Knowledge advances through experimentation – and for virtual events, there’s never been an experiment quite like the last year. At LinkedIn, we’ve had a front-row seat in this virtual events laboratory. We’ve seen brands making innovative and ambitious use of LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events to reach wider audiences with new, designed-for-digital experiences, expanding the scope of what an event can be.
We’ve also been enthusiastic participants in the experiment ourselves. LinkedIn runs a lot of events, for different audiences at different stages of the funnel. From the start of 2020, our events teams around the world threw themselves into recreating events we’d already planned as digital experiences, rewriting our events calendar for the year and coming up with new models and formats to support our sales and marketing teams.
We’d love to be able to tell you that these experiments turned out exactly as we planned; that we worked out how to tap the potential of virtual events from the start and that there were very few mishaps and wrong turns along the way. But we’d be lying. Our virtual events lab has plenty of scorch marks on the ceiling and broken glass beakers from the bright ideas that didn’t’ work out as we expected – and that’s the way it should be. We’ve found our way to a formula for getting the greatest value from virtual events – and it’s a formula that we firmly believe in, because we’ve got first-hand experience of what doesn’t work as well as what does.
I’m writing this post to share the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Those lessons draw on the experiences of every LinkedIn events team in every region where we operate. We’ve used them to create our LinkedIn Events Pocketbook, which is packed with useful data and ideas to help put your future events strategy together. We’ve also distilled them down to seven stress-tested insights – the principles that we’ll be applying to virtual event planning going forward:
1. Event marketing expertise still matters
Since almost everyone knows how to host a Zoom call, it’s easy to assume that anyone at your organisation can host their own virtual event. In the early stages of the pivot to virtual, we saw this democratisation of events as our big opportunity. We created ‘How To’ guides for hosting events for our sales and marketing teams and encouraged them to get started nimbly organising virtual gatherings as and when they needed them.
What happened? We quickly ended up with our events marketing specialists being overloaded with requests to fight fires and solve unforeseen problems. This involved everything from how to set up a panel with different participants to whether a chosen event platform would allow for breakout rooms, to the question of how you add interactivity by sending breakfast boxes or coffees to people’s homes while remaining GDPR compliant.
Just because virtual events don’t involve booking venues or arranging suppliers to provide in-person experiences, doesn’t remove the need for specialist event marketing skills. If anything, it makes them even more important. You need to be able to master a range of technical skills, form partnerships with new types of suppliers and keep innovating with a close eye on the audience experience and engagement levels. The first and most valuable lesson that we learned was to approach virtual events with the same level of planning and attention to detail that we do for in-person events.
2. Don’t overload the audience – or your own team
One of the big upsides of virtual events is that they demand less of your audience’s time. However, this quickly becomes a big downside if you use it to cram more events into your calendar – and overload your audience with invitations. Once again, the apparent accessibility of virtual events can easily turn into a trap. Just as it’s easy to assume that anyone in your organisation can run a virtual event, it’s also easy to assume that virtual events are the obvious solution to any sales or marketing objective.
As the first year of the virtual events pivot went on, we found our attendee numbers dropping as people became overloaded with Zoom meetings, virtual drinks – and event requests from ourselves and others. We adjusted by looking at every campaign and asking if an event was really the best way to deliver on its objectives. By the end of the year, we had reduced the number of virtual events we were running by half – and greatly increased the attendee numbers, show rate and dwell time.
3. Plan campaigns, not just events
Returning to a slower-paced, more intentional events schedule meant that we had more planning time to get sales and marketing aligned – and helped us to create proper campaigns to maximise the value of each event. We could see other event marketers doing the same, in the way they used LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events. Many successful virtual events benefit from promotional campaigns running up to a month before the event itself. And one of the most worthwhile investments you can make is planning an extended life for event content through social video cuts and on-demand viewing hubs. It’s not unusual for the number of views that an event generates to treble in the 48 hours following the event itself.
4. Keep runtimes concise
Attention works very differently when someone is watching an event stream on a laptop to when they’ve set aside a day to attend a conference. Like many other event marketing organisations, we learned this the hard way. When we first pivoted our planned in-person events to virtual ones, we kept to similar agendas and schedules. We found that attendee numbers and engagement levels often started strong but dropped off as initial attention waned and distractions competed for our audiences’ screen time.
Based on our initial learnings, we put a limit of two hours (and preferably 90 minutes) on every event that we planned, and asked most speakers to deliver what they had to say in 12 minute slots (think TED Talks but just a little shorter). We set aside breaks in the schedule to allow virtual attendees to take comfort breaks or grab a coffee too. When you’re delivering an event through video, your audience expectations are shaped by TV – and you don’t get many TV shows running for longer than 90 minutes.
This worked spectacularly well. The more tightly controlled we kept the length of our events, the more attendees we had and the higher the engagement levels we generated. For Spark, a virtual event to energise our Sales Solutions customers for the year ahead, we kept to our 90-minute runtime while still packing in 25 speakers, including high-profile names like Shonda Rhimes and Barbara Corcoran. It produced some of the strongest NPS scores that we’ve ever seen for any type of event, virtual or in-person.
5. Keep sales pitches out of the event content – and plan for sales conversations instead
The dynamic of virtual events (shorter runtimes, greater accessibility, the potential for larger audiences) makes them particularly suited to the upper funnel, where they can reach, engage and entertain people at scale. However, to play this role effectively, you need to be disciplined about keeping sales pitches away from your event content – and focus on value for your audience. Use your virtual event as the trigger for sales conversations rather than a substitute for them. Incorporate breakout rooms with account director experts, add follow-up roundtables for exclusive exec audiences – and encourage sales reps to invite their contacts for virtual follow-up coffees and chats. The more closely you involve sales in the planning of your event, the easier you’ll find it to integrate these elements within the overall event campaign.
6. Add interactivity wherever you can
How can you replicate the experience of being at an event when your audiences are watching from home? The short answer is, you can’t. It’s a far more productive use of your time and resources to design different experiences that are unique to virtual events, but still elevate the live experience above simply watching a video. We’ve found that you can often deliver a more personalised experience for someone watching on-screen than you can for hundreds of people sitting together in a room. We’ve sent personalised mugs and coffee-making kits in advance, set up game shows with attendees competing for the best Halloween outfit, asked live DJs to warm things up before we get started, invited audiences to vote on what we should cover and included real-time polls throughout events. And we’re not the only ones. Nike created personalised welcome pages for attendees of one of its recent virtual events – complete with a tailored message from keynote speaker, Serena Williams.
7. Set the right targets – and plan the right nurture streams
Because virtual events contribute to revenue in a different way to in-person ones do, it’s important to adjust your approach to measuring effectiveness and ROI – and respond to metrics in a relevant way. We’ve focused on reach and engagement KPIs that reflect their top-of-funnel role, such as registrations, live and post-event views and peak concurrent views. NPS is a key metric and we often add qualitative questions on the event experience to help optimise our approach. Virtual events can generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) at far greater scale than in-person events do. However, these are likely to need more nurturing and qualification on their journey towards becoming opportunities and revenue. We measure MQLs from our virtual events, but also monitor carefully the rate at which these convert into sales-accepted opportunities.
Our virtual events journey has taught us many things – but arguably the most important lesson of all is that virtual events aren’t just something you put together because in-person gatherings aren’t possible. They’re at their best and most valuable when you plan them to be more than that – to succeed on their own terms. There are obvious things that you can’t do when engaging people through a screen rather than in a shared room – but there are many other things that you can do more concisely, more impactfully and more innovatively. We’ve discovered these through the many experiments that have succeeded over the last year. And like lots of other event marketers out there, we’re looking forward to more experiments to come.