Here are 3 options to consider when you decide to go virtual with your events. 

• Use a light weight webinar tool (Zoom, MS Teams, Skype) and combine it with an agenda
• License a virtual event platform (Glisser, ON24)  and create a virtual environment in-house. 
• Hire an agency to deliver a virtual event and benefit from the additional services

1) Light weight webinar tool

This option is great if you have a tight budget, but you want to deliver targeted live sessions to a smaller audience. If you want to extend the scope beyond a single webinar, you can come up with an agenda for the whole day and communicate it well in advance. With interesting speakers, and engaging topics this is a good start to urgently communicate on new products or to keep presenting yourself as a thought leader. 

The downside is that you will have difficulties to host such events at scale. From an analytics perspective you can only measure how many attendees you have had. More specialised webinar software such as Gotowebinar will further tell you who attended through personalized link invitations. You can also integrate Gotowebinar with a Marketing Automation Software to build pre-event reminder emails and post-event thank you communication.

The downside of all tools in this category is that you are stuck with the Webinar label which is often associated with laggy powerpoints and Sales heavy product pitches.

Estimated costs: 0€ – 5000€ per year

2) License a virtual event platform

A real virtual event platform – often also called an attendee engagement tool – can take your Webinars to the next level and make them more holistic. As opposed to traditional webinar software, you can have your own branded virtual environment structured into multiple virtual rooms each having their own running agenda.

During the live sessions these platforms offer engagement tools such as polls, Q&As, live slide sharing and live chat within a room or across the whole event. The video streams themselves are most of the time embedded through common video conferencing platforms or through live video of Social Media channels which is fantastic to leverage the power of LinkedIn Live. ON24 offers its own video stream backed up with in-house bandwith to add additional reliability of a stable connection and increases data security and privacy.

Another big advantage is the high quality engagement analytics you can pull out of these tools. They will have a record of each individual’s clicks, downloads, questions and other behaviour data – perfect to deliver your Sales team an overview of all the warm leads. Finally those environments will keep existing beyond the live sessions. You will have on-demand event content which will exist 24/7/365. You can have engaging live session with a long lasting on-demand content hub.

Integrations with your CRM or Marketing Automation Tool are often included as a service to your annual subscription. In some cases your CRM provider has a native integration such as the partnership of ON24 with Microsoft Dynamics. This will sync both platforms out of the box, and your Sales reps can find valuable event engagement data from day one. A CRM integration is ideal to prove ROI of the significant investment you need to do for such a solution.

Estimated costs: 20.000€ – 150.000€ per year

3) Hire an agency

A lot of common Marketing, Digital Marketing, Event or PR agencies will have a way to deliver a single virtual event. There are also numerous agencies which are highly specialized on virtual events.

They can offer their clients expert consultations and will have access to numerous virtual event platforms – each fitting slightly different requirements of their clients. Services include a custom virtual environment design, access to a physical video studio, platform training for the speakers, tech support during the event and reporting after the event. More advanced services can be the development of a native app and the setup of a registration micro-website.

An agency is great if your event is urgent, you want to keep your risk of failure low and you need manpower to reduce workload of your in-house communications team.

Cost for each event: 5.000€ – 100.000€

Virtual events in a nutshell

All three options are legitimate possibilities depending on the nature of your event, the number of attendees and your available in-house resources. No matter which option you choose, you should know that both – platforms and agencies – face incredibly high demand right now. That’s why they can be picky with their clients and prioritize the most profitable requests.

Therefore you should carefully challenge the potential vendor on the level of service which is added on top of the virtual environment itself.