4 Strategies for Making Virtual Events Worthwhile for Sponsors and Exhibitors

During the pandemic, virtual events were the only option. They kept the industry afloat, gave event professionals a whole new digital marketing skillset and opened up new avenues for engagement and community building… but not everyone flourished. Some sponsors and exhibitors struggled to derive value, especially from trade show formats. 

Today, virtual is not dead but is often added as a compliment to live events, which have largely come back in force. Virtual continues to represent a powerful revenue stream for event organizers, but how can they convince sponsors and exhibitors?

This post will explore the real pillars of virtual event value and ways to both deliver and demonstrate engagement with their brands.

1. Thought Leadership Content

During the pandemic, the real value for exhibitors was the opportunity to address new audiences at scale. These audiences were hungry for knowledge and insights about how to navigate massive shifts. We are once again in an era of unprecedented change to the way we work and operate; people are once again looking for that guidance.

Virtual events are optimized for content accessibility. Virtual sessions are designed to be consumed online and can be streamed from any device at an attendee’s convenience. They can replay parts of interest, take notes, participate in chats and leave questions. 

Living online also gives these sessions a much longer potential lifespan than an in-person session recorded from afar with small figures, blurry faces and potentially suboptimal audio. Stova can even help event organizers identify points of interest to curate that content on demand, which can be a significant boon when it comes time to chop it up and serve it on social media.

2. Virtual Real-Estate

Branding on the event capitalizes on virtual’s massively increased reach – but the real-estate value depends on the traffic (as with a physical event). The hard truth: Nobody is scrolling through exhibitor profiles or exhibitor listings. The real value of those things is as a way to deliver contact information when an exhibitor has made contact elsewhere.

Instead, here are areas to focus on: 

• On-screen branding during streams (e.g. lower thirds)
• Branding around chat and networking hubs
• Branding during virtual activations

And the fact that virtual value carries on engaging after the event means even more potential for branding on socials that continue to promote virtual event content. Beyond the live stream itself, it’s important to consider and quantify the exposure on demand. Stova’s comprehensive analytics gives event organizers this information in real time, giving them an additional excuse to reach out to sponsors and exhibitors throughout the year as the brand exposure accumulates.

3. Incentivized Engagement

Virtual events are more than just glorified webinars. With tools like Stova, attendees can engage with sponsors and exhibitors in meaningful ways.

Interactive demos give attendees an opportunity to gain hands-on experience with new tools under the guidance of the people who developed them. This offers them a unique experience to learn best practices from experts and to access real-time support as they navigate systems they may not be familiar with. And the ability to do this with multiple vendors within a category at the same time makes comparing solutions a lot easier.

To make the experience more interesting and less transparently salesy, consider having a trusted industry influencer with a reputation for tech expertise host a workshop where they showcase a number of solutions they’ve already learned. These add a ton of value for sponsors, who get the added credibility that comes from a third-party endorsement without having to host the session themselves.

For sponsors and exhibitors who want more face time with prospects, another way to incentivize one-on-one meetings is to offer exclusive product trials, early access to features (e.g. by forming a beta testing club) and using event gamification. 

In fact, event gamification can help you set up a strata of incentives to motivate all kinds of actions, from watching sessions to networking with other attendees and, of course, engaging with sponsored content. The way it works is by assigning point values for different actions taken that can be exchanged for rewards. For example, you could assign a point for every exhibitor an attendee interacts with and then give everyone who meets a certain threshold a bundle of extended free trials. Exhibitors get value both from the one-on-one meetings and from being featured in the bundle.

4. Creative Activations

Virtual engagement doesn’t have to be limited to watching speakers in a lecture-style format. Take lessons from other virtual-first platforms and industries, like video games and social media. 

The key is to make these experiences interactive. Take a page from streamers on platforms like Twitch who are engaging with whatever they’re reviewing but also responding to commenters in real-time (and often accepting monetary gratuities from the audience at the same time). Create more of a conversation by having an expert lead a live stream where an audience can ask questions and provide commentary in real time, rather than reserving all their questions for a designated period.

Another way to make the audience part of the experience is to bring virtual events into physical environments through, for example, home deliveries or localized group activities. During the pandemic, many event organizers would send care packages to their attendees with branded kits full of swag they could post about on social media. A creative way to incorporate sponsors beyond the branded SWAG is to send them kits that contain items related to an activity, like ingredients for a group cooking class or cocktail networking hour facilitated by a sponsor. Attendees could get randomly paired with a sponsor rep who teaches them a cocktail recipe and gives them 5 questions to ask about any subject related to the sponsor’s offering.

Similarly, local group activities that rely on the virtual event platform offer a way for people offsite to participate in an in-person experience without having to organize a whole separate event. For example, you could partner with a restaurant and create a networking zone with an exhibitor at each table. Then, using the virtual event platform or mobile event app, offer attendees in the area QR code for a free meal between 6 and 8pm. Attendees would then be seated with other attendees randomly and dine for free in exchange for hearing a pitch. To keep things going, you could then use the mobile event app as an ice breaker to deliver timed conversation starters.

It’s important to remember that, even though these activations are fun and creative, they should always have a focal call to action to engage with your sponsors and exhibitors – and should facilitate a moment of authentic engagement. The fun reward is an incentive to participate, but should not be a distraction.

Conclusion: The Analytics Are the Cherry on Top

“A huge advantage of digital sponsorships is that they are optimized for analytics. Recording attendee data is essential for proving ROI and informing any necessary improvements,” says Skift reporter Victoria Copans.

With virtual engagement – whether that’s over Stova’s virtual event platform on desktop or the mobile event app – everything is trackable. You can see how many attendees clicked a sponsor’s profile, watched a sponsor’s session, accessed a sponsored QR code, liked a sponsor’s comment. Everything is clear and packaged on the dashboard for easy reporting.

This not only allows event organizers to easily and reliably demonstrate a sponsor or exhibitor’s virtual ROI through quantifiable metrics, it also helps event organizers improve that ROI in real time. Using Stova’s event intelligence capabilities, event organizers can try multiple engagement tacks and compare how well they’re working as they unfold in order to adapt and pivot as needed. If an ad placement isn’t getting any traction, try moving it and see if it works better elsewhere. If a session on a given topic isn’t resonating, let sponsors know and give them a plan B. Real time data, if used correctly, can be a game changer when it comes to guaranteeing virtual value for sponsors and exhibitors.

Want to know more about how to sell virtual events to sponsors and exhibitors? Book a demo.