3 key elements to keep your audience engaged during a virtual event
49% of marketers say that audience engagement is the biggest factor for a successful virtual event. Improving ways of engagement should be considered during virtual event planning to maximise opportunity, think outside the box and get creative. You want to grab your audience's attention and aim to keep them engaged throughout. So... what are the main elements you need to consider in order for the event to be successful?
- 1. Length
- 2. Interactive features
- 3. High-quality equipment
Length
Event professionals agree that ‘engaging attendees’ is the most crucial element of a live event. It’s much more difficult to hold your audience’s attention for a long period of time than in-person. So, how long is too long for a virtual event?
As virtual events are online, you’re able to get straight into the meat of your event. Instead of babbling on about unnecessary stuff, you want to highlight everything you want to discuss promptly. With live events you have so much to consider from arrival time, to finding allocated seating, to intervals and much more. Virtual events are recommended to last around 60 minutes, therefore if you’re planning to have them longer, you should consider breaking it up, including breaks and creating shorter bursts of content. You’re competing with everything else online, therefore you must ensure that what you’re offering is short, sharp and impactful.
Interactive features
Your delegates are attending your event for either three reasons; personal development, entertainment or business. Live stream chats, polls and QA’s are used to interact with your audience and keep them active in either one of these spheres. If your audience is spending their time watching it, why not get them involved? By doing so, you can get instant feedback from your audience, answer any of their questions, and are able to build strong relationships whilst including them in your stream. In addition to this, by having your audience interacting in your stream, it can benefit you with future stream ideas and you’ll be able to discover trends of what your audiences most interested about. Interactive features also encourage further engagement and keep your delegates invested in your event.
High-quality equipment
High quality technology is crucial for a virtual event. You want to ensure you have the best quality equipment when hosting your live stream event otherwise you risk losing delegates. No one wants to be watching a live stream with poor connection and dodgy sound, right? By having great audio- visual equipment, your voice won’t be lagging through the event, nor will the footage be bad as you’ll have HD quality. All of these factors contribute to your audience’s satisfaction and will keep them engaged.
Conclusion…
Virtual and in-person events are run very differently and both require very different things. Whilst engagement might not be high up on the list of priorities for live events, it’s essential when it comes to online and virtual events. Find out more about how we can help you create the most incredible virtual events, with great engagement at freshproductions.co.uk.
