Hybrid Events-Future of Customer Acquisition
What are Hybrid Events?
Hybrid events are, quite simply, a mix of live and virtual events. You take your live event, complete with an audience, content, and more, and you add a virtual component to it so your audience can participate and engage with your event, no matter where they are.
Why Prefer Hybrid Events?
Greater outreach and participation
It’s a misinterpretation that an audience can actively partake in an event, only if you are face to face. You might believe that by facilitating a cross breed occasion, you split your absolute participation. However, the inverse is valid. Crossover occasions permit you to build your scope and acquire participants, not less.
Better sponsor opportunities
72% of corporate sponsors are interested in participating in a hybrid event, as long as they can effectively reach both audiences. That’s because hybrid events are incredibly valuable for sponsors, for a couple reasons. Reason one, is the increased reach. More attendees at your event means a larger lead pool for them, which is the #1 reason for sponsorship.
Furthermore, they can communicate 1:1 with interested parties while also interacting online virtual attendees. Some demographics, particularly Millennials, prefer virtual communication, which may lead to increased participation at their virtual booth.
More interaction with the audience
Adding a virtual element to your live event opens up many more engagement opportunities than would be possible at a strictly live event, both during and post-event. This is because your virtual audience is actively participating from their mobile devices or desktop computer, meaning they can talk, share, like, comment and much more.
Lesser environmental impact and costs
We’ve already seen the impact that reduced travel has had on the environment. Streets are empty in previously gridlocked cities and emissions have plummeted.
Some reports predict global energy usage to drop 6% — which might not sound like much, but it’s the same as the whole of India going dark. While face-to-face meetings are still important, going hybrid is a great way to accommodate attendees who might feel guilty about their personal carbon footprint. This way, they can still take part in your event and enjoy it, while also doing their part to decrease carbon emissions.
Reduced travel costs
Continuing with the same trend, hybrid events can significantly decrease travel costs across the board for everyone involved. While attendees saving money is obvious, hybrid events can also allow for decrease travel costs for your sponsors and crew.
Work-from-home has become the new normal for companies and employees around the world.
Creating reusable content
Instead of keeping your event exclusive, you can easily repurpose and reshare digital content to keep a steady stream flowing to your audience. For example, you can share the entire livestream (or certain pieces of it) to promote your future event. Sharing your livestream also ensures constant visibility for sponsors who are a part of the stream.
Streaming your event also has the added benefit of ensuring you don’t forget to record anything. With the high focus on broadcasting, you can rest easy knowing all your content is recorded for later use!
You can also determine future marketing campaigns from your previous content. Was there a session that attracted a lot of attendees? Maybe you can expand on it.
Better return on investment (ROI)
ROI is tricky to calculate at events because of all the moving pieces. However, hybrid events offer increased return on investment, due mainly to the increased reach and the scalability. Because you are getting more attendance through your hybrid events, that can translate into greater views for sponsors and more sign ups after the event.
As well, you gain lots of data to provide more accurate reporting on your performance.
Gathering valuable data
Hybrid events come with a crucial benefit of data as compared to offline data. The data gathered in an online event can help you to graphically analyse a lot of trackable metrics and various aspects pertaining to attendance, interaction of audience, at what point the seemed to lose interest and dropped out of the session, and more. This will help improve an event and that too without an actual feedback.
In Conclusion…
The pandemic surely has changed the way we look at means of collaboration and connecting with each other; and with many embracing the change hybrid events are becoming increasingly popular and understandably so. The varied needs of a diverse audience is also expected to eventually transform the way we host and participate in events. It is like, we eventually witness as Hybrid events being the new norm!
