Confidence in face to face events returning by the end of 2020
What has been the balance of focus between proprietary marketing activity and 3rd party activities since May 2020?
What has been the greatest challenge with virtual events as a replacement for face-to-face events since May 2020?
For EI's clients, experiences of virtual event platforms have been varied. General sentiments from Barometer respondents include platforms still being relatively simple/unsophisticated, networking and audience engagement still being figured out by providers, and no platform being seamless. From EI's experience, every platform definitely meets a different objective and it will be a learning curve for all over the next few months as we become more adept at exploring the full functionalities for each event format.
The virtual channel is here to stay and the whole business needs to be brought along the journey and educated to be able to leverage each technology platform for their strengths. Some of EI's clients recognise this and say that the platforms are not the issue, rather formats are, and with content/virtual event saturation in the market, marketers are having to innovate with tools at their disposal such as format and live polling to keep audiences engaged.
Snapshot of Platforms Mentioned & Associated Sentiments:
On24: Strong platform for broadcast medium, sharing meaningful content with large audiences, poor client service
Zoom and MS Teams: Simple and effective functionality and excellent for smaller roundtable discussions, great for collection of data.
Intrado and vFairs: Currently best in class for more immersive experiential events.
For years Bloomberg has integrated audience polling into their panel discussions at live events, to guide the themes of panel sessions. This allows the audience to steer the discussion, ensuring the most relevant topics are covered, with the audience's pain points at the centre. This is a great way to gauge audience sentiment and shape the content to match.
The EI View: Change is always difficult and it is inevitable that the industry will expect the same capabilities from virtual events as the physical realm. However, from EI's analysis over the last few months, it is clear that we cannot expect an exact replica of the in-person experience. We are assessing opportunities differently and asking different questions. For example, a virtual booth may no longer be viewed the same; these are now content booths or 'microsites' and we should be pushing organisers to drive engagement in a different way, maybe through incentives that recognise the 'human' in the user. Benchmarking will take time as we continue to test and learn over the next few months, continue to track engagement, and assess ROI once the longer sales cycles are complete.