Why Content Drives Your Virtual Event
What’s your virtual events content strategy? As businesses continue to move their events online, this question matters more than ever.
Capitalize on the Virtual Format
It’s always been important for businesses to create a content strategy with events, offline or online. With virtual events, event planners need to consider how the digital format affects their content.
For instance, the use of video and live streaming creates more possibilities to deliver content in more creative ways. At Investis Digital Live, we have managed both live and prerecorded virtual events. Your overall goals and the technology you are using will help you decide which type to present. There is also a hybrid format, where you prerecord and then have the speaker/presenter on the live portion of the event to answer questions and close the event with next steps and action items. Prerecording your event allows you to edit and add interactive elements to the video. The other advantage of prerecording is you can make the event available almost immediately after the live event.
It’s also important to take into account tools such as live polling for making content more interactive. For instance, you can use polls to gather quick stats; then plan your poll questions ahead of time and sprinkle them throughout your presentation. There is certainly a balance as to how many to use. You don’t want to break up the continuity of the presentation by asking too many.
These are just some of the considerations event planners need to keep in mind. One thing has not changed: you need to plan content early on.
Putting Content First
Content is the most important element of your virtual event. Carefully consider what you want your audience to take away. It might just be an update of information your customers or prospects will find important; it might be a company-wide update.
Webcasts work across the entire customer journey; so it’s important to decide what you will cover in context of where your audience is in their own journey. Webcasts are a very effective format to move prospects all of the way through the sales process and turn them into buyers.
The best way to start with content planning is to begin with the end in mind. Start with an outline to gather the most important points you want to make, flesh out those bullet points, and then create slides with strong images to support those points.
Once you define your outline, create your story visually. Think like a movie producer, not a writer. You’ve already created your “movie script” with your outline. Now you need to bring that script to life through visual storytelling — not text-heavy slides.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently updated its “No-Fail” Formula for Creating Awesome Webinar Content. CMI recommends the following four steps:
1. Pick a narrow topic
2. Decide on the best format for the topic.
3. Create a structure
4. Write a compelling script on the topic
Bottom line: as with offline events, virtual events require event planners to put content first. Plan early. And capitalize on the digital format to engage and inspire your audience.
Download Our Guide
For more information on mastering a virtual event, download our Guide on Webinars, Webcasting and Virtual Events. This guide provides you with all the insights you need to create close emotional bonds with your audience at scale, get high attendance and engagement, faster and more cost-efficiently than you would with an offline event.
The guide builds off the expertise of Investis Digital Live, which is our is our in-house Webcasting, Webinars, and Live events service. We support more than 750 global events a year through a team of dedicated professionals and our proprietary technology solutions. We are the event experts.