You’ve spent weeks, months, or maybe a year planning your event. You’ve overcome innumerable hurdles ranging from large to small. Budget. Finding a platform. Recording some sessions. Teaching your speakers how to live stream other sessions. Great job! 

There’s only one problem: The most critical part of your event is just beginning. 

Virtual conferences have unique features that allow them to last indefinitely. The ability to cultivate a community, gather essential data, and continue driving value with your content is a massive benefit of virtual events. Often, these opportunities offer you and your organization more benefits than your ‘live’ event days. Some platforms offer you only 15 days of On-Demand viewing, while others like vConferenceOnline offer you unlimited On-Demand opportunities for your events. Read on to see how you can capitalize on this significant opportunity for your virtual event.

Keep in contact!

Your virtual event created great connections between you, your sponsors, speakers, and attendees. This shared experience, along with the ability to continue networking after the event based on various profiles your attendees set up, allows you to continue building your community long after your ‘live’ event is over. 

Here are some options on how you can keep in communication with your virtual attendees: 

• Leverage social media networks by tagging your sponsors and speakers in your posts discussing the On-Demand continuation of your event. This allows you to massively expand your reach on those posts and continue driving revenue through your event. 
• If you’ve created a closed group for attendees, continue feeding that with information! This will allow you to stay top of mind when attendees prioritize which events they choose to attend. 
• Leverage email newsletters to continue communicating with attendees, speakers, and sponsors and drive the excitement for your next event! 

By keeping in contact with your attendees, you will keep your event strategy’s momentum generated already. It’s always easier to plan an event with momentum than without momentum!

Review your reporting!

Virtual conferences have phenomenal opportunities for data and metrics for those who enjoy reports. Most platforms offer you reports that can range from click-by-click to a generalized report showing how many people registered for your event. Ensure that your virtual event platform provides you with the reporting you need, especially if you offer continuing education! 

Here are some options on how you can leverage the reporting to help drive your event strategy forward: 

• Send out a post-event survey. For every event. Yes, even your webinars. The steady drum of responses that you will receive will allow you to improve your events for your attendees constantly.
• Review your minute-by-minute reports of the sessions. This will allow you to see which sessions had attendees stay to the end and which ones left 3 minutes into the session. This is a great way to review your presentation titling and descriptions to align with the attendee’s expectations!
• Ensure your sponsors received any of their sponsored reports. Most sponsors are looking for leads, and the more information they can have on these reports, the better! Make sure that you deliver these to your sponsors as a critical component of your sponsorship packages. 

Reviewing your reporting, both in-event and after-event, is a “must-do” following your virtual conference and can give you an unparalleled look into how your event went. 

Don’t leave your content hanging! 

You have put countless hours of effort into curating your event and ensuring that your sponsors and speakers put forth great content. Don’t let the content end up as a one-off and waste those precious hours. Virtual conferences and event strategies must have a content re-use plan. With a great program, you could end up dramatically increasing your revenue from your event while also positioning your organization as the industry leader.

Here are some options to ensure that you don’t leave content on the table: 

• Create a “best of” event that includes the top 3-5 sessions from your virtual event. You can have this as a gift for your members or the attendees of the main event, or you could market this as a standalone event with little overhead. 
• Create webinar series from related sessions. These will allow you to create evergreen revenue streams for your organization without the additional expense of creating more content all the time. 
• Plan for the on-demand content and create some content such as speaker interviews and behind-the-scenes videos. This will allow you to use these snippets to continue marketing the event even during the On-Demand period to allow your attendees to soak up as much information as possible. 

As you bask in the glory of your completed event, make sure to keep these three areas in mind. Without paying attention to keeping in communication with your audience, reviewing your reporting, and having a solid content re-use plan in place, you risk becoming another flash in the pan event that your audience may attend but will likely forget in favor of your competitors. 

Incorporating all of this with your other responsibilities can be a lot, so make sure your platform can support you through the duration of your On-Demand period and provide strategic advice to help you accelerate your event strategy. vConferenceOnline has the experience and the proven team to help you through your entire event cycle and has helped thousands of event organizers to rejuvenate their virtual conferences. Click below to see how we can help you to create a powerfully customizable online event!