Hosting Your First Virtual Event: Advice and Tips

With the increasing popularity of virtual events, it is not surprising that businesses, universities, government institutions, and other entities are all transitioning away from physical venues to connect with their target audience in virtual settings. Vendor selection can be challenging especially if you are planning your first virtual event, but based on our advice, you will be well on your way to asking the right questions, and making well-informed decisions.

Here are a few tips to get you started!

1) Research Vendors with Strong Event Hosting Experience

With many new solution providers entering the industry, you want to choose a vendor that has worked with a diverse range of top organizations, executed a wide range of virtual events, and can provide you with one-on-one customizations that best match your event requirements.

vFairs has worked with leading powerhouses ranging from Starbucks, YouStudy.com, WayUp, and VeteransConnect- with experience hosting job fairs, career fairs, networking events, and university open day events, we know exactly how to guide our clients and continuously innovate to meet their targeted KPIs.

For example, if you are planning a virtual job fair, vFairs will particularly focus and educate you on acquiring job-related data from the participating companies to make information exchange seamless, in addition to providing CV parsing solutions to aid employers in recruitment.

2) Prioritize a Mobile-Friendly Event

With over 60% of event traffic coming through smartphones, it is essential that your event works seamlessly in a mobile-optimized environment. You do not want to lose visitor acquisition or engagement due to poor technology compatibility – a successful event depends strongly on a responsive design that adapts to all mobile devices without a glitch.

3) Select Reliable Vendors with Dedicated Client Support

Understanding the features, capabilities, and potential of a virtual event is an area of discussion that all hosts must educate their selves on. You want to be sure that the vendor is not choosing a one-size-fits-all solution for you, and is instead going to deliver customized instruction across all phases from booth design, event layout, and marketing in addition to delivering flawless execution.

Compare vendors to find the best technology and operations support so that they keep you proactively involved in the process, yet can independently manage the event planning and implementation without you having to oversee the set up every step of the way. vFairs assigns dedicated project managers to all our clients as a key point of expertise so that all concerns are promptly addressed, objectives met, and you can run your event with the best support team in the business.

4) Decide How Interactive Your Virtual Event Will Be

There’s a lot more to virtual event planning than defining timelines and budgets; you want to attract, excite, and engage the visitors to leave the intended impact. Discuss if you want textual, voice, or video chat-based functionality. Perhaps you want to go a step further and have a live webinar to address audience questions or share market insights.

Pondered over how important is a multilingual platform to you? Be specific with how you choose to communicate with your visitors so that your virtual event is remembered by all participants for all the right reasons.

5) Find Vendors That Help Measure Success

The vendor of your choice should not only excel at delivering a fantastic virtual event but provide reports that measure the impact of your initiative on your audience. Determine your KPIs in advance, for example, unique visitors, visits per booth, or job applications received for every position advertised. Measuring success is pivotal to determine the ROI- discuss with the vendors how they can help you monitor visitors, downloads, video plays, chats, conversions, etc. before you finalize your decision.

Planning your first event can be an intimidating step for many, but with over 7 years of expertise in this domain, we want to provide you with advice to ensure that you too can make use of these dynamic technology platforms to achieve results like never before.

Want to learn more? Read The Ultimate Guide to a Virtual Event.

ABOUT VFAIRS:

At vFairs.com, we strive to build a top-class online event platform that will help event organizers make memorable connections with their target audience. We’re obsessed with taking out the hassle normally associated with physical events and leaving organizers and exhibitors to focus on what’s most important: engagement with the audience.