11 Critical Things to Remember for your Virtual Events
by Jay Baer – Successful Entrepreneur, Author, Hall-of-Fame Marketing & Customer Experience Speaker & Emcee.
If you’re going to get in front of your customers and prospects en mass, doing it virtually is pretty much the only game in town for a while, right?
But that being the case, EVERYONE is going to create a flood of new webinars and such. How long until fatigue sets in? How can you do it right, and set your company apart?
Marketing and Customer Experience Speaker Jay Baer suggests 11 things to remember for your virtual events:
- WRITE KILLER TITLES & DESCRIPTIONS
We’re not sure why, but many businesses seem to have taken a vow of boredom when it comes to writing the titles and descriptions for their webinars and virtual events. People who are great writers of blog posts, headlines, email newsletters, and LinkedIn ads somehow completely lose the thread when it comes to webinars. Two things sell a webinar, period. The title, and the talent. Write a title that interests your audience, and more than half the battle has been won. Add someone on the microphone they know, like, trust, and you’ll win the rest of the fight for attention. Make titles snappy, interesting, and relevant. And showcase benefits in the description.
- MAKE REGISTRATION EASY
There are a LOT of webinar and virtual summit software platforms out there. One of the features that differentiates them is how easy it is (or not) to make a great landing/registration page, with an easy-to-use form that also works on mobile. Sounds obvious? It’s not. In addition to picking the best platform, you also need to resist the temptation to turn your webinar registration process into your own version of the census. The only thing you MUST HAVE from registrants is an email address. You probably should get their name, and ideally their company. After that, every question you ask depresses conversion rate. You WANT them to participate. Make it very simple to do so!
- SHORTEN THE DURATION
A 60-minute session in a live event doesn’t feel like a slog, because attendees have other stimuli. It is FAR more difficult to keep attention in a webinar or virtual summit. Keep these sessions TIGHT. No longer than absolutely necessary. In fact, we suggest shortening up your regular durations. For example, a 60-minute “keynote” should be no more than 45 minutes, if delivered online. A 45-minute in-person session should become a 30-minute webinar, and so forth. AND, I actually pioneered the concept of a “Webinine,” which is an entire webinar in just 9 minutes. Attendees LOVE this format. It’s great for replay rates too, because a lot more people can spare 9 minutes compared to 60 minutes.
- HAVE A GREAT MODERATOR/HOST
Many organizations moving to virtual events believe that since the programming is now delivered over the Internet, no emcee or host is necessary. The opposite is true. Having a consistent face and voice that “stitches together” the virtual sessions for participants adds much-needed familiarity and helps alleviate the isolated feeling that online events can sometimes produce for attendees. The best way to implement is to have the event moderator open up the conference online, just like a regular event, and moderate questions for speakers. They should also pop back online between sessions to chat with attendees.
- USE A SCRIPT AND REHEARSE IT
For some reason, many company execs appearing on a webinar believe they can just put together some slides and speak extemporaneously to them during a live, virtual event. A few can do so. The majority cannot do it well. As mentioned before, webinar attendees have fewer senses activated when tuning in for online events, so their key webinar senses (audio and visual) need to be superior. If you’re going to lean in to virtual events, insist that everyone who will have a speaking role have a written script and a process for rehearsals. This is not a time to wing it.
- USE THE RIGHT GEAR
In addition to selecting the optimum virtual event software platform overall, each webinar speaker should commit to having the right set up (probably at home, at this point) to deliver the best possible quality experience for attendees. This means investing in a decent microphone, headphones, and possibly an inexpensive light if video will be utilized, and making sure the webinar is conducted in a very quiet place. This can be challenging when surrounded by our new “coworkers” who are doing grade school online and from home, but it’s definitely not impossible! There are several tips and tricks on which gear to buy, and how to do soundproofing hacks. Send an email and I can give you specific ideas, based on the nature of your event(s).
- TEST BEFORE GO-LIVE
ALWAYS insist that all webinar speakers show up online at least 30 minutes before the scheduled start of the broadcast. This provides an opportunity to check audio and video, make sure everyone knows how to advance slides, talk though where audience questions will show up, determine adequate bandwidth, and in general avoid last-minute gremlins that can create a lot of panic. Do not cut this close.
- MAKE IT INTERACTIVE
One of the reasons I recommend making webinars shorter is that it’s inherently not that interesting to stare at a screen while someone talks at you. All virtual event platforms have the opportunity to add interactive polls, quizzes, audience Q&A, and more. Make liberal use of these features! The more your audience is PART of the session, the more they are paying attention. It’s also the best way to pull questions out of the attendees. TIP: When you open the session, ask every attendee to use the chat feature to say where they are calling in from (or a similar question). This forces them to get used to asking questions and participating in an easy, stress-free fashion.
- USE BREAKOUT ROOMS AFTERWARDS
A relatively new feature on many platforms, you can now create sub-group breakout rooms after the main session concludes. This is terrific for splitting attendees up into smaller cohorts for question answering, networking, meeting with sales teams, and so forth. This functions similar to how many live events have a keynote session, followed by smaller and concurrent breakout sessions. You can mimic this process on many virtual platforms, adding relevancy and interactivity for participants.
- PERFECT YOUR POST-SESSION COMMUNICATION
After the conclusion of the program, begin two different email nurture sequences ASAP. The first goes to people who attended the session. Provide a link to the recording, a link to a related content marketing asset (ebook, video series, etc.), and instructions for how to ask additional questions. The second goes to people who registered but did not attend. Send them a link to the recording, a written recap of highlights, and a related content marketing asset. Approximately 2 days later, promote the next webinar in the series with an email to both groups, highlight great questions asked by the audience, or send other related assets. There’s a lot more to the perfect follow-up sequence, but this is a good summary.
- MERCHANDISE HIGHLIGHTS IN SOCIAL
Because your session(s) were recorded, you have access to the full-length video. Take that full-length video and cut it up into somewhere between 3 and 7 webinar highlights. You’re looking for key points or great slides, or both. You may want to outsource the editing, depending on your in-house skill sets (ask us if you need a referral). But what you want to end up with are clips (less than 60 seconds) you can use on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote the replay of the webinar or virtual event. In B2B, these highlight reels are also useful for sales enablement, because they give sales teams short assets they can send to prospects, which can be used as encouragement for target audiences to participate in the next session.
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