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Virtual events are becoming largely popular and fundamentally essential for every organization’s communication strategy. Virtual events provide a lot of flexibility making them a great business tool and an attractive way to save costs and enhance productivity.

Attracting the right target audience, successfully engaging and retaining their attention is the objective of any virtual event, and irrespective of the kind of industry, when it comes to putting together a virtual event, the fundamentals remain the same. To put together a successful virtual event, extensive planning is required. While customizing a virtual event isn’t easy, it is certainly easier than the traditional alternative. Virtual events also allow a potentially greater breadth of customization options. The only limitation to virtual events is your own imagination.
Here are a few tips to host a successful virtual event:

• Understand your target audience

An event can be customized, when there is information about the attendees of a certain event, and a large portion of the organizers find it helpful to have this information in advance. This also ensures that the event is as relevant as possible for the attendees. This is one of the most important tips as it allows the content to be closely matched to the needs of the audience.

• Develop compelling content

To deliver value to the target audience, it is necessary to collect compelling content. To formulate your agenda appropriately, it is important to find out riveting topics that the audience will find interesting. It is therefore necessary to have a speaker that can relate to the audience’s enquires and experiences.

• Plan and promote the event beforehand

Email and viral marketing, company newsletters, banner advertisements, search engine optimization, press releases and editorial submissions are often effective in generating events and signups to an event. Ideally an event needs to be promoted diligently three weeks prior to the actual event. Using the social media networking also helps in communicating with the target audience easily and effectively.

• Rehearse

Having a rehearsal always proves to be beneficial as it helps in detecting any snags that may be present. This should be held one week in advance as it allows sufficient time to make adjustments if any are needed. It is advisable to same room, with actual equipment and test attendee dial-in. It is also important to get the rehearsal environment as close as possible to the live-event environment and have a contingency in place.

• Supervise the online activity

Appointing a host ensures that the conversation is kept interactive, and the host needs to be alert and monitor the online activity during the actual session. To keep the audiences interested and interactive it is important to have a host to acknowledge and answer any question that may arise.

• Solicit Feedback

Soliciting feedback by conducting polls and surveys is an important mechanism in justifying the next virtual event that will be held. The result of polls and surveys provide valuable feedback and is also a good exercise to provide additional information for follow-up sales calls, and promotions of future events.

• Make the event available

Recording the event and making it available is very useful for those who could not it make it to the session. Organizers should upload a recording of the event and make it available online so that it is easily accessible later.

• Follow –up

Following up with the attendees of the event within a week is imperative. Send thank you emails and any white papers or useful reading items to keep the interest of the attendees.

Virtual events are an effective and inexpensive method for either having a meeting with an employee to increase sales productivity or imparting information to a prospective customer. By adopting these tips an organization can improve the effectiveness of virtual events and provide maximum return for minimum effort.