully.
Over To You
The virtual conference is the new age technique of bringing individuals together. It is gaining more and more populace as corporates are making a switch to it big time.
The challenges following a virtual conference need to be well-taken care of, for which companies need smart tactics.
Use Taggbox to attract, engage and make an impact that can help you serve the purpose, enhance communication, and improve the brand image all at once.