Prospective virtual show organizers want to discuss
- how others are using it
- the recommended duration
- what the look and feel is like
- best practices in launching and running a virtual trade show
- what the price is
- what the technical requirements would be for users to enjoy the virtual venue
- that they are talking to other vendors.
Prospects rarely address the most important matter: Will your virtual trade show adapt to our branding needs? Do we have the freedom to dictate the experience that we would like our users to have as virtual participants? Will our virtual venue look just like every other venue out there? Can you serve tailored visuals that make sense to our audience?
The key to a successful virtual event strategy is for it to
- extend your brand, and not the brand of the convention center where you held your last face-to-face event,
- position your virtual events in a way that will only grow related legacy iniatives, and
- be self-sustaining so that it breaks even or makes you money in your virtual event, or brings you other measurable returns.
To make the virtual event your own, no matter who your virtual trade show provider is, ask the following additional questions:
- Have you studied our website or our past events?
- What do you understand about our branding and mission?
- What do you know about our target audience, and what might appeal to them?
- Do you know who our customers are?
- Do you know what is going on in our industry that we are considering a virtual event?
- When can we do a user-experience conference call with some of our exhibitors, sponsors and attendees included?
- Are you open to building a completely new navigation just for our show?
- Will you let us mix and match some of the tools and content that we already own or rent internally?
- Can you designate one person to be on our weekly internal conference calls as we ramp up our event?
- How will you partner with us to position our virtual event for the long term to grow our face-to-face events, while simultaneously growing our brand?
I have been on conference calls where the prospects, armed with a certain budget, have simply interrupted our salesperson asking to jump right into a visual of the virtual venue - wanting to know how much glitz can be bought for the budget, with absolutely no sensitivity to the virtual venue as a branding mechanism. The best and most effective virtual events are the ones that are tailored to your user-base. You, as the event organizer, know your audiences best. Not the technology provider. We do not do cookie-cutter virtual shows because when done that way they are difficult to wrap effectively around an event organizer's branding needs. Virtual events created with a branded user-experience in mind have a higher chance of repeat users, and with repeated usage, participants climb the learning curve faster to start enjoying the content as the technology that once seems to crank away soon begins to gently fade behind the scenes.
Consider creating a Virtual Venue User-Experience (UX) Task Force with representation from various users, and of course the technology provider. When you thus take ownership of your virtual event brand, you will see a positive impact not only in word-of-mouth, but also through the grass-roots generation of ideas on what would be the most logical next step for your virtual event program.
