Читать книгу Event Success - Alon Alroy - Страница 17

According to a study we conducted in 2020, 68 percent of event marketers believe it is more difficult to facilitate networking opportunities when hosting virtual events, 67.7 percent struggled to maintain engagement, and 52.5 percent were challenged by the logistics of virtual events.

Up until this point, our entire industry was built around face-to-face human interaction, whether on stage, on the exhibition floor, or after hours. Organizers faced the immediate challenge of replicating those interactions, and many are still struggling to overcome this. Keeping virtual audiences engaged, especially during a pandemic that forced many to work from home, was especially daunting. Event organizers have long enjoyed the benefits of a captive audience, but suddenly found themselves competing with everything from incoming emails and phone calls to a dog barking or baby crying in the background. Furthermore, event teams are experts at facilitating in-person experiences, from booking venues to managing logistics, but producing a virtual experience often requires different skills and different tools. Despite these challenges, however, both virtual and hybrid events (which contain elements of both in-person and virtual experiences) offer a range of benefits.

According to our research, 60 percent of event professionals pivoted an in-person event to a virtual format as a direct result of the pandemic in 2020. That year, 80 percent of event organizers said they were able to reach a wider audience with virtual events, more than half increased the number of webinars they produced, and 71.5 percent say virtual engagement tools will play a major role in their event strategies moving forward. In fact, 65.5 percent said their budgets will increase, and 93 percent plan to invest in virtual events in the future.

Virtual events are relatively less expensive to produce than their in-person counterparts, and the shift to a virtual format will dramatically increase their reach. They are also powerful data generators, providing valuable insights on attendee engagement patterns, potentially offering clues to buying behaviors.