Planning a Virtual Event - Looking Back

Planning a virtual event determines its success.  Knowing what to do and when to do it can greatly affect the success of your event.  I have identified five areas that you should think about while planning your next virtual event.  If you have others please share them.

A few weeks ago our marketing team put on a virtual event.  We had some great successes in this project and there were some things which I would do much differently next time around.  I want to share my thoughts and hear from you on your experiences with this medium as well.

1.  Planning.  These events take tons of planning and doing it yourself will require lots of effort so partner with others if you can; events teams, PR, and marcom all are good partners to look for when putting on a virtual event.  Also, if you are less than 90 days away from your event and haven't started planning you may be behind.  Planning and executing your promotional activities will take time.  Promotional items like banners, newsletter links and industry calendars can take a while for placement.  Not to mention the fact that you will need to have an idea of who will be presenting and what they will talk about to do your promotions.  A six month head start is the best case scenario.  You can definitely do it in a shorter timeframe but you will probably need to set other projects aside.

2.  Content.  Timely and relavent content is another key factor.  If you can get a well known speaker in a field, do it.  Next to promotion, key speakers and topics are some of the most important items to get for an event.  Review your event goals with the speakers so they understand what you are trying to accomplish with the event.  They can help you with your event goal if they know what it is.  Plan ahead with content templates and style guidelines so you can share them with the speakers prior to them creating their presentation.  Meet with the speakers prior to the event to make sure you can answer their questions and make them feel more comfortable about what will happen on the day of the event.

3.  After the event.  Plan for what you want to attendees to do after the event; is it visit a landing page or have attendees contacted by sales teams, etc...  Don't wait till after the event to figure this out.  Warm leads aren't warm for long.  Custom landing pages on your website can be a great tool for keeping the interaction going with event attendees.  You can provide additional information, host videos by the speakers, present flash demos, etc...  all are good ways to engage attendees after your event.  The point here is don't let all your hard work go to waste by not thinking about what you want attendees to do after the event.

4.  Send invitations out to people who will care.  Inviting large numbers of potential attendees is important but make sure the attendees you invite are your target audience.  If you have buy or rent a list it can be expensive so make sure you have a very specific audience identified for your event.  Click through rates can be less than 2-3% for invitations so plan accordingly.  To some degree the success of your event will be driven by identifying your audience or target market prior to the event and then using that information to drive who you invite, where you promote and how you promote your event.

5.  Do a postmortem on your event.  Make sure you plan to review all aspects of your event after it has taken place.  This helps ensure that you set up ways to measure each step along the way.  For example did all the lists you used perform equally towards your goal?  Did attendees stay to the end of each session or did some speakers turn the audience off completely?  How many attendees visited your landing page?  Did the web page serve its purpose?  These are just a sample of the items you might track.  Having the measurement tools in place prior to the event is critical as some metrics cannot be gather after the fact.

Planning is critical for any virtual event.  Knowing what and when do certain things can help you plan a successful event.  What types of things do you use to plan your virtual events?