Category: Virtual Conference

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.

The 7 Different Types of Virtual Events You Need to Know About

 

It’s no secret that the state of the planet has led to a huge pivot from in-person events to virtual events. While it’s understandable why so many brands are jumping on board to virtual events, this has led to a saturation in the online events space. So, it’s your job to breathe some creativity and engagement into your new events strategy.

Here at vConferenceOnline, we have been helping brands like yours host virtual events for over 10 years and want to offer you some insights on the different events you can host to engage attendees, generate leads and close deals.

Research shows that virtual events are cheaper to execute than in-person events and have the ability to reach a wider audience. In fact, since so many brands have hosted virtual events after the pandemic started, many companies report that virtual events are here to stay even when the world goes back to normal.

To inspire your next event, here are the 7 types of virtual events that we see and some tips on how you can host such an event successfully. 

Webinars

What is it?: Webinars are the most popular type of virtual event. They are composed of 1-5 speakers and can reach an audience that spans the entire globe. The goal of these events is to educate, promote thought leadership and to generate leads. The average webinar lasts 1 hour and leaves time at the end for questions.

Pro tip: Utilize polls and a Q & A period to maximize the engagement during your webinar.

Roundtable Events

What is it?: A roundtable event consists of multiple speakers weighing in on a topic in one session. There is a moderator to make sure everyone gets heard. Usually the goal for this type of event is to generate new leads and establish thought leadership with intelligent discussions. 

Pro tip: Don’t incorporate a sales pitch into your event. Consumers are smart and can spot a sales effort in seconds. Be sure you’re adding value and your event will go swimmingly. 

Conferences and Summits

What is it?: A virtual conference aka a summit lasts for 1-3 days. This type of event features a variety of speakers and more attendees than the other types of virtual events. Conferences and summits usually aim to incorporate all the functionality of an in-person event. This includes conference halls, virtual libraries, networking lounges, vendor booths, and sponsors. 

Pro tip: After your conference runs, make the sessions available online to attract new eyeballs and generate leads on an ongoing basis. 

Trade Shows

What is it?: Virtual trade shows feature vendor booths and presentations that showcase a product or service. Networking and lead gen are central themes to these types of events. Usually the vendor booths have webcam functionality to humanize the feel of a virtual trade show.

Pro tip: Monetize your trade shows by charging vendors to be part of your event. Keep in mind that you need to show value to these vendors which usually comes in the form of how many attendees are signed up for your event. This means that the monetizing component comes after you start marketing the event and signing up attendees. 

Employee Hiring and Training

What is it?: From job fairs to recruit new talent to team building in a virtual world to training a large amount of employees–virtual events are a great way to engage with your workforce. In an increasingly virtual world, brands need events like this to maximize the potential of their workforce. 

Pro tip: Productive employees result from great communication and humanized interaction. The more you can bridge the gap from a desire for in-person communication to the reality that business is done remotely, the more talent you will harness from your employees. 

Workshops 

What is it?: Virtual workshops are all about education and providing value to the people who join your event. Oftentimes, the thought leadership and teaching is extremely enticing to attendees and they’re willing to pay to attend these types of events.

Pro tip: In order for attendees to get value out of your workshops, limit signups to a small group so that you can give customized strategies to the attendees. This will make your workshop feel exclusive.

Fireside Chats

What is it?: Fireside chats have gotten really popular in the startup space and are compiled of a moderator and a speaker or speakers. The goal with these types of virtual events is to reach potential consumers in a humanized and conversational way.

Pro tip: Find a moderator that resonates with your target consumers. They need to know the questions to ask and interact at an engaging level with the speakers. 

What is your favorite type of virtual event? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!



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!

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!

How to Get High Profile Speakers to Speak at Your Virtual Conference

Virtual conferences are great for lead generation and establishing thought leadership. These events have been replacing in-person conferences due to the fact we live in a pandemic world.

Not only are in-person conferences being canceled, but virtual conferences are thriving. They have the functionality of in-person conferences like vendor booths, resources libraries, networking lounges, and more. Better yet, virtual conferences are more affordable than in-person conferences and can generate more attendees.

However, your virtual conference can’t succeed without great speakers. So, in this post, we are going to explore every angle of getting the right speakers for your next virtual event. 

Why Do I Need High Profile Speakers?

In your marketing materials for your virtual conference, you need to include the speakers. If you get a well-known speaker, it’s going to make people more likely to sign up for your event.

Virtual conferences are all about thought leadership so having a seasoned speaker will ensure a great session.

Additionally, high-profile speakers have large social media followings. So, they can help you promote your virtual conference to their followers.

Assets to Create Before Pitching Speakers

There are a few ducks you need to get in a row before you start pitching speakers. These details include: 

  • Date of the virtual conference
  • When their pre-recorded presentations are due
  • Desired length of presentations
  • The theme of your event
  • Budget (if there is one) to compensate speakers

Having these assets in place before pitching speakers will save you a lot of time as they will weed out speakers who aren’t a good fit. 

What Attendees Expect From Speakers

When someone signs up for a virtual conference they want to be educated and inspired. So, your speakers must have the knowledge and experience to deliver great presentations. In order to find such speakers, you can vet them through webinars and even other virtual conferences that they may have participated in.

Attendees also want to feel engaged with virtual conference speakers. In order to achieve this, you need to have speakers ask questions during their presentation, engage on Twitter after their session, and even be available in the virtual networking lounge. 

Locating the Perfect Speakers

Lining up awesome speakers is arguably the most important thing you’ll do when putting your virtual conference together. Here are a few ways to find speakers who are the perfect fit: 

  • Contact bloggers you follow
  • Utilize LinkedIn
  • Tap into your happy consumers and ask them to present
  • Purchase targeted email blasts to invite speakers
  • Put up a request on HARO
  • Poll your clients and ask them who they would like to see as a speaker
  • Conduct a Google search to find thought leaders in your niche

Pitching Speakers

The most important thing when you are pitching speakers for your virtual conference is to personalize your outreach. State why you think they would be a good fit and reference content or virtual events they’ve done so they know you did your homework.

Most of us get hundreds of emails a day and tend to skim them so be sure that your pitch is short, sweet, and to the point. Give potential speakers the necessary details about your virtual conference and give them the rest of the details if and when they decide to present at your virtual conference.

Match Your “Ask” with your “Give”

Presenting at a virtual conference can be pretty time-consuming. Speakers have to create slides, practice their presentations, record their presentations, and interact with attendees. So, you can’t just ask them to be a speaker, you also have to return the favor and provide value to them.

Matching your give with your ask can be done a few different ways: 

  • Monetary compensation
  • The attendee list
  • Return the favor with a guest post or webinar for their brand
  • Let them have their own vendor booth
  • Tell them how many attendees they will be in front of for the promise of new followers

Keep Your Speakers Engaged for Future Collaboration

Once your virtual conference is over, it’s important to keep your speakers engaged so that you can establish an ongoing relationship with them. Thank them for speaking at your event and send periodic emails to them to keep in touch.

It’s also a good idea to share their presentations after they stream on social media and tag them so that they get some recognition and appreciation. 

Your Speakers Can Help Promote Your Event

One of the most effective and free ways to promote your event is to enlist the help of your speakers. They can promote your virtual conference in a variety of ways including:

  • Sharing the event on their social media
  • Emailing their contacts in their newsletter list
  • They can do a sneak peek version of their presentation

Final Thoughts

Your lineup of speakers can make or break your virtual conference. Be strategic on who you choose and keep open communication with them so that they feel valued and can help you promote your event.

High-profile speakers tend to have large social followings and if you use them in your marketing materials, they have the power to increase the number of attendees by a ton. Take the time to research and identify the right speakers and this will pay off in gold.

Do you have any strategies when it comes to lining up high-profile speakers for a virtual conference? We’d love to hear what you say in the comments below!

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 ChecklistDownload

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.

Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash

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!

Should You Feature Rolling Time Zones in Your Event?

First of all, what are rolling time zones?

When you have a rolling time zones feature on your event, your sessions start at the same time across different time zones. This means that if a session begins at 10 AM in New York, it will start at 10 AM in Dubai as well. Everywhere across the world, it will begin at 10 AM in each person’s time zone.

Is this something that’s important?

To answer this question, there are two others you should ask yourself: 

  1. Are your attendees international/across several time zones?
  2. Do you have enough attendees in several time zones that would be at awkward times?

If you have a lot of attendees in the US, you can pretty safely just run your event at a time that’s fairly courteous for all US time zones. For example, starting at 8 AM in PST and 12 PM in EST. Most people can attend during these times, so you don’t have to worry about having the event roll through time zones.

However, if you have about half of your attendees in the US, a quarter in the UK/Western Europe, and the final quarter in Asia, you might want to seriously consider rolling time zones. The Eastern countries often wind up having to attend events that begin at 9 PM, 10 PM, or even into the wee hours of the morning. While those times are plenty courteous for the US and some UK attendees, you might want to consider that last quarter of your audience who doesn’t appreciate that oversight.

Don’t want to do rolling time zones, but still want the whole world to be able to see your sessions at their convenience? You can host your sessions at scheduled times, then offer them On Demand after they broadcast. You can also run your event similar to a class, and make the whole thing On Demand.

Have a scenario not covered here? Send me a message, and I can help you brainstorm: kat@vconferenceonline.com

Good luck!

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?

How to Get Sessions on Time

Coordinating successfully with speakers

The most difficult part of any online event is coordinating the content. It’s far more difficult than any marketing challenge, getting sponsors, or any other aspect of planning the event. 

Without your speakers and their presentations, you wouldn’t have an event at all – which is why they are absolutely integral to your event. However, they’re difficult to coordinate with leading up to your event. More than one client of ours has described it as ‘herding cats.’ How do you make this process easier?

  1. Make your expectations clear from the beginning.

You’ll have to contact your speakers a few months before the event to make sure they’ll have time to even participate in the event, so the moment you contact them to ask them to speak, make your expectations clear. Tell them when the event is, when your deadline for title/abstract submissions is, and when your deadline for the recorded session is as well (if you’re doing pre-recorded instead of live). 

If you’re doing a live event, tell them what days the event is, ask when on those days they’re available, and lock them in ASAP. 

     2. Have a contract – and get them to sign it.

The moment they say they’re interested, send them a contract that you’ve created specifically for the event. The easiest way to do this is to leave the name area blank and
 have them sign their initials on every page. You can do this with an online signature service or just have them print it out and scan it back to you. If they’re unable to scan it back, just get an email from them saying that they agree to it and they understand the terms.

Inside of that contract, reiterate the deadlines from above. This way, you make it extremely clear with them that your expectations are written in stone and they understand. 

     3. Keep in contact with them frequently.

Especially if you’re doing a pre-recorded session, which will likely be submitted two weeks before the event, keep in contact with your speakers. Ask them how the recording is going, how the slides are coming along, if they have any questions. You can come up with many reasons to contact them. 

You should also create a graphic that your speakers can use on their blog or personal website; this way they can say that they’re speaking at your event. Presenters love to brag about the events they’re involved in, and that’s great marketing for you as well. 

The bottom line is, though: be patient. Without your speakers, you wouldn’t have an event. Make sure they know they’re appreciated and they’ll come back for your next one, too! 

Have any questions? Send me an email at caitlin@vconferenceonline.com and I’ll be happy to help out!