Virtual Events have been in the vocabulary of event organizers & planners ever since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 brought normal life to a standstill.
Virtual Events help save organizations a lot of time, money, & resources, whilst also providing them with increased outreach, visibility, & greater ROI.
And these benefits are surely translating into a rise in the number of companies planning a virtual event.
A leading survey of event organizers showed that around 51% of them are planning to invest more in virtual events in 2021.
Virtual Events have a lot of benefits for both small & large companies. They help propel organizations of any size towards growth when planned & strategized to maximize visibility & networking potential.
Virtual Events are also great at engaging audiences from all over the world by providing them with a channel to communicate with the event attendees and organizers.
Many large companies around the globe, be it Google, Apple, Facebook, Stanford University & a lot more, continue to utilize virtual events to expand their consumer base, engage new customers, & retain existing ones.
So what exactly are the benefits of hosting virtual events for large companies? We take a look at this in the points below!
- Increased number of attendees
Virtual Events attract a larger audience to your brand as people don’t have to travel or even change out of their clothes to attend those.
Since they can easily join these from anywhere in the world, virtual events naturally lead to an increase in the sheer volume of attendees.
A larger audience pool also translates to more detailed, useful analytics & insights into attendee behavior.
Event organizers can easily perform lead retrieval, lead organization, & post-event follow-ups using these detailed event analytics.
What’s more, most of these processes are often automated with the help of today’s effective & result-oriented virtual event platforms.
Since large companies often plan large virtual events, with an anticipated attendee footfall in thousands & potentially higher ROIs.
Virtual Event planning for the same should also be top-notch, goal-oriented, & driven by past event analytics.
Sending out pre-event surveys to your to-be attendees in a large quantity before the actual event is also important to capture the nerve of your attendees. This helps your company host a better, more informative virtual event with powerful data metrics in the driving seat.
- Saves precious time
Large organizations often have multiple simultaneous projects & deals on the table. This leaves the key decision-makers & leaders of these companies short on time and almost always in a hurry.
Physical Events naturally require a lot more time in planning, taking care of the various modalities that are a part of it, & maneuvering sponsorship deals.
There is also the need to select adequate accommodation for speakers & attendees, look after catering services, & take care of their overall comfort at the event.
In addition to this, event organizers also have the gigantic task of handling attendee registration, on-site settlement, & attendee management all through the event.
Needless to say, all of this requires a lot of time & takes multiple days of painstaking planning & organizing.
Virtual Events save a lot of the time, effort, & energy of event planners by streamlining the entire registration & attendee management process.
You can utilize this time in integrating new & efficient event tech tools in your event, event marketing, & promotional campaigns.
Virtual Events also allow your event management team to enjoy a little breather & focus on driving sales & increase attendee engagement during the event.
- Increased global outreach
Stipulating on the points mentioned above, Virtual Events attract a larger audience pool to your brand. This leads to a direct increase in the global outreach of the event.
This is in direct contrast to most physical events, which have pronounced geographical constraints on the number of people that can visit the event at any given time.
Since your attendees can easily attend a virtual event from the comfort of their chosen space, virtual events usually attract a wider audience from all over the world.
A large audience pool gives your organization the upper hand over landing potential customers and gives you more opportunities to turn them into profitable leads.
With Virtual Events, you can also tap into the fan base of your speakers/panelists/sponsors. World-renowned speakers, sponsors, & panelists help increase your virtual event’s global outreach by unlocking the large audience base they have already amassed over the years.
All these factors contribute to a dramatic increase in the global reach of your virtual events & lead to better outcomes.
- Virtual Events are more cost-effective
It’s quite a common understanding that physical events are much more costly to plan, strategize, & deploy, than virtual events.
There are venue booking costs, accommodation costs, catering charges, & travel expenses to consider, along with the money spent in marketing, management, & ticketing.
Even when the entire event budget is carefully charted out, there will always be some last-minute overhead costs that prop up in physical events.
Virtual Events, by comparison, have fewer expenses to begin with, in addition to much lower or negligible overhead costs.
Couple this with the fact that virtual events tend to generate higher revenues & greater ROI for every penny you spend on those. And you can easily see why they make such a perfect choice of event for large companies.
- Gives event planners deeper, more useful insights
Virtual Events come with the prospect of getting instant audience feedback through live polling, chats, & feedback in real-time. Something which even the most carefully planned out physical events can’t boast of.
Getting live feedback from your audience tremendously helps your virtual event in terms of overall ease of attendance & success.
It helps you modify certain aspects of your virtual event according to your attendees’ likes & requirements, making them feel involved & appreciated in the process.
Real-time attendee feedbacks can also help you fine-tune your marketing strategy, as your audience replies can tell you a lot about their mindset & potential event goals.
Your marketing team can narrow down the exact attendees that could turn into potential customers, & focus on converting them into loyal customers.
- Intelligent matchmaking & networking opportunities
Although physical events beat virtual events in terms of sheer networking options & features provided in the event. Virtual Events have one thing going for them.
It’s the potential to generate more meaningful, useful, & profitable matches for the attendees through intelligent AI matchmaking & networking algorithms.
These help match attendees with each other based on their mutual interests, likes, dislikes, goals, intents, & motivations.
Virtual Events can easily leverage these powerful & intricate matchmaking tools to help their attendees match with each other in a more refined way.
Owing to these networking features, virtual event organizers can enjoy greater attendee satisfaction rates, as well as get access to a wide pool of like-minded audience members to target their marketing efforts towards.
These benefits of Virtual Events for large companies & organizations should help you design an all-encompassing event strategy for your virtual event. It should also help you decide your virtual event goals, motivations, & expectations.
