Here at RAW Marketing, we know that events are top line priorities for many organisations and their marketing budgets. They rely on these events to develop new accounts, and as a valuable opportunity to meet new connections face to face.
For all organisers, sponsors and attendees of these events, cancellations represent potential business losses down the road. This lost touchpoint could stall pipeline growth for B2B companies. This isn’t just a dent in marketing budgets, as it could potentially have a longer-term impact on sales.
What Are Your Options When Your Event Has Been Cancelled?
Companies will need to be creative to engage event attendees without the option of meeting in-person. At RAW Marketing, we’re quick to remember the fundamentals of agile marketing, and we’ve devised some ideas to help you engage your target audience with a range of exciting and innovative digital events.
Activate Your Event
An event should be more than just a block of calendar time and some boring slides. Brand activations are growing in popularity at events, as they’re an excellent way to bring your brand and your products to life – while keeping attendees entertained. Ideas for an activation at a digital tech event could include:
- A live customer problem solving challenge
- A hands-on demonstration of an exciting product feature
- A quiz or a game for attendees to play along with remotely
Use the event as an opportunity to communicate new information before, during and after, as this increases the overall “stickiness”. Activations can be literally any activity your audience will find entertaining – even if it doesn’t relate directly to your product. The more you think outside the box, the better the results.
Leverage Next-Gen Virtual Conferencing
We’ve all sat on conference calls, and they’re very rarely engaging. When we talk about virtual conferences, we’re talking about leveraging new technology to create a conference-like feel in an online event. A great example is Microsoft’s Educators in VR Summit in which 170 speakers took the virtual stage in 150 events over six days and more than 2,000 people attended.
Some of the most exciting virtual platforms we’ve seen include:
- Virbela – Think of VirBELA as “the venue: convention center, stadium, hotel ballroom, break-out rooms. All that’s needed is the event support and attendees.”
- Glue – Having worked with both HP and Microsoft, Glue is a “Universal Collaboration Platform” that uses VR to manage groups of up to 20 people.
- Spatial – A remote conferencing system that works with every device and creates convincing avatars who can collaborate in the virtual space where participants can share whiteboards, post-its, videos and 3D models.
Bring the Seminar to Webinars
Webinars have become an overused medium that are often just an online powerpoint product pitch. Remembering that “webinar” came from the word “seminar”, it’s important to treat a webinar as a valuable education opportunity for your clients.
This means your webinar has to be well researched, carefully crafted, and expertly delivered by an engaging speaker. Your attendees should walk away feeling they’ve learned something new, or that they at least found the webinar highly engaging.
All the World’s a Stage
The speakers are often the drawcard for your event, so there is no reason your event attendees can’t still hear them speak. Rather than having them talk over static slides, set up a stage, a webcam and a screen for their slides – have them deliver their presentation in the same format they would at an event.
Open the online event up for questions by a moderator to boost the engagement levels for your audience. Once the presentation has been recorded, you can then send an exclusive code for event attendees to view in their own time.
Keep It Exclusive
We enjoy the simple privilege of being invited to an event. We all appreciate that we’ve been recognised, either as a business or professional. Create exclusivity for your digital event with dedicated logins for attendees, and ensure that your invite messages have targeted greetings for each individual.
Connect the Experts in a Digital Roundtable
Roundtable events are an engaging format because they encourage high-level discussion between a panel of experts. A digital roundtable is an opportunity to connect experts in a variety of locations around the world, and have them bounce ideas off of each other in real time.
With only a webcam headshot of each, the format can resemble the talking head format of television news, and the roundtable can even be moderated by an engaging presenter. Once again, the roundtable can be recorded to create another exclusive asset for engaging your clients.
As Jacob Lowenstein from Spatial recently told Forbes, “Even after COVID-19 (hopefully) burns itself out, the degree of caution and uncertainty about travel is likely to continue.”
For our clients currently exploring avenues for keeping their B2B prospects engaged over the coming months, we’re enthusiastic about the opportunity to work collaboratively on these digital engagement activities. Over the remainder of 2020, we’re excited about helping our clients to develop some exciting new tools for their digital marketing campaigns.
To find out more about hosting Digital Events with RAW Marketing please download our Digital Events Guide.
