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Summits are an essential part of any organization’s growth strategy. But organizing and hosting an in-person summit can be quite daunting. You have to send invites, book halls, print collateral, and arrange for catering and accommodation. And that’s a lot of money and materials down the drain.
These costs and geographical limitations have encouraged organizers to up-skill their summits through a virtual environment not only to increase networking opportunities but also to bring people together irrespective of their physical location – hence forming virtual summits.
Contents
A virtual summit brings together industry experts, business leaders, and speakers together online. All these experts talk on or discuss a specific topic. Attendees also register online to attend these summits. The main difference between physical and virtual summits is that physical events use an actual auditorium whereas in virtual summits a virtual auditorium is available for the attendees. Online presentations are leveraged to communicate ideas. Virtual summits are considered very useful for sparking discussions and problem-solving.
Looking to attract attendees without geographical limitations? One of the easiest and most effective ways is through virtual events.
Potential audiences are always spread around the globe, and it becomes challenging to reach every one of them.
In-person events cost twice as much as virtual events – well if you can avail yourself of the same benefits or more within the budget how can you refuse? Through virtual summits, the overhead costs are drastically reduced. As a result, you don’t need to charge high registration fees or ticket prices to break even. Lower prices make your event more accessible, which means more registrations.
Additionally, you and your attendees can build strong relationships with industry leaders and experts based around the world. Through virtual summits, you not only get to build your brand and solve real world problems, but also get an opportunity to build influencing networks and global communities.
If you are looking to sell a product or service, one of the most important aspects is to make sure that your potential customers trust your brand. For this purpose, you may want to speed up your brand awareness activities. Because if people haven’t heard about you or your brand, chances are they may not buy from you and may take a long time before they can decide whether to trust you or not.
Virtual events give you a chance to make some noise about your offerings. And when the noise is combined with word of mouth from industry experts – the success is immediate. Moreover, a virtual summit organized around your brand and the problem that it is solving can help you position yourself as a market leader in the industry and that too on a budget.
Virtual summit hosting platforms come with many in-built features and one of those features is the ability to make sales during the event through exhibit booths. For example, vFairs offer cart options with the custom booth environment, through which organizers can close sales faster by processing orders right through the virtual summit. These shopping carts help you see an instant ROI.
If you are looking to host a successful summit online, and excited about it, then you should know some of the basic yet important steps about how it works.
The first thing you need to do is identify your goals. why are you hosting a virtual summit? What do you intend to get out of it? Maybe you are looking to generate more email subscribers or secure leads – it can be anything. But at the end of the day, you have to be clear about what you are looking to achieve. You should be able to answer the what and the why. Some common goals of virtual summits are:
You need to make sure that your plan aligns with your event purpose and goals. Some important things to consider while planning is:
Anyone can arrange a zoom meeting or a webinar and call it a day, but hosting a virtual event that looks and feels like a physical event is the real deal. In order to ensure high engagement rates, you require a hosting platform that offers all the features you need to stand out. Look for a platform that offers the following features:
For a better understanding of our offerings, browse the vFairs virtual summit.
Now that you have decided on the virtual event hosting platform and familiarized yourself with the features that it offers – planning your summit’s format becomes a lot easier. In this step you will decide if you want to run a sole virtual event or a mix of both – live and virtual also known as a hybrid. Do you want to go with live event sessions or pre-recorded? If you choose to go with live events, your attendees can network with other industry professionals and experts in real-time through live Q&A but if you decide to go with pre-recorded on-demand sessions, catering to different time zones becomes a lot easier. The choice is yours!
No virtual summit or event is complete without speakers. That is why speaker outreach should be a top priority for you. Invite influencers and industry experts that best fit the goal of your virtual summit. You can also utilize LinkedIn to connect with industry leaders, build relationships and invite speakers to your summit. Remember to highlight the benefits of mutual collaboration such as more exposure, high authority in the market, and more email list subscribers.
The last step before launching your event is to create exciting and meaningful content. Pro-tip is to plan and design content way ahead of time to avoid missing out on anything and avoid delays. You would need:
To host a successful summit, you need a service provider to help and guide you throughout the process. The service provider in your case is the virtual event hosting platform – The pricing of your event depends on the kind of features you need, the numbers of attendees, and the level of service.
For example, hosting a simple webinar with few attendees and chat options will cost much less than one with the 3D interface, gamification features, and dedicated support. But generally speaking, you can expect to spend somewhere around $10,000 to up to $50,000 or more.
The normal duration of a virtual summit can fall somewhere between three and 10 days. This duration helps enhance attendee knowledge on important topics and solve the main problem statement.
But the right duration always depends on the scale of your event. If it’s a small-scale event with 30 to 50 attendees, the summit can span from one to three days. However, if you’re reaching a global audience with more than 10 speakers, the summit may take more than five days to
Games such as spin the wheel, trivias, and quizzes excite attendees and keep them engaged. Speaking of, vFairs offers amazing opportunities to enhance attendee interest and spark curiosity throughout the event through activities like leaderboards, scavenger hunts and trivia to incite a little competition among your event attendees within your virtual event.
Give your attendees a chance to understand your brand even better through two-way communication during a Q&A session and offer an interactive summit experience through live polls.
Give a chance to your sponsor and exhibitors to network with attendees through one-on-one chat options using video, audio, or text chat features. Allow attendees to schedule meetings with sponsors and exhibitors during the summit through meeting schedulers to reserve their spots.
Your virtual summit needs an enticing event page with eye-catching and engaging images. Plus, it should have all the essential details to create pre-event hype such as information on your speakers, your event agenda, and list of sponsors. Among other things, vFairs also designs attention-grabbing event landing pages to drive sign-ups.
Branded booths are a game-changer, be it an online conference, webinar, or summit. Through an immersive virtual booth, exhibitors can boost their visibility. Additionally, vFairs lets exhibitors insert their videos and upload all their content including marketing collateral to the booth for maximum reach., attendees can download the content into their virtual briefcase and email it to themselves for future reference.
You can host live, semi-live, or on-demand webinars with live Q&As. This will give your speakers more flexibility. You can also make the webinars available on-demand after the live event days.
The impact of social media is huge when used the right way. Plus, social media is considered crucial for marketing and running promotional campaigns. Therefore, consider adding a social media integration to your event to boost audience engagement.
vFairs has been helping global businesses organize striking virtual summits and conferences over the past few years. They’re fulfilling their marketing, sales, training, and corporate communication needs with the platform.
Want to know how to get your virtual summits right with vFairs? We’ve put together a vFairs online summit tutorial for you.
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Sadia Mehmood
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