3 Things to Consider When Going Online with your Events

The shift to digital is real, and I doubt that this shift will reverse. Especially the longer we are in this special situation caused through the pandemic. This will have long lasting effects on our businesses. Businesses need to lead this digital transformation for their own benefit.

One business that is very hard hit is the event industry. But instead of looking at the event industry per se, I would like to think about the businesses who need events to gather their employees, customers, followers, the media and other groups to influence their business outcome. This need has not gone away, it still stays the same: Through an event, I want to communicate with other groups and hence want to influence. This is true for basically EVERY industry.

Just the way how you do it has changed. 

When you preach to your own folks

This has now shifted towards tools like Zoom, WebEx or Microsoft Teams just to name a few. As a matter of fact each of these - of course - has its pros and cons but those platforms are effective tools to get the job done. They do a good job for the day to day work, but not for staging an event, a new product launch, demonstrate a major initiative. These platforms not necessarily offer the excitement that you need.... That sparkle....

When you want to excite

You need to dig deeper and come up with a strategy and a tactic how to move forward and how to establish yourself NOW. Apple is a very good example for this. For their developer conference they not only created a page that served as an invitation platform and during the event as an event platform, but the platform is still around as a point of reference. But they did not stop there. They produced a stand alone app that serves as a hub to create an even deeper link between them and their developers. Those developers are often independent souls, freelancers and of course they need a camp fire to come together. So Apple offered them an app for this. 

Instant communication, feedback and ultimately a direct sale

Social Media, like an Instagram, can be a very good tool, if you want to communicate and highlight your product to a circle of brand lovers, followers, who are already open to the brand. Instagram Live for instance is a tool that the beauty industry has discovered: From co-operating with influencers, to brand-lead beauty tutorials, to individual spa owners who highlight their services and products, the beauty industry embraced Instagram even faster and pivoted towards this channel. They even found ways to use their formats to sell: From coupon codes redeemable on their websites, to swipe ups to buy, there are numerous ways you can sell your products.

These 3 examples show that we as businesses should not focus on how we reached out in the past, but embrace what the new digital event scene could offer us. I am pretty sure that event organisers are already pivoting towards concepts on how to support companies in their communication efforts, despite main stream media reports on who ailing the event industry is. Yes, the event industry how we know it might be a thing of the past, but a lot of industries embraced change in the past years and got stronger. So let's digitally transform the how events are done, to better serve businesses out there!