Event industry has come a long way since last year — 73% of event planners have now moved to online events. Planners need to keep in mind these four P’s which are the various phases of delivering an online event: planning, promotion, production, and post-event.

Here is a comprehensive list of all the key components required for successful execution of an online event.

Planning Phase

Planner Objective

First and foremost, it is important to lay down the main objective of the event. Next, it is crucial to benchmark against any similar events conducted before. Doing this will help guide you throughout the planning process. While defining the objective, it is important to keep in mind that the event should be aligned with overall marketing mix & tactics.

Attendees Objective

Volume of registrations and engagement level are largely dependent on the attendee’s objective. Before moving forward with content and event format planning it is imperative to consider their objective (why they are attending, what do they seek to gain from this event, etc.), so that the entire event is streamlined. For instance, they might be interested in a training, see it as a learning opportunity, want to get expert advice, or just want to attend for the networking.

Budget

When planning on a budget it should be kept in mind that the value derived should be greater than expenses. Your expenses would be mostly from event success platforms, investment in hardware to equip remote speaker, studio expenses, AV and production expenses. Interestingly, 75% of the spending in an online event is on technology while for in-person events 75% of spending is non-tech expenses.

Team

People with right skills and having great synergy among themselves can save your time and cost and give you right value for any event. It’s crucial to have the right blend of talent – having required technical skills, expertise in content strategy, someone who can manage the speakers and most importantly, someone who is a great TV/video producer. The required skillset has broadened from what was required for in-person events. Therefore, its good to have individuals with complimentary skill sets.

Event Design

Now that you have laid down the objectives and made your budget it is the right time to outline the event design which includes important aspects like event size, event format, content and delivery. First and the foremost it is important to decide whether your event will be a webinar or a conference. Post that, it is crucial to break down the entire event into parts like introduction, keynote session, breakout sessions, networking, and Q&A session.

Event Size

The size of the audience needs to be determined to plan the event style. For instance, if the session has fewer than 50-100 attendees, it could be made live and interactive. But when you are expecting more than 100 attendees, it would be wise to pre-record the content and further organise it by breaking out the sessions into smaller groups for more interactions.

Event Format

The good news is that the format of an online event could be much like in-person events. You could choose any of the formats, like a webinar, keynote, news-style broadcast, an executive presentation, TED-talk style event, video, or even a late-night show. Other then that it would be good to tick boxes by asking yourself some questions like -

• Will your event be live, recorded, simu to live or a mix of these?
  • If it is a recorded or a mix of live and recorded session, how do you want to film it?
  • In case it’s part-recorded and part-live, which parts should be recorded?
  • How many speakers are you having?
  • If your speakers are remote, are they equipped with necessary tools like microphone, lighting, webcam, greenscreen, etc.
  • How to make your event interactive?
    • • Polling
      • Attendee Chats
      • Attendee Matching

Content

Online events have bought huge dependency on content for the success of events as there is no other way which could drive audience. Unlike in person events where audience is sitting in a conference room setup with no distraction, Online events setup is full of distractions. Audience has much more convenience to drop off in a virtual setup.

Content is an important aspect for both marketing and delivery. Sixty Percent of the B2B marketers have a documented content marketing plan for smooth flow of events.

Event Delivery

It is not necessary that the speaker who has a great feedback for an in-person event will have similar impact at an online event. If online events were a part of your total events program earlier, you may utilise the insights from the session to gauge into the attendee dynamics. Audience has shorter attention spans in online events, to make sure the attrition is low it is not only good to have a great content but also good delivery. Not only that, but it may also be helpful to have multiple speakers and a dynamic screen to engage more.

Event Technology

All your planning can be put to an action with the help of the right technology. Determine your technology needs and try to understand if your current tech stack can support your technology needs. Especially in online events, AV quality and production needs to be kept in mind. Irrespective of the everything, it will be worthwhile to take insightful and actionable attendees’ data.

Survey says that 39% of event professionals agree that the most crucial element of a live event in engaging attendees. Considering the no show rate and attrition levels of the audience, it is important to reduce the noise by choosing the right technology partner suitable to your event format.

Promotion Phase

Attendee persona

Audience segmentation and targeting is the first thing to do in order to reach the right set attendees. The main advantage of the online event is reach. New prospects could be invited to create awareness around the product. Invites could also be shared to C suites and senior employees who are key decision makers of their organisation. Since, these sessions do not require commute, they might want test waters in new territories.

Event website

Your event website is an important promotional tool that will play a key role in keeping potential attendees interested and enticing them to register for the event. Ideally, your event website should contain the event schedule, showcase speakers, include FAQs, and point potential attendees to registration.

Registration

Registration helps you gather more data about the attendees and improvise on your plan based on the insights generated through this data. Registration pages make it easier to collect useful personal information and preferences along with payment, if required.

Messaging

The key for getting more registrations is personalised messages. Depending on the personas of attendees you can create multiple email or ad copies. Seventy four percent of the marketers say that targeted personalisation’s are helpful in getting a customer engaged.

Promotion mix

The promotion mix for your event should have a blend of advertisements, public relation, social media presence and email marketing.

Email Invites

Over 75% of event creators pick email marketing as their most effective strategy, with 45% of event ticket sales coming from emails. Email should be the primary medium to send invites. To ensure higher open rate and registrations, subject line, preview text and CTA buttons should be put in place so that its easier for the prospects to register.

Social Media Presence

Social media Channels can be good way to capitalise on event. However, the channels are not the only way to create buzz. Attendees should be encouraged to share about the event, they could turn promoters for the event. Other tactics like using hashtags & online communities could be great way get traction.

Direct Calling

To ensure attendance, it would be wise to call high value prospects a few hours or a day prior to the event. Not only new prospects, but existing customers should be through their respective account managers.

Production phase

Attendee Engagement

Attendee engagement is the product of great content, good audio and video quality, interactive tools & networking opportunity. You should make sure that there is a dynamic screen, pre rolls, sponsor ads, gamification, breakout rooms, etc.

A great deal of engagement can be made possible by choosing the right technology that can facilitate attendee matching, networking, prepare sales and executives for important conversation, staff scheduling and added controls. On the D Day you need to make sure that all these factors are in place.

Give space to your sponsors

Sponsors look for brand awareness and lead generation through your events. To improve your sponsor ROI a range of tactics like sponsored ad pre rolls, transition banners, sponsor breakout rooms could be added to enable appointments.

Attendee data

While the event is on air, it is good to collect data on attendees so that meaningful profiles could be created for further sales interactions. It would be meaningful to capture check-in’s, length of session attended, event engagement like involvement in Q&A’s, networking, breakout session or appointments.

Contingency Plan

To reach the pinnacle of event implementation it is good to have a contingency plan. Along with that there should be a good communication between the team members so that it can be handled in case of any outages.

Post event

Survey and Feedback

Survey links should be displayed on screen right after the session or sent via mail within next 24 hours. It is important to gather feedback before it gets lost or blurred. While sending the no show mails it would be wise to also attach event recording.

Performance

It’s important to measure and repurpose the data to understand event performance, drive more revenue, refine your content and provide value to exhibitors and sponsors. In essence, you need to process the data to get deeper insights into your event.

Once all the KPIs are measured it needs to be used by sales team or sponsors. It is essential to do appropriate profiling and visualise the data into readable format so that it can be shared across to multiple stakeholders across the organisation, sponsors, and exhibitors.