Virtual events are an amazing way to interact with your audience, but how can you ensure they’re engaging? No matter what your live event is about, there’s no need for it to be dull and dry, you’ve got lots of tools at your disposal to make it an event to be remembered, and these tips will help you do just that.
Understand Your Target Audience
When you understand your target audience, it’s much easier to give them the content they’re looking for. So before you begin planning the content for your virtual event, you need to understand some key things about your audience:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Pain points
- Questions they have
- Buyer intent
- Goals
These are just some of the points that can help you understand exactly what your audience wants. One of the best ways to find out is simply to ask! Put together a poll and give people a good reason to fill it out.
Make it Multi-Channel
You want to reach as many people as possible with your virtual event, so don’t limit yourself to just one platform. There are lots of different ways to live stream to your target audience, and you don’t have to settle for just one of them. With the right software, you can stream simultaneously across a whole host of platforms, extending your reach.
Your audience “hangs out” in lots of different places, so make sure you’re reaching them where they are.
Get Engaging Guests On
Guests play a huge part in your live events, so make sure you’re going out of your way to get the right people on. Whether it’s an industry expert or just someone with that extra entertainment value, a good speaker can make all the difference. It’s not easy to find good speakers, but keep doing your outreach and really focus on getting the right people to your event.
Captioning
Remember that the vast majority of videos on social media are watched without sound. If you’re live streaming to Facebook or Instagram, or wherever it might be, this means for the most engagement, you need to offer it with CART captions (captioning). You might have an amazing guest speaker on, but when someone’s scrolling through their feed, they might well be relying on captioning to decide what is valuable content.
Make sure you’re taking every step to drive engagement and not missing important extras like captioning.
Interactive Polls and Q&A’s
Live events give you a great opportunity to get people involved in what’s going on. Through interactive polls and live questions and answers, you’ve got the tools to drive greater engagement, but you need to be making the most of them.
Find ways of working these tools into your content plan and encourage people to engage with them. Think of fun and innovative ways to get people involved with what you’re doing, and you’ll find it makes a big difference to your live events. This is a big benefit of live events, so leverage the interactive tools as much as possible.