Virtual event engagement: 13 ideas for creating memorable experiences

If you’re gearing up to host a virtual event anytime soon, audience engagement should be one of your number 1 priorities.

That’s no surprise.

Poor virtual event engagement is one of the biggest sins you can commit when hosting a virtual event.

According to data shared by Markletic, as many as 49% of marketers believe proper audience engagement is the key to any successful virtual event.

However, determining strategies to captivate your audience and keep them thoroughly engaged can pose challenges, particularly in the context of virtual events.

But it’s not impossible.

Join us as we dive more into virtual event engagement, its benefits, and common strategies and tools you can use to nail virtual event engagement in time for your next event.

Let’s dive right in.

What is virtual event engagement?

Virtual event management is the process of overseeing, leading, and commanding a gathering held in an online space consisting of two or more persons.

Unlike managing certain types of events such as seminars, classes, or lectures where attendees can all be on-site, managing virtual events such as webinars, virtual conferences, and hybrid classes requires hosts to be more creative in the tactics they use to engage their audience online.

The benefits of improving your virtual event engagement

High audience engagement at your virtual event brings many benefits. Here are three of them:

Strong brand positioning

Greater audience engagement directly correlates with the smooth execution of your event, resonating effectively with your audience, and leaving a lasting positive impression on attendees. These attendees then act as brand ambassadors to spread the word about your company. Not only does this word-of-mouth advertising play a role in helping you expand your reach to new potential markets, but it also helps solidify your branding and image in the minds of markets you’ve already positioned your company in.

Increase ROI

According to Gitnux, organizers who put on virtual events saw a 79% decrease in expenses incurred for in-person events. As audience engagement intensifies, the potential for word-of-mouth marketing to amplify the impact of your brand reputation and expansion significantly increases. This cascading effect can elevate your return on investment by reducing costs and generating higher returns in exchange for your initial investment.

Establish easier partnerships

Every company that puts on a virtual event knows that it’s a goldmine for content ideas moving forward. Audience engagement in a virtual event is a way to measure how likely attendees are to participate in any initiative you have in the future. Whether it’s testimonials, video interviews, or success stories, the more engaged your audience is, the easier it is to build partnerships that last and prove beneficial to your company in the long run.

13 Ideas to boost your virtual event engagement

Interactive content

Interactive content is any type of material that encourages users to actively engage with it to access additional information or messages about a given topic. Hosts can use interactive content ideas such as polls, quizzes, clickable infographics, and more to foster more robust virtual event engagement among their audience members.

Personalized experiences

Personalized experiences are messages, content, or otherwise that seek to highlight and appeal to a customer’s individual preferences. Unlike broad targeted approaches, personalized experiences try to meet attendees on a personal level. This helps with engagement in virtual events as it increases the chances that an attendee remains interested since they’re consuming content that’s relevant to them.

Immersive environments

Immersive environments are situations in which attendees are either so wholly engrossed in a scenario that it consumes their entire focus or they are placed in a fictitious environment created scientifically through augmented or virtual reality. Companies use strategies related to sound, sensors, people, and graphics to create immersive environments that keep attendees on the edge of their seats yearning for more.

Collaborative activities

Collaborative activities are a type of exercise that requires two or more persons to participate to complete a goal or objective. When done for the right exercise at the right time, collaborative activities have a reputation to be fun and engaging since they force participants to interact with one another.

Entertaining Performances

Having any form of entertainment at a virtual event is a form of engagement. Whether you host a musical artist, dancer, or comedian, this type of activity is what sets up your brand for success through solid reputation management and an improved event success rate.

Educational Opportunities

Instructional material is a form of supporting engagement in virtual events. In webinars and virtual conferences, most times audience members attend these kinds of events because they’re looking to learn something. The more you incorporate moments where you share nicely packaged knowledge pills and informational content, the more likely your virtual event will be a hit with that audience.

Social Media Integration

Ensuring that attendees can interact with social media is key to success. Sometimes, attendees enjoy having the option to post something related to the virtual event they’re attending on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. A software integration allowing this solution for attendees gives you more opportunities to get creative and incorporate social media as part of your virtual event engagement strategy.

Polls

Polls aren’t just tools you can use during an event to engage with your virtual audience: rather, you can use them before your event even starts to interact with your attendees. Consider putting up a social media poll on Instagram to gauge how excited your guest list is for an upcoming event.

Social Media

Social media platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are havens for hosts to start engaging with their audience even before their virtual event starts. Running content-driven social media campaigns that build awareness around your virtual event helps you gauge interest among your target audience and measure it by metrics such as the number of likes or reshares you get.

Warmup Event

Depending on the virtual event you’re going to put on, it might be useful to host another small, pre-event activity online to help ease the jitters associated with the main event. From meet-and-greet sessions to virtual coffee meetings to break the ice, warmup events are solid choices.

Testimonials

Once your event is complete, consider creating branded testimonials that you can then repurpose in a content marketing strategy to maintain engagement with attendees.

Behind-the-scenes

Releasing behind-the-scenes footage in an on-brand, fun format is a great way for event organizers to keep the interest high among their target audience once an event is done.

Recap videos

Attendees always look forward to recap videos because they get to engage with familiar content. There’s always the added excitement of wondering whether you might show up in the recap video as an attendee at your event. The recap videos of Kaltura’s Connect on the Road 2023 in-person event were highly appreciated by the audience:

Overcoming challenges in virtual event engagement

Managing virtual events poses greater challenges compared to in-person events due to the absence of physical interaction, making it more demanding to devise effective strategies.

That said, virtual event management can be done well if you have a creative mindset and the right tools to support you as you carry out your virtual event.

Measuring and evaluating virtual event engagement

Figuring out how engaged your attendees were at your virtual event can be tricky. Here are some common metrics you can use to get a feel for it:

• Drop-off rate during the event
• Push-notification reactions from attendees
• Engagement with polls and other interactive content during the event
• Social media engagement post-event

Tools for virtual event engagement

Virtual event management can be successful once you have the right tools behind you to make it happen.

Partnering with software that’s made specifically to manage virtual events is a step in the right direction. The best virtual event software comes with a suite of features and tools that help you manage your virtual event and collect the insights and reports needed to make informed decisions.

Trends in virtual event engagement

If there were ever a time to start using virtual event management software, now would be it.

The trends are revealing. According to one source, 95.5% of event organizers they surveyed expressed an interest in wanting to host more virtual events in 2023 and beyond, with 57.4% believing that virtual events will continue to grow in popularity in the coming years.

With so many virtual events springing up, having the right software to support you will help you stand out and produce the kind of amazing experiences that your brand needs.

How Kaltura can help you increase engagement in your next virtual event

Kaltura is a video cloud solution designed to help brands turn virtual events into unforgettable experiences for their attendees.

With Kaltura, you get a complete product suite that allows you to manage your virtual events from start to finish and turn attendees into leads:

• Design: Create company-branded virtual events with easy-to-use customizable templates that you can set up and launch in a few clicks.
• Manage: Keep all your assets and communication in one place with a tool that streamlines content and collaborative efforts with your team.
• Measure: Get the insights you need to measure how well your virtual event performed with a software tool that gathers data and generates reports for you on key moments of your virtual event.

Book a demo to discover how you can start creating memories that live on in the hearts and minds of your attendees with a software tool that’s made specifically to build amazing online experiences.

Summary

Virtual event management is not an easy task.

Nevertheless, it is entirely achievable.

Don’t allow yourself to be limited to the traditional strategies seen in physical, in-person events.

Instead, think outside the box and start adding that extra spice your virtual events need with a software tool like Kaltura that helps you nail those experiences for your attendees time and time again.