The success of your virtual event may rely upon how well you engage your audience. Learn how to engage an online audience to maximize your virtual event success.
Audience Engagement refers to the level of attention and involvement that an audience has with a particular piece of content and is used as a measure of success in your virtual events (and lots of other things like social media, movies, TV shows, or live events).
Virtual event organizers like you, that are focused on engaging with your audience at a high level, will get more people to think about and then talk about your events because they are getting more out of it – they are engaged with your content.
On the contrary, events with no audience engagement don’t create much buzz and are largely forgettable. Audience Engagement IS NOT getting your event participants to say “hi” in chat or maybe answer a polling question that lacks relevance because they don’t create an impact or generate feedback.
Let’s get beyond the basics of audience engagement for virtual event organizers and step past a few tropes to help you sharpen your tools.
Engagement can be measured in a number of ways:
Audience engagement is important because it helps you, the event planner, content creator or marketer, understand how well your content is resonating with your audience and can provide you with insights that encourage improvement.
Overall, the key is to track a variety of different metrics and to gain a holistic understanding of your audience’s engagement with your content.
As a virtual event organizer that is focused on audience engagement, you have the potential to drive revenue and influence your brand’s reputation. Ignoring audience engagement comes with a number of negative consequences for you and your team.
For content creators, ignoring audience engagement will result in future content that fails to move your audience, leading to lower viewership or attendance at your events. That translates to lower advertising revenue and potentially some damage to your team’s reputation.
For marketers, ignoring audience engagement will result in promoting content that fails to properly address your target audience, leading to a waste of marketing resources and potentially damaging the brand’s reputation.
The best approach will depend on the specific content and the event requirements and your audience.
Strategies for engaging a live, online audience may include:
Use of these engagement tools deliver the best outcomes when their use is frequent and varied. Truly captivating content may offer points of engagement as often every 1-3 minutes and make use of a blend of verbal, visual and system prompts to keep participants actively engaged.
Engagement strategies before and after your event may include:
At EventSpace, we encourage you to enhance your virtual audience engagement strategies in a thoughtful manner. Add new tools and tactics with expected, observable results in mind. Audience engagement generates the crucial data for your programs to keep them relevant and on target.
Get in touch with us to learn how EventSpace can help you to achieve your audience
engagement goals.