Cathy Song Novelli is the Chief Marketing Officer at the leading global virtual, in-person, and hybrid event technology company, Hubilo.
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The pandemic’s impact on business travel after the pandemic remains to be seen entirely. From environmental concerns to a continued focus on health and safety, I’ve found that businesses and corporate road warriors are still heavily evaluating their time away; hence, integrating virtual destinations can keep these audiences engaged even when they’re not on the road.
For users ranging from convention center marketing teams to those responsible for engaging a global workforce, hybrid and virtual events can keep a brand top of mind for stakeholders who may still be homebound. Even as business travel regains its steam, connecting virtually offers a cost-effective way for people to come together more often.
Bridging Work-From-Home With The World
I also think it represents the future of events as a whole. Event and marketing teams that capitalize on creating immersive and memorable virtual and hybrid experiences could now have the edge as flights fill up with corporate travelers in the future.
There could be more audiences available to capture if brands integrate their in-person and digital worlds. The brands that kept audiences engaged even through challenges like quarantines could stand out in a rush to see colleagues and clients in person at conventions and trainings. In addition, marketers can use virtual events to build and maintain customer loyalty.
After everyone goes home, the marketing teams that adeptly integrated hybrid and virtual into their strategies should use the data they gathered as a path to follow up with leads.
Audiences generally appreciate a personal touch, and with the data gathered from virtual events, marketers can segment outreach by interest, customer segment, region, engagement preference (like SMS or email) and so on. Event marketers can activate campaigns that are more personalized and relevant; for example, after a specific event, you can follow up with attendees with localized content that is relevant to the sessions they engaged with most. Getting familiarized with the data that’s available from your events can enhance how you attract and successfully engage attendees post-event.
Build Up The Engagement
No one wants to be remembered for a boring event, whether it’s for tens of thousands of attendees or a small sales team training. Even worse is traveling to or attending an event where you can hear the crickets. Lack of audience engagement can be a roadblock to an effective hybrid or virtual event. At this stage of events’ digital transformation, marketers and event planners have many strategies available to build engagement.
One way I love to suggest blending hybrid audiences is by having attendees snap a selfie that they can then impose on a branded background and share in the event space. Create a social-media-like feed that in-person and virtual attendees can use to see their cohorts. This can engage them in a familiar way.
Gamifying the experience can also invigorate attendee engagement. For example, consider creating a hybrid scavenger hunt that encourages audiences to pay attention and interact with the content and each other.
Organizers can use scavenger hunts or treasure hunts to direct attendees toward places and event activities. For instance, consider driving people to booths with the hunt challenges to get attendees to interact with exhibitors. Or you can drive attendance to a session by asking questions about what the key takeaways were or who the surprise guest speaker was. Event organizers can be as creative as they want to move toward their primary goal of driving traffic and engagement to all event activations.
Marketers Can Parlay Virtual Into In-Person Events
A great immersive virtual experience can turn into a great immersive in-person experience. The opportunities for crossover, especially for corporate audiences, are enormous.
Marketers who successfully use virtual engagement tools with online audiences can extend those engagements to in-person audiences. Consider incorporating polls, sending out surveys and allowing people to ask speakers questions to provide both virtual and in-person attendees opportunities to interact. The key to bridging the gap between online and in-person experiences is to ensure your key moments (think: surprise guests or gifts) are executed uniquely for in-person versus virtual audiences but with an equal “wow” effect.
As global teams approach new ways of working, continuing to host team gatherings, sales kick-offs or staff trainings virtually could bridge remote employees or international workforces. Taking advantage of digital communications in between in-person events can really make the face time count.
People want to do things that are interesting. They also want to repeat things that are interesting. Marketers and event planners have a whole new era of digital opportunity ahead of them to create fun and interesting virtual and hybrid destinations.
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