A successful virtual event is the product of many parts working in harmony. The event’s structure, content and interactivity can all influence performance. But each part is tied together by event design.
Effective virtual event design can make the difference between a virtual event’s success or failure. It is responsible for making a strong first impression, helping users find the content they’re interested in, and ensuring maximum accessibility.
This guide will tell you everything you need to know to design a virtual event successfully.
The Growing Importance of Virtual Events
Virtual events are a growing force in audience and customer engagement strategies because they offer the opportunity to deliver powerful interactive content to a broad, remote audience.
Compared to in-person events, which can be costly and complicated to set up, virtual events can be facilitated by user-friendly virtual event hosting platforms, making them accessible to businesses of all sizes. They also provide the opportunity to learn from in-depth event analytics, which can fuel new marketing or engagement strategies elsewhere in the business.
These factors make virtual events one of the most exciting developments in event marketing for decades, and the capabilities offered by virtual event platforms like ON24 are constantly developing.
Understanding the Importance of Innovative Design
Virtual event design isn’t just about aesthetics – good design is a key part of keeping attendees engaged and achieving event marketing objectives. A well-designed virtual event journey, with consistent branding, effectively integrated interactivity features, and thoughtfully constructed user journeys, can boost audience experience, maximizing the value of a virtual event.
The design of an event can be just as effective as the content itself at keeping users engaged, but, to understand its importance, there are some key things to know first.
Evolution of Virtual Events
While virtual events are more popular now than ever before, they’re not a new concept. In fact, they’ve been around in one form or another since 1993, when a tradeshow organized by the Visual Data Corporation was broadcast live over the internet.
Virtual events grew in popularity over the following three decades, benefiting from rapidly increasing internet access and advances in live-streaming technology. Over that time, the virtual event format evolved to meet changing audience expectations, with better event design capabilities helping businesses create more immersive and engaging virtual events.
Impact of Design on Attendee Engagement
The quality of virtual event design is correlated with attendees’ engagement level. Better-designed events with well-branded visual interfaces and seamless interactive features encourage participants to get involved and can lead to better commercial outcomes.
Examples like Drift’s #RevGrowth Virtual Summit event showcase how effective event console design can make the most of an audience. Their design utilized a pre-event soundtrack, clickable GIFs as calls-to-action (CTAs), and lots of cleanly integrated branding elements.
Pre-Event Design Considerations
Good virtual event design doesn’t come about accidentally — it requires thoughtful consideration in the event planning process. These are the most important things to do before you start designing your event.
Setting Clear Objectives
Establishing clear event objectives is a critical first step, influencing every subsequent stage of the event planning process, including your design choices. Decide what you want to achieve through your virtual event and consider the implications of design. For example, if your objective is to generate leads, your event design should be oriented around strong CTAs.
Understanding Your Audience
A well-developed understanding of your audience’s needs and preferences will influence how you design your virtual event. Identify your core target audience and use research methods like surveys or polls to discover what they expect from an event. You can use these insights to make design choices like what content formats to use and how many interactive features to integrate.
Choosing the Right Platform
The design capabilities you’ll have access to for your virtual event depend largely on the platform you choose. A dedicated event hosting platform like ON24 will offer the best selection of design tools, with many options for customizability in terms of both aesthetics and functionality. This will ensure you can properly apply your brand identity and integrate many interactive features.
Designing Engaging Content
With planning out of the way, you can move on to designing and creating content for your virtual event. These tips will help you ensure that all of your event content is optimized to maximize audience engagement.
Crafting Compelling Visuals
Although the most important part of a virtual event is the content itself, the way it’s displayed can have a big impact on how impactful it is. Create a clean, cohesive design that aligns with your branding and use multimedia assets like images, GIFs and videos to add some visual interest. Most importantly, focus on how your CTAs integrate with the rest of the content, aiming to fit them in naturally and seamlessly.
Incorporating Interactive Elements
Interactive event features like polls, quizzes and live chat functionality can enhance audience engagement, boost their event experience, and give you more opportunities to collect useful data. These features should be integrated directly into your event rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Think about where they make the most sense in your event schedule and how you can seamlessly build them into your design.
Enhancing User Experience (UX)
Optimizing your event for UX allows your audience to get maximum value from your content without being distracted by confusing or cluttered design. Focus on making navigating the event content simple and remember to pay attention to virtual event accessibility guidelines. This will ensure that everybody can engage with your event, regardless of their tech know-how.
Innovative Design Strategies During the Event
Encouraging audience engagement during an event is a key part of keeping people interested in your content and achieving your objectives. These innovative design strategies can help you drive more engagement.
Dynamic Presentation Formats
While slideshows are the standard content format for virtual events, using other, more interesting formats can help keep your audience interested and engaged. Live speaker slots, pre-recorded videos and product demonstrations all offer dynamic ways to deliver your event content while keeping things fresh for your audience and preventing their attention from lapsing.
Gamification and Engagement Techniques
Designing your event around opportunities for audience participation is one of the best ways to maximize engagement and ensure your audience has a great experience. On a basic level, using interactive elements like polls and quizzes can get your audience engaged. But advanced techniques like gamification can take engagement to the next level. Try implementing competitions or in-event leaderboards to get your audience truly involved in your event.
Immersive Experiences
The design choices for your virtual event should extend beyond the content itself. Taking a holistic approach by ensuring that event landing pages, content hubs, and follow-up content are all stylistically aligned with the virtual event helps create a cohesive user experience, boosting your brand’s impression on your audience.
Also, use content personalization techniques to ensure that each user gets presented with relevant content that meets their specific needs.
Post-Event Design Practices
Post-event activities are an important part of the virtual event process, helping you to make the most of the engagement generated during the event and learn from the data you capture. These are the most important steps to take when your event is finished.
Follow-Up and Engagement Strategies
Following up with your audience after the event has concluded offers an opportunity to maintain momentum toward achieving your objectives. Send a post-event email summarizing the key takeaways and providing additional content to explore to generate more engagement and continue nurturing leads.
You can make this process even more effective by personalizing follow-ups to suit specific audience segments and delivering hyper-relevant content based on engagement data captured during the virtual event. Remember to uphold the design principles you used in your event in all follow-up communications.
Data Analysis and Insights
Dedicated virtual event hosting platforms like ON24 provide access to comprehensive event analytics dashboards, unlocking valuable data that you can use to make your next event even more successful. After your event has concluded, delve into the data to find useful insights and consider how to apply them in your next event.
Metrics like engagement rate with key interactive features and average time spent in the event can help you understand how well your event design contributed to overall performance. If you notice poor performance in particular areas of your event, focus on improving their design for the next time around.
ON24 is a virtual event platform that offers a broad range of tools to help you plan, create, and host powerful and engaging virtual events. Get started with the platform today or get in touch with one of our virtual event experts to learn how ON24 can support your business.
