Mistakes To Avoid While Planning A Virtual Event

The lockdown period has resulted in the rise of online event. Planning a virtual event, seminar, or conference is a pretty hectic task that requires a meticulous approach and hard work. From ensuring an excellent experience for your attendees online to proper engagement for your sponsors, there’s a lot to organize and work on for event management companies. Ensuring the success of your event can help your investments to pay off. These days event management apps are out to help!

You can find several blogs out there telling you what you should focus on or tips that should follow to make your event successful. But there are things that you should avoid to ensure the success of your online events. Just planning how things will go is not sufficient; you have to have a plan B if things do not go as planned.

Virtual events are a bit trickier and different from in-person events. As everything is digital, Social media to your conference app, you have to make sure that communication and engagement are on point at all times. We have five mistakes that you should avoid at all costs. Let’s explore a bit more.

1. NOT PLANNING SUITABLE SESSION TIMES

Keeping everyone engaged during your conference or event is one of the main factors that decide on the success of your online event. If your participants keep zoning out, or they are getting bored, that is how your brand will be recognized- “ boring, stringent event company.” Nobody wants that, so as a thumb rule, keep your sessions short, crisp and interesting. A 20-minute session is more than enough; this is the average attention span of people.

Plan your sessions as per their popularity and preference in such a way that people do not end losing interest gradually. You can even have the schedule added on a banner in your event application. This will help your attendees plan accordingly. Keep the second most exciting and popular session first after, then maybe fifth, third, and so on. If all your sessions are in demand, keep your first preference in the end. It will help ensure that people do not drop out of meetings. But this doesn’t mean that you make your attendees wait a lot. Keep all these things in mind.

2. UNWANTED PITCHES

Hosting a virtual event is a great way to garner attention. But an unwanted and no strings attached pitch in the middle of your event will do no good. We understand that sale pitches are essential, but you need to pick the right time to add it. This is where event planning comes in; you need to make sure your participants are glued to their screens throughout the session. As it can end the sales pitch at the end, and it will ensure that people will stay online throughout your event. It will also help you get potential leads who are interested in what you have to say and what you’re offering.

3. NOT STREAMLINING AND PLANNING THINGS AHEAD OF TIME

This might look like a necessary thing that everyone covers, but we tend to leave a few ideas for the last minute. If you have the habit of doing this or saying things like “ I’ll look at it later,” then don’t. It will create issues that you won’t be able to solve due to time or resource crunch later on.

To ensure that you maintain the quality of your online event, make sure you plan ahead of time. Start two or three months before the event; it will give you enough time to test everything. If you think your plate is full, then assign work or your team. You do not need to micro-manage everything. Try online apps like Trello or Grupio, the best event organizer app to streamline things before you go live.

4. NOT CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLATFORM

To host your virtual event, you can find a diverse range of platforms and tech services in the market. Choices are nice as you can run trials to choose the best platform that works as per your requirements. But sometimes it can turn out to be more confusing than helpful.

There are so many lucrative features available in the market that people end up wasting money on features they do not need. To avoid this, you need to make a checklist of things that you need to successfully host your event before you start looking out for platforms.

Once you have the checklist, compare, and choose. Keep in mind that the cheapest is not always the best. Thorough research is required to get the innovative tools for the best and most tailored experience for your attendees. You even get in touch with event planning app development companies for a customized app if you can not find all the things you need in one app.

5. PICKING THE WRONG SPONSORS

The size of an event decides the type and number of sponsors. Getting sponsors for your online event is not the task here, but getting the right one is essential.
You need to be stringent and tactical while picking your sponsors. Make sure that you have a few sponsors on board that from the same industry, this will ensure that your attendees remain focused on the essence of your event even during sponsored bits. E.g., makeup company ads will look abrupt during and animal rights events/sessions.

CONCLUSION

There are a lot of common mistakes that you need to avoid when it comes to hosting your onlinel event. Keep the points mentioned above in mind while planning and executing, and it’ll be so much easier to avoid unwanted and last-minute issues that might arise during your event. Try to use the best white label event app to avoid such problems.