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16 Benefits of Virtual Events: Make the Most of Your Time & Resources
Virtual events are about using technology to make the best connection between your business and your audience.
The virtual event industry is on a trajectory for tremendous growth. What’s already a $110.21 billion market is expected to grow to $617.33 billion by 2030. There’s a reason businesses are making the shift to take advantage of the benefits of virtual events. But why do they need to embrace this technology?
We’ve created the following list to articulate just some of the focal points you should know about the benefits of virtual events.
What Is a Virtual Event?
A virtual event is a live, streaming event that typically lasts from a half day to several days. Examples of virtual events include:
- Town halls
- Galas
- Summits
- Conferences
- Conventions
- Company training
- Seminars
They offer a wide range of ways to connect any number of speakers to audiences, weaving in polls, chat, and other live interactions. At a minimum, virtual events should be orchestrated and coordinated by a professional team for:
- Skillful planning
- Event organization
- Event production
- Audiovisual equipment and setup
- Transition effects
- Professional recordings
Why Are Virtual Events Important?
Industry leaders have been taking advantage of the benefits of virtual events for well over a decade. But from 2020 forward, new constants for society include travel limitations, remote work, health and safety concerns, and the myriad associated challenges stemming from our post-pandemic world.
Add to this economic concerns and rising prices, and it’s easy to understand why businesses are leaning heavily on affordable, technology-based solutions to help cut costs.
Meanwhile, large in-person events are a challenge to organize. Not only are people cautious with travel plans, but the greater public shift towards environmental principles equates to a drop in live-event popularity.
The benefits of virtual events far outweigh their in-person counterparts. The positives are capturing the attention of businesses ready to embrace the future.
The following are 16 reasons your business should shift to virtual events.
Important Benefits of Virtual Events #1-4
Benefit #1: Save on Costs
You can produce a stunning virtual event with money spent in all the right places and still save thousands. There’s no live venue to book, nor any of the extra promotional materials and equipment, travel costs and hotel rooms, and staffing and meals. You’ll spend less while reaching more people—with more value.
Benefit #2: Save on Time
Travel, booking accommodations, rearranging schedules, and planning the physical coordination of in-person events are a drain on time. Furthermore, the complexity of a physical event requires more coordinators, taking up work hours that can be otherwise used elsewhere.
Planning arrival times for equipment and supplies, training those managing the event, and juggling the inevitable changes in plans make physical events a hurried, often frantic process. Once an event is finished, it’s time to break everything down before traveling back home.
Benefit #3: Reach More People—Everywhere
Virtual events aren’t bound to geographic barriers, so companies that are used to setting up multiple regional events are discovering their international appeal in ways they didn’t know existed. Accessibility increases dramatically.
One example is
Salesforce, which had planned its World Tour Sydney in-person event around the time COVID-19 hit. They had a whopping 15,000 registered to attend that live event, which sounds like a remarkable turnout. When they had to pivot to virtual, that number grew to 80,000 people joining the virtual event.
Benefit #4: People Increasingly Prefer Virtual Events
Businesses are realizing their target audiences simply don’t see virtual options as a compromise—it’s become their preference. Many view virtual events as part of the world’s transition to online conferences and remote learning. In truth, physical, localized events are often outdated and impractical gatherings that are difficult for some companies to let go of; for others, the appeal of virtual events has been a well-kept secret for over 15 years.
The bottom line is this: Businesses will gravitate toward their audiences, and the more they understand the benefits of virtual events, the better they’ll cater to their needs.
Important Benefits of Virtual Events #5-8
Benefit #5: Enjoy Nearly Unlimited Capacity
Events bound to physical locations are also bound to pre-arranged venue limitations, but your virtual event can accommodate rapid growth and quick scaling.
On-location events may be limited in the following ways:
- Local ordinances can place an inflexible limit on maximum room capacity.
- Reserving event space far in advance without certainty of attendance could mean overspending for the venue’s size when attendance is low.
- Cancellations can impact the cost of other items like catering decisions and the numerous arrangements that affect a physical event.
Your virtual event’s ability to scale is virtually endless. With the right partner, you can account for equipment, bandwidth, and other adjustments at a minimal cost.
Benefit #6: Easily Gather More Data
In addition to the ability to reach people around the world, gathering valuable data while engaging your attendees is one of the more important benefits of virtual event technology.
People are more comfortable sharing valuable data in virtual events because of a combination of the desire to actively engage with your event and moderators and the ability to enjoy anonymity when providing answers.
A well-planned virtual event comes with the ability to boost your attendees’ engagement with interactive elements like the following:
- Live polls
- Q&A
- Live chat
- Downloadable resources
- Raffles
- Music and videos
- Breakout rooms
Measuring your results is nearly instant, and a great organizer will be able to integrate data directly into your CRM, giving you direct access to substantial marketing and demographic data that would have cost you thousands to gather any other way.
Benefit #7: Gather More Meaningful Data
Not only can you gather more data—you can capture more meaningful data. We’re talking email sign-ups, user feedback, multiple-choice questions, and insightful information about company demographics. The data you can collect from audience interaction is often infinitely more valuable than the cost of hosting an event.
When you run analytics on participant responses, you could have hundreds of results on your customers’ top concerns and interests, feeding your marketing strategy for future email campaigns and blog topics—not to mention new strategies for targeted ads based on their input.
Benefit #8: Host a More Inclusive Event
Due to their very nature, a live-stream event planner can ensure your event is accessible on every mobile device and laptop, and anywhere that can access the internet.
Because virtual events cater to crowds anywhere around the world, not only does technology widen your inclusivity, but language no longer has to be a barrier. Virtual events can feature both written and spoken communications in multiple languages.
With Rally Point Webinars, we go so far as to allow users to select their language at registration, at which time their web pages, email correspondence, and even event tech support will all follow in their native language.
Important Benefits of Virtual Events #9-12
Benefit #9: Customize Your Branding
Often, when companies attempt to save on costs with a simplified online streaming platform, they miss the massive opportunities to customize and brand their event. One of the crucial benefits of virtual events is connecting your brand to a great interactive experience.
A quality planner will help customize your registration process with actionable drop-down options and unique data points, incorporating your logos, color scheme, and other details inside virtual rooms. This includes transition effects and anything that makes your company stand out.
Benefit #10: Familiarize Yourself with the Webinar Platform Beforehand
For events that include sponsors or vendor marketing opportunities, virtual events offer a highly-targeted audience for promoting their brands. Vendors are making meaningful connections with more attendees than they could from a localized event.
Benefit #11: Enjoy Improved Interaction with Your Attendees
A virtual event is an equal playing field for attendees, where everyone has the same front-row seat to your event. Whether it is the interactive polls, Q & A, or live chat, every audience member has the same opportunity to feel included. This can be fielded to speakers or professionally monitored. What’s better—it all takes place instantaneously.
Virtual events allow endless ways to create interactive experiences for clients, customers, or trainees. Engaging audiences helps build deep, direct, lasting connections to your brand that, in many ways, can’t be accomplished to the same degree as a physical event.
Benefit #12: Organize Your Event with Greater Ease
Consider the staff, caterers, decorators, security, and equipment costs of a physical event. Sure, there are technological challenges to a perfectly planned virtual event, but with the right planning partner, you’ll experience a much more streamlined and logical organizational process.
From registration to RSVPs, a well-organized virtual event can ease the process of bringing all your planning, preparation, and scheduling together in a streamlined, user-friendly manner.
Important Benefits of Virtual Events #13-16
Benefit #13: Increase Sales Leads
With larger attendance, virtual events generate more sales leads with more actionable data points. This allows you to learn about pain points in attendees’ businesses from multiple-answer responses, surveys, and anything you wish you were already collecting.
Benefit #14: Generate Great Evergreen Content
Your live virtual events can now create a mountain of new highly-targeted content for your YouTube channel, broken down into social media-sized bites to share on all of your social channels. This evergreen content can spread in multiple directions, from newsletters to emails and even online courses.
Equally significant: This content doubles as excellent promotional and marketing material that increases your return on value from your initial investment.
Benefit #15: Host a More Sustainable Event
People care more about the environmental impact of events today than at any other time. This generation views pollutants and expending finite natural resources from air travel as unsustainable byproducts of large organized events. Add to these accouterments, flyers, and disposable promotional items—environmental consciousness is a major selling point of virtual events.
Benefit #16: Receive End-to-End Support
To host a successful event, you want to partner with a professional virtual event team that will provide you with everything needed for an impeccable event.
Below are just some of the details a virtual event planner, like Rally Point Webinars, can help plan for you:
- Creating a timeline
- Helping with your scripts
- Rehearsing with your speakers
- Designing customized interfaces and transition effects
- Planning your production
Coordinating and setting up live-streaming equipment
Challenges of Hosting a Virtual Event
Hosting your virtual event is certainly worth all of the advantages over localized events—but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to pull off. They say with live events: If something can go wrong, it probably will.
Virtual events are technological challenges. You’ll need to prepare your presenters properly, have excellent microphones, and have the right cameras and lighting for streaming. Even then, things can go wrong live—in front of everyone.
Things that often happen during a virtual event include:
- Presenters and moderators don’t know how to use the software.
- People fail to plan a backup if their servers or internet streaming fail.
- People don’t practice before their event goes live.
- People underestimate how hard it is to transition from one aspect of an event to the next.
- People don’t know the best ways to acknowledge their audience.
- People forget to close out questionnaires and polls, losing valuable data.
- People don’t ask for the most relevant data or don’t know the best ways to incorporate interactive elements.
- Every live event involves last-minute changes, but people don’t know how to factor these in.
The trick to capturing all of the benefits of virtual events is working with experts who know the hundreds of snags that happen, so they’re prepared and ready to handle them. Your attendees will see a perfect event—they’ll never know the technical glitches managed by the pros behind the scenes.
Get in touch with Rally Point Webinars today, so we can help you present a flawless virtual event.
Plan Your Next Virtual Event with Rally Point Webinars
You can see how virtual events open your business to a world of new audience engagement. Now more than ever, it’s vital you make the right impression.
Your live virtual event is your opportunity to “wow” your audience with engaging, professionally produced content. These are connections you can nurture for years, with data you can use to deepen your knowledge of your target audience.
Don’t go it alone.
Partner with Rally Point Webinars to host a seamless virtual event they’ll remember—for all of the right reasons. It all begins with getting in touch with us today!
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Lehi, UT 84043
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