By | Imala Green
According to a report, 73.6% of event planners are now more familiar with virtual tech as a result of the pandemic. Perhaps, it is also a necessary transition within the industry.
Since March 2020, more and more event planners are switching to virtual hosting.
What Is Virtual Hosting?
If you’ve been following up with the new normals since the pandemic has struck, then you must be familiar with WFH arrangements too. Several brands, institutions, and organizations prompted their workforce and peers to connect digitally.
Platforms like Zoom and Skype have been a great leap during these times.
And, notably, conferences, meetings, and all other sorts of events also concluded through these platforms.
This brings us to the question at hand- virtual hosting is the act of organizing an online event where none of the participants have to be physically present. Instead, all the participants can attend the event virtually over the internet.
Precautions To Be Taken Otherwise
Keeping in mind the traditional way of organizing an event, it is quite not possible to maintain all the precautionary measures in place. For starters, maintaining social distancing is one of the biggest challenges.
Following the social distancing, the immediate need for sanitization and sterilization poses another challenge for the event organizers.
And on top of all this, the most difficult part is ensuring that every attendee is tested for Covid symptoms.
On the other hand, when organizing a webinar none of these precautions come to play. The only precaution that event organizers need to ensure is a secure connection for the attendees.
Placing proper security checks in place
Most of the virtual meeting platforms make sure that only the desired users attend the event. For this, usually, the platforms make use of dedicated links and encryptions.
The organizers can share the link with the invitees, along with a passcode. Clicking on the link should open a meet-up page where the user can submit their username and enter the passcode. And voila, it’s done.
Planning Better Webinars
So, when nothing is going the conventional way, event planning must also take the contemporary approach. To put this into perspective, event planning tips and tricks need a technical upgrade. Keep reading to learn how.
Confirming date and time
Like conventional event planning, your webinar must also be scheduled on a particular date and time. No one likes their audience to be missing out on these details. After all, missing out on dates and time can cost losing potential leads for a business.
Essentially, a planning tool can help with this. All that needs to be done is feeding in the time, date, and other specifications and setting a reminder for the same.
Recruiting speakers and support teams
The next thing that event planners need to check on is who’ll be narrating through the event. Webinars are usually meant for creating awareness and sharing information.
Typically, there’ll be one speaker at every webinar who handles these tasks. However, even for a webinar, there are support teams needed. To better understand this, the support team would be handling the technical part of hosting a webinar.
Formatting your webinar
Another crucial part of organizing a webinar is deciding the format for it. There are plenty of formats for the same, for example, a speaker-centric webinar, a discussion panel, or an interview. All these formats have their own pros and cons. However, the choice of the format usually depends on the agenda.
For instance, if the webinar is about discussing Key Pain Points for a business, and finding solutions to them, then a moderated discussion panel format is the most suitable one.
Creating visuals for the audience
Apart from deciding the format and the agenda, the organizers also need visuals. Since the event is to be hosted virtually, engaging the audience needs some extra effort. And this is where visuals come in.
That being said, once again there are different formats for creating the visuals. An organizer may choose interactive videos or simply digital pictures and infographics.
Practice, practice, and practice
One of the key factors affecting the success of any online event, for that matter, is a glitch-free conclusion to it. Believe it, nobody’s perfect, but what eliminates the chances for faults and flaws in practice.
Perhaps, the event planners can use some time to practice their event management skills. Following the format with the team and rectifying the flaws that may occur during the live hosting might help in this regard.
Marketing your webinar event
Before the actual event goes live online, and after all the planning, the most crucial inclusion for event planners is implementing the right marketing strategy. To put this into perspective, for a web-seminar, reaching and registering the right audience is amongst the primary concerns.
What event planners can do about it is sharing the information online through blogs and social media. And the best part about using these strategies to market the event is the results can be measured in real-time. So, the event planners can actually know who’s viewing their content, who’s engaging with it, and who’s registering to attend it.
Concluding The Event
As already mentioned, for any event to be considered as successful, it must conclude the right way. What event planners may need to decide upon is offering the gist to their audience. Along with that, the event planners must also share information with their peers about the next events in the line.
Well, these are the most common things that every event planner would do. Taking it a notch up, however, needs a little more effort than this. What event planners can do instead is sending personalized mailers to the attendees. Some event planners may also go a step further by sharing gift vouchers with their audience. It not only helps keep the attendees happy but also builds a long-lasting customer relation.
By now, you already would have an idea about how webinars can be organized and successfully concluded. Notably, for event planners, this might be the right time to extend digital services to their peers. Perhaps, it is also the need of the hour.
