Events have always housed the sophisticated group of people talking their ways through troubles and how they achieved success.
If you have ever attended in-person events before the pandemic, how many attendees have you seen speaking or engaging with the speakers in real-time? Events are mostly conducted in a broadcast manner where speakers keep talking about their accolades and the attendees are simply present.
But the events where attendees equally participate, ask questions, and interact with speakers, give rise to a community of people. You may wonder, how is it possible to form a community virtually?
Virtual events are fun and can be made more exciting compared to in-person events, enabling to form multiple communities. You can come up with various tips and tricks to keep the community alive and interact with each other.
In our latest blog, we share some insights of how you can improve the community experience while conducting virtual events.
Organize events that interests the community
There are many events from different aspects of life taking place online, but you must be aware of the interest of your community people. Understand what they love to talk about, what they like listening to, and then give them an opportunity to join a kick-ass event.
Before you conduct an event, make sure to research well, plan the content and the theme, the list of your speakers, and other details that will interest your community.
Launch your community early
If you want to build a solid community of experts, then launch your first event soon. Once you have all the details about the attendees, you will have enough time to nurture them and lead into a funnel.
This way you will give the community time to adjust to the environment and agenda. Plus, they can also feel confident in voicing their opinions, which could be great for you to plan on your upcoming events.
Choosing the right event management platform
Your efforts to community building depend on your event management platform, mostly. The choice of your platform must be based on your audience type and persona. The platform must be compatible to host your community and cater to your requirements.
Goldcast is an excellent event management platform that is easy to use, customizable as per your brand, and provides an intuitive viewing experience.
Sync the event dates to the calendar
In today’s virtual world, you can’t expect attendees to manually save the date for the upcoming event. It is up to you to sync your event date to their calendars. Where most people now use Google calendar or Outlook, it is easier for you to sync the dates easily.
When you send an online invitation to your community people, they can simply add the event with a single click, and Goldcast lets you add the event to their calendars in less than ten seconds.
By scheduling your event dates to their calendars, you give the participants enough time to get themselves ready for the big day. This also avoids the conflict between the participants available times.
Include a companion post always
The companion post is a great way to give a snippet about the event and what it could turn out to be. The companion post encourages more attendance from the participants and, in some cases, leads to referrals. This unique page can also be used to provide a quick recap of the entire event along with a feedback email for your email marketing efforts.
Make sure to keep this page witty, interactive, and fun.
Collect feedback
How much ever busy you may be, feedback is the one way to keep your community engaged and make them feel important. After every event, create engaging feedback forms and send them across to all your participants.
Ask them for genuine feedback and also let them suggest a few ideas that may be in demand. Also, implement the feedback you collect from your participants and acknowledge the change to your entire group.
Let them feel valued.
Provide exciting content
Get creative with your content. The type of content you use during an event must not be implemented when conducting events for your community. Let the content be more fun, let the community engage with each other, use gamification, create breakout sessions.
While organizers try to implement the above techniques, when it comes to creating content for a known and interactive community, you must show what difference you can make.
Your content should provide them value and make them stick to your community. If anytime your content sounds monotonous, you may risk losing people from the community.
Get influencers
Influencers are a big part of marketing efforts today. While we understand that there are many such influencers online from different fields, it is important that you discuss with your community first before bringing in an influencer.
People might have different preferences, so give them some time to settle on a common ground. Once you have a name, start making your efforts in grabbing more eyeballs to the event.
Afterall, growing your community is no harm.
Content marketing efforts
To grow your community and nurture them, you always don’t have to conduct online events. At times, you can simply implement content marketing techniques to keep the community engaged and happy.
Share with them some insightful blogs, E-books, social media images, content snippets. Don’t just depend on one source of entertainment for your community. Perform multiple efforts and techniques to nurture and grow your community.
Stay connected after the event
When you are building a community, don’t give up on them post events. Your responsibility to keep them happy begins after the event. During an event, you can keep all your participants happy and engaged, but after the event, you must nurture them until the end.
Share with them recording from the events, key takeaways, content snippets, ask for their feedback, share insights, and keep their eyes hooked to your brand and community.
Conclusion
Building a community takes time and efforts. Once you have an audience joining in, you will have a better picture of your target audience and their needs. Craft your events as per their insights and expectations and engage with them on a regular basis.
