The inception of virtual events did not fetch the desired attention that the event marketers expected. However, tables turned ever since the pandemic hit us.
Ever since the concept of events came into existence, brands and event visitors preferred hosting and attending regular events.
The attraction of regular events is understandable as it allows the attendees to roam around the venue, speak to the brands on a personal level, and overall, have a fun and memorable time.
But what if we tell you that virtual events can have a similar impact and get you desired results?
Since hosting a regular event in an ongoing situation is not recommended, in this blog, we are going to tell you about a few strategies and practices using which you can host a virtual event and take the engagement of your attendees to another level.
Let’s get started!
Create A Hashtag For The Event
Hashtags are a great way to promote your upcoming event and boost your audience’s engagement. Hashtags also work effectively to make your brand stand out from others. It segregates your content from the content produced by other brands that further increases your brand’s visibility.
You can create a specific event hashtag for your event and your social media followers can create content using the hashtag.
Hashtag campaigns have come a long way and have become a major strategy for brands, businesses, and event marketers to promote their events.
Include A Social Wall
Including a social media wall in virtual events is a sure-shot way to win over your audience and to increase their engagement levels and participation in the event.
A social wall is a collection of live or aggregated feeds that are picked up from various social media platforms and presented together in the form of a social wall.
You can aggregate the content of your attendees and display it on a social media wall. You have to urge them enough to create content and post it on their social media handles.
Using a responsive social media aggregation tool, you can seamlessly collect the content and display it.
You can also display the content created by your users during the hashtag contest. This will be a total surprise for your users and would instill excitement within them. This will also push the other present attendees to participate in the activity as they too would love to get featured.
Send Goodies To The Attendees
Another way to pump up the audience before the event is by sending a swag bag and a few goodies to the attendees at their address.
You can design the bag by setting a particular budget. A few options to include would be key chains, backpacks, caps, a personalized t-shirt, a diary, some stationary, etc. If your budget permits, you can also go higher and include assorted chocolates and a bottle of wine to go with it.
Run A Contest
Quite similar to regular events, you can run a fun contest during the middle of the virtual event. The contest can be trivia, scavenger hunts, a quiz contest, or a creative contest like mask or kite-making, they will surely work extremely well to garner the attention of your audience and to improve their event engagement levels.
To increase participation, you can keep exciting prizes like food coupons, clothing vouchers, or an enticing hamper to give your audience an extra push to keep the participation to the maximum.
Create Fun Filters
Your audience would forever look forward to something unique, fun, and creative during the event. You can instill interest in them by encouraging them to click selfies during the event. You can keep a personalized fun filter for your audience.
The filter can have a recognition of your event like the brand’s logo, colour scheme, tagline, etc. When your audience clicks selfies using specific filters, it would further intrigue the other present audience members to participate and click pictures, leading to increased engagement levels.
Bonus –
Before concluding the blog, we would like to give an important bonus tip.
Always remember to send a beautifully designed thank-you email to your audience after the event is over. This is a great way to leave a lasting impression on your audience.
They would surely be touched by this gesture and would look forward to attending more events hosted by you.
Key Takeaways
We have reached the end of the blog and are quite positive that you must now be aware of the main strategies to keep in mind while hosting your virtual event.
The engagement level of your audience throughout the event is of prime importance and defines its success.
If you are on the way to hosting your next virtual event, then incorporating these practices would boost up the engagement of your audience. Try them out to believe it and you will surely be amazed!
