The Real World Marketing Value of Virtual Events

When done right, virtual events also deliver incredibly rich marketing intelligence and significant return on investment More and more companies are including virtual events in their marketing arsenal to generate demand. Virtual events can replicate all aspects of a physical event—without all the hassles and costs.

Cisco is developing an ongoing partner community using virtual event technology, and other companies such as IBM, National Instruments, and Quest Software each held multiple virtual events in 2007 and plan more for this year.

Technologies have advanced to the point where virtual events look and feel remarkably like their physical counterparts, while delivering similar knowledge-sharing and personal interactions. Virtual events include:

• Live conference sessions – Keynotes, product demos and panel discussions with live Q&A.
• Exhibition floor – Exhibitor booths offer collateral, product demos and live interaction between booth reps and visitors.
• Professional networking – Combining the most business applicable capabilities of Web 2.0 and social networking enables virtual attendees to search for people with similar interests.

The benefits of virtual events are the convenience and cost savings for both attendees and organizers. It is common to see thousands of people attending an event, and the marketing department seeing a 50-80 percent reduction in costs compared to a physical event.

What to look for in virtual event technology
Depending on the platform you choose, all of this can be delivered online with no special applications to download, no avatars to dress up and no new commands to learn. Ease of accessibility is extremely important if the target audience is business professionals and/or you expect a large number of attendees.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Ease of accessibility: Your attendees must have instant access. It should be simple to register, click on a link, enter the virtual event and use the mouse to get around. If an attendee has to download an application, dress up an avatar and learn new commands, your registration-to-attendee ratio will suffer miserably.
• Professional networking: The top two reasons people attend events is to gather information and network. Your virtual event solution should take all the business-applicable aspects of web 2.0 and social networking and apply them to fit the needs of today’s busy businessperson.
• Unified experience: A virtual event environment should include a conference hall supporting multiple sessions and an exhibition hall with exhibitor booths with a variety of rich media that attendees can download. And, there must be live interaction between attendees, sponsors and presenters. And most importantly it should all be in a unified environment. If the virtual environment is cobbled together with a bunch of different applications, it appears clunky to the attendee and results in poor user experience.
• Marketing intelligence Especially for lead generation events, marketing intelligence is critical. Unified virtual events should be able to supply the organizer and its sponsors with the richest marketing data available from any marketing vehicle. It should track and report on all attendee activity and then rank this data so the organizer and sponsor know at the push of the button, which are the hottest leads.
• Best practices: It is critical for event planners entering the virtual world for the first time to find a solution provider that can provide them with best practices for content creation, audience generation, event management, and post event reporting in the virtual world.

Brent Arslaner oversees global marketing for Unisfair.