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A Virtual Conference Checklist

We are so passionate about virtual events here at vConferenceOnline because they are the best lead gen strategy that we’ve ever seen. However, to reach the fullest potential, a virtual conference must be well organized and strategic in all steps to pull off this type of event.

Because we’ve helped over 1,000 brands host a virtual event, we have it down to a science. In order to support your next virtual conference, here is a checklist you can print off, hang on the wall and use it to organize your event.

Planning

Don’t get ahead of yourself and start promoting your event without having all of the details in place.

Name your virtual conference
Get a logo designed for your event
Write a tagline for your event
Choose the date(s) it will stream
Hone in on your budget
- Budget for conference platform
- Budget to promote event
- Budget to pay speakers (optional)
Determine if you want to have vendor booths
If having vendor booths, do you want to charge?
Determine goals for your virtual conference
- Target number of attendees
- Number of qualified leads
- Decide how many speakers you want
- Establish if you are doing the event for lead gen and/or monetization
Make a list of speakers that would appeal to your target consumers

Organizing

Once your details are outlined, it’s time to do some actionable steps to pull off your virtual conference.

Pitch potential speakers
Create a landing page for your event’
- Presentation timeslots
- Speaker bios and headshots
- Lead capture form
Set up the workflow and emails that go out to people who register for your event
Make a marketing plan for your conference
Build out the virtual environment
- Conference halls
- Vendor booths
- Resource library
- Networking lounge
Create resources for speakers

Promoting

A good rule of thumb is to start promoting your virtual conference 6 weeks before it goes live.

Create graphics for social media
- LinkedIn
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Instagram
Utilize both paid and organic posting on all of your social channels
Pre-write social posts and email copy for your speakers to leverage to their audience
Purchase email blasts from like-minded brands
Research digital newsletter slots
Email your brand’s network of contacts
Incentivise attendees to invite their connections
Write guest posts on high profile blogs linking to your conference landing page
Publish a press release about your event

Post-Event

After your event streams, your work isn’t done as you can still leverage your event after it takes place.

Publish recording of your event
Email out the landing page for recording of presentations
Create a lead nurturing program for everyone who registered
Analyze data/goals
Send thank you notes to speakers

If you want some actionable virtual events insights, we are hosting a virtual conference about virtual events best practices on June 29th and we’d love to see you there! Sign up for free here.

10 Virtual Event Statistics and What They Mean for Brands

Adjusting to new norms a year after the start of the pandemic has brought some drastic changes when it comes to engaging with target consumers and canceling in-person conferences.

A massive amount of companies panicked in 2020 when they had to cancel their in-person conferences. However, now that time has passed, the panic has dwindled and virtual events were here to save the day.

Here at vConferenceOnline, we make decisions based on data and some say we are kind of data nerds. With that said, we have rounded up 10 juicy virtual event statistics and are offering key takeaways based on data. Hopefully this helps you to plan a successful virtual event. Let’s dive in!

In 2020, 73% of event planners successfully pivoted their in-person events to virtual events (Event Manager Blog)

Key takeaway: 73% is a large number and it’s a relief to see that they are reporting success when it comes to virtual events. Many people don’t realize that virtual events have the same functionality as in-person events do including monetization, networking lounges, multiple conference halls, vendor booths, and more.

For large virtual conferences, most event planners need more than 6 weeks to promote their event. (Markletic)

Key takeaway: You can’t have a successful event without attendees so promoting an event should encompass a lot of effort.

90% of virtual event organizers use surveys to measure attendee satisfaction. (Markletic)

Key takeaway: Be sure to pick a virtual event platform that has interactive functionality such as surveying your attendees.

84% of event organizers report that they spend less on virtual events than in-person events. (Wild Apricot)

Key takeaway: The silver lining of living and operating business during a pandemic is that companies are realizing that virtual events are a positive change. Spending less on these events means that many companies will still do virtual events even after the pandemic passes.

76% of event planners report that email is the single most effective way to promote a virtual event. (LAI Live)

Key takeaway: Promoting a virtual event is crucial and email is key. Of course you’ll send emails out to your network, but it’s also smart to get your speakers to email their lists about the event and a lot of event planners even buy email blasts to promote their events.

80% of virtual events are free to attend. (Bizaboo)

Key takeaway: To boost the number of attendees it is smart to make your event free. Many companies who host virtual events do it to generate leads and you’ll get more leads if your event is free. There are other ways to monetize your virtual events such as charging sponsors.

80% of marketers say that virtual events reach a wider audience than in-person events. (Bishop. McCann)

Key takeaway: Since virtual events have the ability to reach more people, event planners are happy with the shift from in-person.

85% of companies who have hosted virtual events believe they are here to stay. (Any Road)

Key takeaway: After experiencing virtual events compared to in-person events, the majority of marketers will continue to offer these events long after the pandemic is gone.

The virtual events industry is expected to grow to $400 billion by 2027. (Eventus)

Key takeaway: The virtual events industry is experiencing explosive growth and this growth will continue for a long time. There also is a great opportunity to monetize your virtual events with sponsors.

65% of event planners that pivoted to virtual events during the pandemic had no experience hosting virtual events. (Event Leadership Institute)

Key takeaway: Don’t be overwhelmed or intimidated when it comes to hosting a virtual event. Here at vConferenceOnline, we have success coaches who help you with every step of pulling off a successful event. There are also a ton of free resources at your fingertips to pull off a successful event. Just be diligent!

Have you come across any virtual events data to share with us? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

The Ultimate Guide to Monetizing Your Virtual Conferences

Virtual conferences have dramatically increased in popularity in a Covid-19 world. However, we’ve been helping brands host virtual conferences for over 15 years and have helped over 1,000 brands host virtual events. Over the years we have observed what works and one of the things we see a lot of is brands monetizing their virtual events.

In this post, we will explore how to monetize virtual conferences based on tangible evidence that we have gained from learning through our customers. There are many different ways to monetize virtual events successfully and we are going to go over all of those.

Over half of our customers have monetized virtual events in some way successfully. Some do it to offset the cost of executing a virtual conference to break even and some do it to make revenue. So, let’s dive in!

Put the Pieces in Place to Make Your Conference Appealing

Monetization doesn’t happen right away. You need to organize a virtual conference that looks appealing to sponsors and attendees. Once the right pieces are in place, you can start monetizing it. Don’t know the pieces to put in place? Here is a list:

Event theme
Goals need to be defined
Create a timeline
Recruit speakers early
Create a landing page with speaker headshots and brand logos with a teaser blurb of what people can expect from your conference
Pick the date that your virtual conference will stream
A plan for vendor booths
The marketing plan for maximizing the amount of attendees you will have

Define Your Goals to Determine How to Monetize

Our customers come to us with a variety of goals they hope to achieve with virtual conferences. We’ve helped people with a variety of goals and coach them on how to create a conference that achieves these goals. Here are some common goals that we see and the type of event that accommodates these goals:

Thought leadership: In order to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry, hosting an event with expert speakers is in order. Find the best speakers and leverage them to get like-minded brands to pay for a vendor booth at your virtual conference.
Networking: Interacting with attendees who are also potential consumers is one of the most common goals that we see. Make your event free for attendees so you maximize the amount that you have and monetize your event through sponsored commercials that play in between presentations. Emphasize to your attendees that they need to check out the networking lounge so that you can interact with them.
Make a profit: Some of our customers cite their main goal of making a profit. If this is you then you should consider charging attendees, charging for vendor booths, charging speakers to present, and charging for commercial style clips in between presentations.
Lead gen: Another common goal we see a lot when it comes to virtual conferences is lead gen. In order to gain a lot of new leads you’ll want to make your event free to attend. But, you can monetize by charging presenters to speak and/or charging for vendor booths.

Once you have honed in on your goals, it’s time to explore the options you have to monetize your virtual conference.

The Rundown on Charging Attendees

We see a lot of companies charge attendees for their virtual conferences. It’s very doable but it yields a smaller amount of attendees. So if your goal is lead gen, this is not a good option for you.

A good tactic to try is to offer some presentations and features of your virtual conference for free and then have a premium ticket option for attendees to purchase where they have access to more presentations and resources. It’s a balanced approach and we highly recommend it.

About half of our clients have charged attendees and they usually charge $300 or less per ticket. If you plan to do this, make sure that your landing page and marketing materials convey a lot of value.

Commercial Ads Are Always an Option

Commercial ads are simple to incorporate and are an easy way to monetize your virtual conference.

When making your conference schedule, leave 5-10 minutes in between presentations to play commercials.

After you start getting attendees to register and you have an awesome lineup of speakers, pitch the commercial slots to like-minded brands who would want to be in front of your attendees.

Charging for Vendor Booths

Vendor booths are arguably the best way to monetize a virtual conference.

Our platform offers the functionality for attendees to do video sessions with the booth owners and allows them to be super engaged.

Consider offering your vendors a slot in your virtual conference lineup so that they can encourage attendees to visit their booth.

Speakers and How to Make it Appealing for Them to Pay to Present

Charging speakers to present is a little less common than the other monetization strategies that we’ve explored but it’s doable.

If you’re going to charge speakers, you have to make your virtual conference extremely valuable. You need to set aside the marketing budget so that you can gather thousands of attendees. You should also consider offering them a robust package like a vendor booth to compliment their presentation.

If you are going to charge speakers, it’s smart to offer them the list of attendees who view their presentations so they can email them and spark a conversation.

Offsetting the Cost of Producing a Virtual Conference

While virtual conferences are cheaper to produce than in-person conferences, they still come with some costs. You need the budget for a virtual conference platform as well as a marketing budget to promote it. We see a lot of people monetize pieces of their virtual conference to break even with the costs of running a successful virtual conference.

How Virtual Conferences Compare to Monetizing In-Person Conferences

View virtual conferences as the new norm and think about how they are replacing in-person conferences. The virtual conference environment was created to mimic in-person events.

Think about how in-person conferences are monetized. Attendees pay for tickets, brands pay for booths and there are sponsors providing swag. Virtual conferences can accommodate all these components and cost a lot less to produce. Win-win.

Final Thoughts

Whether you want to break even and offset your virtual conference costs or make a profit, there are a few ways you can monetize your event. From charging attendees to vendor booths and more, you have a lot of options.

Be sure to outline your goals before deciding to monetize your event and create a virtual conference plan accordingly.

Do you have any tips or insights when it comes to monetizing a virtual conference? We would love to hear all about it in the comments below!

Powering the Sales Funnel with Virtual Events

In a world of Covid-19, virtual events are the new norm and companies are changing gears and adapting virtual events into their strategies. However, here at vConferenceOnline, we have been helping brands with their virtual event strategies long before Covid-19 happened. Because of our experience, we love weighing in on how you can make the most out of virtual events and help you ensure that your virtual events are living up to the fullest potential.

One of the biggest benefits of virtual events is that they can power all stages of the sales funnel. From thought leadership to lead gen, virtual events are here to stay.

Traditionally, marketing was responsible for generating top of funnel leads and sales was tasked with converting those leads to sales. It was a very disjointed process. Over the past few years, we are pleased to have observed, marketing and sales are working more closely together and are making a more seamless buyer’s journey. Now that both parties are more involved in every stage, we see more brands gravitating to virtual events because these types of events appeal to every stage of the sales funnel. How cool is that!?

How Virtual Events Support Your Sales Team

Virtual events should be created from your buyer personas. Spend some time with them and work backward from your buyer personas to the type of event and topic of event that would best speak to these personas. This ensures that you’ll be boasting thought leadership to the right people and generating qualified leads.

This thought leadership, lead gen, lead nurturing and brand interaction powers all stages of the sales funnel for your team. Many of our clients report to us that virtual events are the best thing that has ever happened to their marketing and sales programs.

Promote Your Event to The Fullest Potential

In order for your event to power all stages of the sales funnel, you first need to spread awareness and promote your event. This is marketing’s job and sales will appreciate you for it. Because, afterall, your event can be awesome but you need attendees to make it a success. So a solid promotional strategy is in order!

Here are the strongest ways that we’ve seen brand’s promote their virtual events over the years and hopefully this can help your brand promote your event to its fullest potential:

Email your database of customers and leads and invite them to your event
Purchase email blasts from sources that are compiled of your target consumers
Create sponsored social posts on LinkedIn (other sponsored channels don’t convert as much as LinkedIn so this is a smart use of your budget)
Equip speakers to promote your event to their contacts by pre-writing messages for them to use on their social channels and in emails
Purchase online newsletter spaces from thought leaders your buyer personas follow
Share organically on your brand’s social channels a few times per week
Work with industry influencers to promote your event
Write guest blog posts for like minded blogs that talk about your virtual event

Top of Funnel

Virtual events pivot your brand as a thought leader in your industry. This is easily done with virtual events because your target consumers will admire the initiative and this builds brand trust.

Stay away from pushing people with sales demos and strategies of the like. This stage is all about thought leadership and brand awareness.

Mid-Funnel

This part of the funnel is all about generating high quality leads. Once the event is over, you can look at your data and qualify the “sales ready” leads for your sales team. Meet with sales and come up with a game plan on how to best convert these leads into customers. It’s all about keeping the momentum going after your virtual event.

Bottom of Funnel

Virtual events help close deals. Syphon off the leads that are closest to closing and invite them to an intimate workshop where they can interact with your brand. Or, plan ahead and incentivise current consumers to speak at your conference and talk about their experience with your brand. Equip sales with presentations like these that are available on demand and can convert a lead into a sale.

Another strategy for bottom of the funnel is to have members of your sales team interact with attendees during the event. It’s smart to have a booth and let attendees come to you so as to not come across as pushy.

Setting Up an Efficient Drip Campaign

Because a lot of what you will be working with when it comes to your collaborations with sales, it’s crucial to set up an efficient email drip campaign for all of the event attendees. This will identify who is a lead and not only that, but who is a strong lead.

A good rule of thumb is to drip your attendees 4 thought leadership resources like blog posts and eBooks and then the 5th email can be a light sales pitch to uncover the strongest leads. Once this sequence has been achieved, sales will take over from there.

Final Thoughts

Virtual events serve many purposes, but the most common use case we see are events with B2B brands to generate leads and establish thought leadership. These types of events will power all stages of the sales funnel–unlike any other marketing tactic.

Work closely with sales to carve out an efficient customer journey and reach your target consumers. Create an efficient drip campaign and let sales take over once a lead is ready.

Have you powered your sales funnel with virtual events? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!

How to Boost Virtual Event Registrations

So you want to host a virtual event. From small events like one-person webinars to all-day conferences with 20 speakers–your virtual event deserves leverage and the maximum amount of attendees.

Lining up speakers and organizing an event is a lot of work. And if you put in a lot of effort, of course, you want a lot of attendees to be part of your awesome virtual event. There are other events occurring that compete with your event, so you need to stand out.

In this post, we will explore both paid and organic strategies to boost attendees for your next virtual conference.

Allocating Enough Time

When you are working on your virtual event timeline, it’s crucial to allocate enough time for you to promote your event and for attendees to plan for it.

For a large event like an all-day virtual conference, budget 6 weeks from ideation to launch day. If it’s a smaller event like a single webinar, plan 4 weeks ahead of time.

Leverage Your Speakers

Great speakers will power your virtual conference. Secure these thought leaders before you start promoting your event so that you can leverage them.

Headshots of your speakers on your landing page and marketing materials will make your target consumers want to sign up for your event.

Additionally, your speakers are a powerful asset in getting attendees. Help them share the details of your event on social and email. When you write the copy for the influencers, it makes it super easy for them to share your event.

Convey Value

When marketing your event, you get a very small amount of time to convey a lot of information.

Create a landing page for your event and feature headshots of your top speakers, logos to brands participating and of course, the details of the event laid out cohesively.

Determine what questions and pain points your conference can serve. Flip the pain points on their heads and utilize this information for marketing verbiage.

When marketing your event, use messaging that makes your target audience feel like they need to register right away. Messages like “the price will increase tomorrow” or “there are a limited amount of spots left” will create a sense of urgency.

The Power of Email

Our brands that have hosted virtual events have had more success with email marketing more than any other strategy to promote a virtual event.

In fact, 76% of marketers report that email is the single most effective way to drive event registrations.

Tap into your own network and invite them to your event. Explore email blasts from like-minded brands. Email blasts can be a dedicated email or a space in their online newsletter.

We recommend that you use 75% of your virtual event promotion budget on email.

Your Social Media Strategy

Second to email, social media promotion is an important asset to your virtual event marketing plan.

Post organically on your social media channels about your event. Start promoting as soon as your speakers are lined up and post on each channel every other day leading up to your event. Analyze which posts are the most successful and put some budget behind them. It is also smart to track the effectiveness of the speaker-generated posts and consider putting money to boost those as the third-party social proof is what your target consumers want.

Gamify the Process

Contests are fun and you can leverage gamification to drive virtual event registrations.

Consider doing a contest for both your speakers and your attendees to see who can get the most signups. Offer the winner a $250 Amazon gift card. This will be worth the power of authentic content.

Consider the Cost

It’s tempting to charge attendees to sign up for your virtual event. However, if your goal is lead gen, you should make your event free to attend. A free event means more leads so take that into consideration.

If you are hosting an event to make revenue, be mindful of the cost to attend. Look to like-minded events and get a pulse on the industry standard in terms of what it costs to attend similar events.

If you want to offset the cost of your virtual event, consider charging vendors and sponsors.

Have you hosted a virtual event? We’d love to hear how you boosted registrations in the comments below!

Post-Event Engagement (Part 2)

(This version is for Event Exhibitors. If you’re an Event Manager, the post ‘Post-Event Engagement (Part 1)‘ will be a little more applicable!)

After an event you’ve sponsored has ended, you’ll probably be pretty relieved. Setting up a booth, selecting sponsorship benefits, and engaging with the attendees in and out of your booth can be a lot of work. It’s always fun to be involved in events, especially online, but there’s a fair amount of leg-work involved as well.

However, in that quiet period right after an event is over, you may be asking yourself, “Okay…now what?” You spoke to attendees at the event, promoted your business’ products and/or services, and you feel like your booth was pretty engaging. But all of that had to do with the during-event portion. What do you do afterwards?

The First Step

First of all, you’ll want to make sure your event manager fulfilled your sponsorship benefits. A lot of times, this involves a list of leads and their contact information, feedback from any sponsored sessions or advertising mtaerials you hosted, and possibly the results of a giveaway. More specifically, you’ll want to make sure you specifically know who interacted with the materials you provided for the event, if you didn’t set up your own lead capture. Those leads will be considered ‘hot’ leads, or people who have already shown significant interest in what you have to offer. You’ll also want to make sure you get the contact information and chat logs from anyone who visited your booth to speak with you.

Post-event, you’ll want to do a couple of different things to make sure you get the most out of your leads.

Types of Leads

First of all, make sure you contact those who chatted with you in your booth or via your ‘Email Us’ button with personalized messages discussing what they talked about with you. Those leads are going to be your best bet for future sales. They initiated contact with you – that’s a great sign.

Next, you’ll want to put together at least two email campaigns. If you don’t know, email campaigns are “a coordinated set of individual email messages that are deployed across a specific period of time with one specific purpose, such as download a white paper, sign up for a webinar, or make a purchase with a provided coupon.” (Thanks, Campaign Monitor.)

Email Campaigns

Your first email campaign will be for those hot leads we talked about earlier. These are people you already know are interested in your products or services. You’ll be able to skip the formalities of introducing who you are and what you do (though a bit of a refresher never hurt); you can get straight to why they care who you are and what they may find useful that you have to offer.

Your second email campaign will be for the cold leads. These are ones you have to ease into contact with you; you’ll have to explain who you are, how you got their contact information, and why they care about who you are. I also recommend being extremely transparent about how they can get off your mailing list. You’re required to allow them to unsubscribe, but I find it makes you a little more personable if you make that process fairly easy to execute, even though you don’t want them to.

After a few emails in your cold lead campaign, chances are a certain number of them (between 10-30%) will click on some of your links and either interact with you directly (attend a webinar, check out some whitepapers or articles, or even contact you). Those people should be put into a hot lead campaign similar to your first. They’ve interacted with you and shown that they’re interested in what you have to offer – no need to beat around the bush with them.

The rest of the people should be dropped into a less-frequently touched email campaign that offers things like special deals, asks direct questions that they may feel compelled to answer, or shows them some great content you have to offer that will help them. These emails will be focused on ways your business will assist them for free, without a sales hook. This kind of contact will help them become warmer leads, who you can eventually drop into your hot lead campaign.

Finally…

Finally, you’ll want to keep an eye out for future sponsoring or even event hosting opportunities yourself. Things like webcasts, classes, or full conferences are a great way to offer content to all of those people you now are in contact with; they’re also a great way to find even more people to keep your funnel churning.

Have any questions? Reach out to us at production@vconferenceonline.com and we’ll be happy to help out!

Good luck!

Post-Event Engagement (Part 1)

(This version is for Event Managers. Keep an eye out for Part 2 – specifically for Event Exhibitors! You can send that post to your exhibitors to make sure they get the most out of your event!)

You’ve hosted your event, you had a lot of great attendees come see it, you had great engagement, and the speakers all had a blast. It was a successful event and you’re pretty happy with how it went. Now what?

Post-Event Engagement Checklist Download

TIP: Download this checklist to make sure you follow-up on all the tips in this article!

Well, once your event is over, there is a lot that you can (and should!) do. First of all, you need to collect your leads from the event. That’s easily done on vConferenceOnline by going to the Reporting section of the VME and downloading the registration report. Do you have a marketing tool similar to Hatchbuck or SalesForce? This is the time when you upload these leads to a tool like that and make sure you can easily access and sort them.

After that, look through the reporting tools given to you. For example, on our platform, you’re able to see which speaker and session were the most popular, as well as get some feedback from the surveys you may have hosted in the event. You can sort through all the information and come up with a couple of key pieces of information: 1) what did your audience like the most and 2) what did they feel you could improve upon?

Immediately after the event, I highly recommend your event continues into an On Demand portion. This can be anywhere from 1 day to 180 days, or even longer if you want the information to be available. This allows those who registered, but were unable to attend live, to catch the sessions, view the exhibit hall, and ask questions so they can learn as much as possible from your event. It also allows continued registrations and lead capture even after the event is technically ‘over.’

TIP: extend that On Demand period for people who are registered members with your website. For example, if you have a standard and a premium membership available on your site, allow standard members two weeks to view the content and allow premium members 60 days! You can change this combo in any manner of ways, but this is a great way to offer a perk to those who support you.

If you had 1-4 highly appreciated sessions in your event, the next step is very easy. Those sessions can be turned quickly into a separate event, an encore webcast or expo down the road. This is a great way to continue engagement as well as to make sure that those who were unable to attend are able to learn from those presentations, even after the On Demand period has ended.

Aside from continued content distribution, make sure you’re engaging with your registrants fairly frequently. You don’t want them to forget who you are between now and your next event (which you should start planning soon to get ahead of the curve!), so you can contact them every once in a while with a simple email giving them information on who you are, how to support your business further, and what great deals you can offer them.

For example, if you offer the memberships mentioned above, email your leads with information on why those memberships are great and how they can get their hands on one. Tell them about the content you share or the services you provide. They were clearly interested in your event – make sure they know you have more to offer!

I recommend using a marketing tool to schedule these sorts of emails in a funnel system. You can add tags to leads that engage more and drop them into a campaign that guides them through the process to supporting your business further – purchasing a membership, services, or other products that you offer.

If you continue your engagement with those leads, it will be easy to estimate how many of them will want to attend your next event, which will make your estimates to exhibitors and sponsors that much easier.

Need more tips? Contact your project manager or contact us here.

Happy planning!

How to Get Your Message Past the Marketing Noise

“Show, don’t tell.” It’s one of the first things you learn when you take an English class. Whether it’s a short story or an essay about Nietzche, you want your audience to believe you’re an authority on whatever you’re talking about, but you can’t just insist that you are that authority.

When you’re trying to get customers to believe your product is the best one out there, traditional marketing methods fall flat. Banner ads flash on every page until they’re blocked by AdBlocker. The first three links on Google are clearly sponsored, and sometimes they’re laughably off-topic (what are they even doing there?). Even commercials are easily skipped over with TiVo, or just ignored and talked over until the show comes back on. So how do you show your ideal audience that your product is worth their time?

Educating your audience and proving to them that you know what you’re talking about is incredibly important and provides value to them, so they won’t feel scammed or like they’ve wasted their time. However, in the time of noises coming from all directions, it’s often hard to find the motivation to read a whole book or series of whitepapers from a company you’re not even sure you trust.

That’s where virtual events come in. With a short webcast, a day-long class, or even a full-blown conference, you can display your knowledge to your ideal audience while showing that your products or services are needed in their lives. This establishes you as an authority who values their time and doesn’t want to waste it by shouting about how great you are to them.

Give your ideal clients something worthwhile, and they’ll come to you the minute they have a problem that you can solve!

What do you have to offer your clients that’s worth their time?

Why Is Customization Important?

One of the more important options you have when selecting a virtual event platform revolves around customization options. You’re already putting in major effort in creating and providing your virtual event, so the customization (being able to contribute your own look and feel on several key elements) is the fit and finish to your event that can make a huge difference.

This is part of a series of posts that supplement the “5 Things to Ask…” free planning guide, available at the top of the right column of this page. Get your free copy here.

There are several areas to consider for your customization: they include items that are based in the platform, but also items that are things you control entirely for the presentations. Here’s a quick look:

Slide templates – make sure your slides have a common theme and look and feel. While this seems perhaps tedious and odd, it’s important to have your event (even if it’s a webcast), have your logo information, your branding, you “look and feel.” These things reinforce to the attendee who is providing the event, and where to turn with questions on the overall event and information provided. Creating templates in your presentation tool (like Powerpoint, for example) is typically pretty straightforward. Taking the time to create the template and distribute it to your speakers is a small step that has a big branding and consistency pay off for your event.

On-screen elements – talk with your provider about options you have for customizing the environment. Things to ask about include:

Your logo placement throughout the event environment
Your graphical backgrounds and designs (1)
Your graphics and designs on the registration pages and microsite

(1) examples of this include one event where we were doing some work with school busses. We changed the lobby to include a school bus and used the windows of the school bus as the navigational elements in the event (instead of conference room doors). Consider using your offices, or your campus or other items that relate to your business and the industry you are serving.

Exhibitor booths – if you’re having booths inside your virtual event, consider the options you have for booth designs and how much your exhibitors can easily take advantage of those options. Graphics sizing, options for using the “margins” on the page (some exhibitors like to include coupons in these spaces), custom menu and button options, custom videos and assets, along with general customization to the look and feel are the things you’re looking for here.

Emails, (Attendee Correspondence) – How much control do you have over the branding, look and feel and other elements that make up the email contact capabilities for notifications, announcements, etc. These are important because you may be able to offer sponsorship opportunities (as an example) where you can include sponsor logos in the emails about your event. In addition, you will want to make sure your branding is prominent and consistent.

There are many different components to customization. While most platforms will indicate that customization is allowed, the “how” of it all – the options available – vary widely, as do the tools and approach to implementing the customization. Ask lots of questions, find out the various things possible and make sure they align well with your company and show branding and functionality requirements.

Should you charge for your online event?

In your to-do list for your event, one of the first things is to decide: are you going to charge attendees to view your event, or are you going to find other ways to cover the cost of hosting? When this question comes up, usually there are two options:

Charge attendees to cover the costs
Charge sponsors to cover the costs

If your event is well-established (you’ve been hosting it for a while either online or in-person), it’s easy to justify charging an attendance fee. Your content is consistently worth the attendees’ time, you’ve been in the game for a while so your name is known, and if you haven’t been charging yet, the attendees are likely surprised that you’re “giving away” your content.

If you’re just starting out or if your audience balks at the idea of paying for attending an online event, you may want to approach sponsors in a different way and view them as benefiting from the event just as much as you and your attendees do, turning it into sort of a ricochet effect – your attendees benefit, so your sponsors benefit, and so you benefit.

Let’s say your event is established and you’ve decided to charge for it. How much do you charge? Your first step would be looking at other events in your sphere.

What similar events are there?
Are they online or in-person?
If they’re also online, how much are they charging for their content?
- How many presentations do they have lined up?
- Are the speakers going to several different events and repeating those presentations at each (are the presentations not unique to the event)?
- How well-known are their speakers?
- How well-known is the event?
- Are they competing with another event happening at the same time?
If the event is in-person, consider the other fees that the attendee or their company will have to cover (hotel, food, travel, car, time out of the office).

If you find one very much like yours (online, similar renown, etc), that’s your best reference point. If they are a competitor, this is your chance to slightly lower your price (while making sure that your costs are covered and you will profit from the event).

If you can combine the profit from the sponsors AND the profit from the attendees, I would recommend that you lower the price for the attendees. If the price is lower, more attendees will be able to attend and you’ll actually profit more!

Have other questions about hosting an online virtual event? Not sure about the difference between virtual tradeshows, virtual conferences, webcasts, or classes? Shoot me an email at caitlin@vconferenceonline.com and I’ll be happy to answer your question – it may even end up on this blog!