Virtual Events have provided businesses with a way to consolidate their networking efforts in a digital environment. This way, they can turn these events into a bedlam of audience engagement & interaction.
Another valuable benefit that virtual events have provided businesses with, is the ability to access a ton of important attendee-related event data.
Right from the number of people that attended your event, to how long they stayed, where did they visit in the event, what activities did they enjoy the most, & which sessions did they most interact with. These are all data metrics that help you understand audience behavior.
Understanding audience behavior has many upsides; it can help you draw up better engagement strategies to ensure your attendees stay focused throughout the event.
So how do you get to know these precious attendee insights? With the help of a specific virtual event platform feature know as ‘data analytics’.
Data analytics help you understand various types of virtual event metrics such as audience engagement, audience retention, recurring audience, audience interaction, conversion rate, post-event form sign-up rates, & more.
By leveraging these analytics, you can design your events in such a way that appeals better to your audience & helps them engage with them.
Read the tips below on how to capture & utilize relevant audience data to empower yourself to host more engaging & interactive virtual events.
Study the Attendee Heat Map
Attendee heat maps in the virtual event give you an idea about the places that your audience spent most of their time at.
It helps you understand which spots became hotspots for attendee confluence, & which ones remained ignored & desolate throughout the event.
This data tool gives you valuable insights into attendee behavior during your event. Thereby allowing you to strategize the various aspects of your event in real-time.
Heat maps can also give you insight into individual attendee preferences, which empowers you to modify your event to suit their requirements.
And if this sounds like a winning recipe to you, that’s because it is! Designing your virtual event in such a way that it takes into consideration your attendees’ personal preferences. Is surely a way to dramatically increase audience engagement & event outreach, thus helping you meet your event goals.
See Which Resources they Downloaded the Most
A virtual event consists of specific resource centers where they can download any resources about the virtual event. The resources are shared by the event organizers & can include information about sponsors, brands associated with the event, as well as any other relevant information that pertains to the audience.
As with everything inside the virtual event realm, organizers can easily track the number of attendees that downloaded resources, as well as which resources were downloaded the most.
This helps you understand just what information your attendees are looking for, & which resources provide them with it in the best possible way.
You can also modify the resources that are not getting enough traction to better suit your attendees’ needs.
This can be done by making them more informative, concise, & easy to understand.
Another important factor to consider is how easily locatable the resource center is for your attendees.
This particular data insight can also help you understand if your attendees are running into any problems while locating the resource center, so you can change its location in real-time.
Include Your Attendees in Live Polls
Live Polls are another great way to engage your audience with your event. What most event organizers don’t realize is that live polling can also be utilized to understand the specific nuances of your attendees’ behavior & requirements.
By asking specific questions in your live polls, you can understand the exact requirements & needs of your audience.
In this way, live polls can also resemble a form of audience feedback.
You can modify your event strategy in real-time according to the answers received, & empowers you to host a truly engaging, interactive virtual event.
Live polls thus play a double role in ensuring attendee engagement. They help you understand your audience a little better, & also lets your audience feel involved, included, & connected with your event.
Live polls also help bolster overall attendee engagement & interaction, as well as let you in on the intricacies of your event audience.
Q&A Sessions
Q&A sessions have long been a way to engage your audience in the event proceedings. Whether physical or virtual, Q&A sessions provide interaction and engagement facilities to your attendees through which they can get in touch with you & the event sponsors.
More than live polling, Q&A sessions allow your attendees to feel a personal degree of involvement & engagement with the event.
They also become a way for them to interact with your speakers & sponsors, making it easy for them to form meaningful connections with them & have their questions answered.
Q&A sessions are also better at ensuring active audience engagement as your attendees are more likely to verbally interact with your speakers in these sessions.
They also help you understand your audiences’ preferences in a more detailed manner by providing you with more information than live polls.
Pre-Event Surveys
Pre-event surveys consist of specific questions that help you understand your audiences’ needs & preferences well before the actual virtual event.
Questions like what activities would they like to see in the event, which sessions are they most excited about, which speakers are they looking forward to in the event & more, form a part of pre-event surveys.
These questions target specific audiences and their exact event requirements, empowering you to design your virtual event in a way that better resonates with them.
You can also leverage pre-event surveys to uncover a specific audience nerve regarding any particular query you might have in mind.
This is especially helpful if you’re hosting a virtual event that caters to a specific niche of audiences, like art exhibitions, educational fairs, industry-specific webinars, etc.
Organizer/Sponsor/Speaker AMAs
While Q&As are known to provide slightly more personal conversational formats to event attendees, AMAs can be considered as an informal version of those.
As in Q&As, the questions posed towards the speakers & sponsors are more serious & business-like in nature. While in AMAs, the attendees are free to ask more personal, informal questions to speakers/sponsors/organizers.
This helps set a free conversational tone to the event, & allows your attendees to become more engaged & involved with the virtual event.
AMAs also help you get deeper insights into your audience behavior, along with understanding the exact mood/goals/needs/requirements of your audience.
Hosted in the right way, AMAs help you understand your audience behavior in a more intricate way by carefully observing the way they interact with the speakers/sponsors/organizers/exhibitors & formulate better strategies to engage them in real-time.
These data tools will help you understand audience behavior in a better way by capturing & studying relevant data metrics.
Event organizers can easily leverage these data tools for coming up with more engaging & interactive strategies to keep their event audience hooked.
