Online and hybrid events give you flexibility to reach more people in engaging ways. Use our step-by-step guide to plan and execute a successful virtual event of any size or scale.
Online and hybrid events give you flexibility to reach more people in engaging ways. Use our step-by-step guide to plan and execute a successful virtual event of any size or scale.
Whether you’re affected by travel and venue restrictions or simply looking to bring your event to a larger audience while saving time and money, there are a number of reasons to host virtual events.
When your speakers and attendees can join from anywhere, it creates amazing opportunities for networking, knowledge sharing, teaching and learning, and connecting on a more personal level.
If you are hosting in-person events, you can still add a virtual component to expand your reach. Hybrid events create an experience that in-person and virtual audiences can enjoy together.
Enhance engagement
Asking the right questions will allow you to build a strong foundation for planning and making decisions, from choosing the right speakers to figuring out how and where you should promote your event. Here’s a list of questions to get you started.
Knowing your target audience will help you shape your entire event experience, from your agenda and schedule to the content you provide.
Consider what value you can bring to your audience in terms of content, networking, and other opportunities.
Immersive, interactive, collaborative — think about how you want your attendees to engage with the content, speakers, and other event-goers.
Whether you want to educate current customers or find potential leads, understand your goals and objectives and create a strategy around achieving them.
For first-time virtual event planners, we recommend no less than four to six weeks for most events. Give yourself at least 12 weeks for a large, multi-day online event with concurrent tracks.
Engage your IT team (or hire a tech expert early on — Zoom Events offers event experts to assist customers with setup, planning, rehearsal, and live support) and include them in all your meetings to identify technology limitations, recommend solutions, test, and fix issues.
Allocate budget for attendee acquisition and marketing, content development, speaker fees, attendee gifts, and video and audio equipment.
Metrics will vary depending on your event objectives, audience size, industry, and type of event.
A few to consider are:
Make sure you set up ways to track metrics that are most important to you.
The right tools will make planning easier and help your event go more smoothly. Depending on the experience you want to provide, research and select your tools in the early stages of planning so you can make the right decisions for your event and be more efficient with your time and efforts.
Zoom Events is a virtual event platform for hosting single-session, multi-session, multi-day, and multi-track events. Zoom Events builds on the functionality of Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars by adding dedicated event hubs, robust registration and ticketing options, and attendee networking to all of your event types (public or private, free or paid). You are able to publish your events to a private or public hub to make it easy for attendees to join.
Deciding whether to use Zoom Meetings or Zoom Webinars for an individual session is an important choice. The right solution will allow you to design an experience that meets your objectives and ultimately results in a successful event. Zoom Events users can easily choose which one to use for an individual session within your event.
When planning a larger session, you may want to use the webinar option for keynotes, guest speakers, and entertainment (think main stage) and the meetings option for breakout tracks and smaller roundtable discussions.
Consider these three key factors when choosing between a meeting or webinar format:
Combination of Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars with one ticket for attendees and a networking Lobby.
Do you want participants to interact with each other, or do you want the focus on your presenters?
If you want the audience to be on video, speak, or share their screen, then go with Zoom Meetings.
If you want the event to be view-only, where the host controls which attendees are seen or heard, then go with the webinar platform.
Attendees you know (e.g., employees or customers) often pose less risk of being disruptive and may want the interaction that Zoom Meetings offers. Zoom Webinars is a better choice for events where you’re dealing with large groups of unknown attendees, because it gives you more control over factors like who can speak and be on camera.
Breakout sessions
Attendee roundtables
Focus groups
Smaller, interactive trainings
Networking sessions
Keynotes
Main stage presentations
Live event entertainment
Product demonstrations to a large audience
Town-hall-style panels
Zoom Webinars are great for single-session, one-to-many presentations. If you purchase a Zoom Events license, you also get all of the benefits of Zoom Webinars and more.
You may choose to host Webinars from the web portal versus setting up the event in Zoom Events. Or use Zoom Events to add to the capabilities of Zoom Webinars to connect multiple webinar sessions and combine them with Zoom Meetings for longer, more interactive virtual experiences. Zoom Events includes complete event management with features like branded events hubs, registration and ticketing, and enhanced reporting. Check out the dedicated FAQ for Zoom Webinars.
Some examples for when to consider hosting a single Zoom Webinars from the web portal include training, presentations, and single session/one to many events.
Use Zoom Events for longer and more involved events like sales kick-offs, customer events, town halls, and employee onboarding.
Integrate Zoom with your existing tech stack to run your online event more efficiently.
Want to charge for your event? Use Zoom Events and connect with PayPal or Stripe to streamline the payment process.
What makes a good event? It’s all about the experience you give your audience.
An online event can be so much more than sitting at a computer viewing a live feed or video. If you’re taking an event that’s usually in person and transforming it into a virtual experience, be creative and thoughtful in bringing some of those interactive elements online.
From pre-event prep to the live experience, see how you can build interactivity and engagement into your event.
A virtual event should have a quicker pace that keeps attendees engaged and helps prevent drop-off.
Use the Zoom Events lobby to allow registered participants to connect and network before and during your event. Set up and promote topics with all participants two weeks before the event to start a dialogue and pose questions to encourage attendees to interact.
What would your attendees have received at an in-person event? Send it in the mail or with a delivery service for a happy surprise.
The Q&A feature allows attendees in a webinar to submit questions for live or written responses during the session. Here are a few tips for using Q&A during a webinar:
Get real-time feedback from your audience or gauge their level of understanding with the content you’re presen event and launch your pre-set polls during the session.
Use tools like Slido, Kahoot!, or a “wheel of names” to bring more fun and interactivity to your event.
Let attendees engage with each other in smaller groups during your event. You can assign attendees to Breakout Rooms in real time, pre-assign attendees, or allow them to self-select which room they want to join and move freely between rooms.
All you need to know about Zoom Breakout Rooms.
Send a post-event survey to collect feedback after your event. If you’re using Zoom Webinars, you can set up the survey to launch automatically after your guests leave the session.
Sign up for the Introduction to Zoom Events webinar
Request a demo with a Zoom expert.
Running a successful online event is a team effort! You’ll need to prepare your speakers and have your event team aligned to make sure everything runs smoothly. Run through our event checklists to ensure you don’t miss a beat.
Send speakers a kit with everything they’ll need: a microphone/headset, ethernet cable, ring light, and webcam. Put together a folder of digital assets with a virtual background template, event graphics, and sample social media post copy, so they can promote their session to their network.
You can design the most amazing event experience in the world, but if you don’t take the time to promote it, your target audience won’t know about it. Create assets that allow you to market your event effectively and drive attendees to your website to learn more.
Start promoting your online event at least two to three weeks ahead of time to drive registration numbers. Don’t forget to create source tracking links for webinar registration to see which marketing efforts are most effective.
Send marketing emails and reminders. A/B test your subject lines and consider two to three mailers prior to the event to maintain awareness. Consider using video content in emails to get prospects and registrants excited about the event.
Content marketing enables you to tell the story of your event, provide information, and go more in-depth than an email. Use the right keywords to increase organic traffic.
A press release and media outreach highlighting notable speakers and other compelling details can get your event in front of more eyes. Put together a media list with industry publications and look for outlets that cover events like yours to reach your target audience. Be sure to offer interested reporters invitations to the live event.
Get followers buzzing with an event hashtag, graphics, and social media campaign. Don’t forget about ads and boosted posts to go beyond organic reach.
Create visual assets and sample social posts partners and speakers can easily use, like a graphic template they can tweak to add their name and session information.
You’ve done the planning and prepping. Now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty: hosting your event. From the dry run (absolutely necessary!) to the big day, here’s what you need to keep in mind.
Schedule a dry run about one week before your event with your production team, event hosts, speakers, and anyone else with an active role, to address any issues before the big day.
Dry run checklist: Everything you need to go over
Provide your speakers and panelists with tech setup tips so they’re prepared to look their best.
A webinar practice session lets the host start the webinar and allows only the panelists and co-hosts to join. Give your speakers a call time to join 10 to 20 minutes earlier than the event starts so they can join the practice session, test their audio and video, and troubleshoot last-minute problems before broadcasting live.
Only hosts and co-hosts can click the Start Webinar button during a practice session. This action cannot be undone, so only click the button once everyone is ready to go live!
Try to launch your webinar a few minutes early to allow attendees time to join before the program starts. If you want to play welcome music, make sure it’s royalty-free.
While attendees are joining, this is a perfect time to make sure your meeting or webinar settings are correct. Check to see if you’re recording and livestreaming to the proper platforms, and start the livestream if it’s not automatically enabled. Also ensure Q&A settings are correctly enabled and that panelists and co-hosts have the right permissions.
Kick off your event with a short housekeeping announcement letting attendees know whether the webinar will be recorded, how to submit questions, and what the webinar is about. Don’t forget to thank speakers and sponsors!
Keep Zoom Events, Zoom Webinars or Zoom Meetings support pages open to quickly troubleshoot issues on the fly. If panelists come across any issues, chat privately with them on the Zoom client or the in-session private chat feature.
That’s a wrap! Once your event is over, that doesn’t mean the work is complete. Take a few extra steps to collect feedback, leverage recordings, and follow up with leads so you can get the most out of the event that you worked so hard to execute.
Capture feedback from attendees on what worked well and areas for improvement. Use the survey to collect the Net Promoter Score from attendees for the overall event and for each session.
Edit recordings and transcripts, and make them available on your website or event page. If you like, you can gate the content to collect user data from viewers accessing the recordings.
Send an email to attendees with a link to the event recordings and additional resources.
If using Zoom Events, review your Event Summary dashboard, generate meeting reports, which provide data on registration and polling, or webinar reports, which provide data on registration, attendees, Q&A, polling, and event performance.
Leverage insights from reports to qualify leads and utilize the key integrations mentioned above to funnel leads to sales.
Make your next online event even better than the last by assessing what worked and what didn’t. Utilize attendee data and feedback from the reports, as well as any speakers and panelists, and track engagement with your content and other event features.
Want to learn more? Contact our sales team to get started with your virtual event today.