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As covid-19 hit the world and spiraled our everyday lives into an unexpected global turbulence, various industries were disrupted and faced an inevitable, yet speedy, need to adjust. Finding new ways to engage with future customers and connect with employees became challenging, independent of the size of the business. Specifically, the event industry, known for traditionally being tied to physical space and human contact, had to find new ways to create engaging and impactful content – now in digital and hybrid formats.
As anyone who’s ever run a Zoom presentation or an online stream will confirm, capturing attention through screens is tough. To captivate hundreds of delegates for an entire day, gain smashing attendance rates, generate unprecedented interaction and wildly positive feedback can be an obstacle. Nevertheless, not impossible… with the help of professional virtual events.
“Many marketers understand the advantages of hosting physical events. Especially when it comes to business-to-business marketing, developing and deepening relationships with customers and prospects is essential. However, companies tend to leave the advantages of virtual happenings unexplored, when in fact there are often more benefits to hosting virtual events,” Roosa Kontuniemi, Head of Event Operations at Epicenter Helsinki underlines.
The untapped potential hasn’t been left unnoticed by delighted clients including including CMI (Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation), Nordea, Capgemini, VTT, Kiuas Ry, Renoa Group, Ekonomiska Samfundet and Alexandria Pankkiiriliike.
”Being able to provide value to our customers beyond the actual event date is what makes virtual event production so rewarding. We continuously receive positive feedback on the level of interactivity and entertainment from our customers. In fact, we do our best to spice up our events with fun twists and turns, both with performances, interactive chat boxes, Q&As and visual cues, to keep the audience engaged – supported by a top-notch professional stream, audio, and venues, of course,” she continues.
As we have learned throughout covid, the benefits of hosting virtual events are manifold. To make the entirety easier to grasp, we listed top 5 reasons for hosting virtual events now and in the future:
1. Scalability
One of the main benefits of hosting virtual events is the ability to scale beyond geographical borders and social restrictions. By choosing the right virtual platform for your online event, reaching thousands of delegates at a time can be done with minimal effort without spending resources on expensive event venues equipped to host delegates merely physically.
2. Low barriers to entry
Unlike with physical events, joining virtual events is easy and can be done from anywhere in the world. Want to tune into a company kickoff from your home sofa, summer cottage, or from hundreds of miles away? No problem. Virtual events are independent of high-cost travel expenses or complex adjustments in personal calendars – joining is always easy and worry free.
3. Interactivity and gamification
Like said, creating engaging content that will keep your guests’ eyes glued on the screen requires thorough planning and a clear strategy. The times of one-sided communications in digital events is long gone. Live Q&A’s and chat box options are great ways to bring your audience closer to the event, even without physical contact.
4. Improved data & attendee feedback
On top of the rich data that can be collected from virtual event attendee lists, digital events are great for providing a variety of different metrics to plan future events. Tracking the actual number of participants for each session, level of attendance at certain times and identifying speakers with the highest engagement rate can be discovered by using this data.
5. On-demand content
One of the great sides of hosting events virtually is the ability to capture content for after marketing and analysis purposes. Even if your event guests are unable to attend at the time of the actual happening, on demand content able the viewers to revisit the content at any time giving them a flavor of why they should attend your next digital gathering.
Are you interested in hearing more about how you can grow your business and deepen relationships with your delegates or employees with the help of virtual events? Shoot us a message at events@epicenterhelsinki.comand let’s talk!
