With virtual events becoming a more popular option for companies, you need to come up with virtual event ideas that can help boost attendee engagement with your brand.
Many real-life events make for great virtual event ideas but this isn’t always the case. Some great event ideas (such as hands-on workshops or trade shows) still cannot be implemented as virtual events.
Since virtual events are more popular now than ever before, you need to think of ways to deliver a good user experience with the tools and digital environment you’re working with.
For this reason, you need to think of popular, trendy event ideas that can make for good virtual events that attendees will enjoy. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best event ideas that make for great virtual events.
Article Outline
Best 5 Event Ideas That Make For Great Virtual Events
Let’s look at five great event ideas that can be used for creating virtual events to help you boost attendee engagement with your brand.
#1. Pre-Recorded Sessions
Pre-recording live sessions and making them available for people who missed out on the main live event is a great way to keep attendees engaged.
Instead of attending a live event in-person, attendees can simply enjoy your pre-recorded session online. For instance, if you hosted a live event for a limited audience, you can provide a pre-recorded session of the live event the next day for attendees to view. This can help you boost engagement and your audience members won’t be disappointed that they missed the live event.
You can also provide users with pre-recorded sessions that have a comprehensive summary of all the topics covered in a series of live sessions. Let’s say you organized three live events in the past month. You can provide a summarized version as a pre-recorded session that highlights all the main points from the three events.
Additionally, you can also consider “gating” your content. This means that you can offer exclusive access to pre-recorded sessions. For example, only your members, subscribers, or past event attendees can access the pre-recorded session on your website. This is also a great way to incentivize people to sign up for your email list.
#2. Leaderboard Challenges
Leaderboards show a list of users who have the highest score. These scores can be earned through different challenges. The person who has the highest score is the winner.
By creating leaderboard challenges for users to complete, you can boost engagement on your website. Users can then complete the challenges to gain more points and make their way to the top position.
This means that they’ll be viewing your content, sharing your posts on social media, inviting friends to join events, or completing online courses – depending on how you set it up. By doing all of this, users will be rewarded points and a chance to be at the top of the leaderboard.
For instance, you can create a cooking training pack for users to complete, or host a cook-off challenge where users prepare a dish and share it on their social media profile with your event hashtag. These challenges will award points to users and the top winners will receive prizes for competing in the challenges.
By awarding points, you motivate users to go through more of your content, faster. It’s also a great way to motivate new people to engage with your brand.
#3. Giveaways
Giveaways make for great virtual events where you can give out free stuff to subscribers and followers. This boosts engagement and can help attract many new people to your business along the way.
Since everyone likes free stuff, you can rest assured that people will be willing to join your virtual event for a chance to win something. For instance, you can give away free membership passes, merch, or tech products. This will motivate more users to engage with your brand and join your virtual event.
To take things further, you might consider getting sponsors for the giveaway. By hosting sponsored giveaways, you not only boost engagement by giving out good, high-value stuff for free but this can also help you tap into another brand’s audience.
This is also a great way for non-profit organizations to gain exposure and boost engagement on their website. Giveaways can also help you raise funds for non-profit organizations.
#4. Virtual Concerts
Virtual concerts are a great way for people to listen to their favorite artists at their own convenience. Before the pandemic, you would have to physically be at the event venue to attend concerts. For many people, this meant traveling to a big city.
Now, all you have to do is register or buy tickets online and enjoy performances from your favorite artists from the comfort of your home. With virtual concerts, we have more opportunities to enjoy concert music that we may not ever have been able to see before.
Usually, bands already have a huge following behind them. You don’t have to worry about selling out concert tickets since plenty of people will be excited to attend the virtual concert.
It’s important to note that choosing the right streaming platform for the concert is important. Streaming it from a video feed won’t cut it. You need to provide a much more immersive experience for attendees.
#5. Award Ceremonies
Awarding your members for completing certain courses or programs in formal ceremonies can help improve brand loyalty.
You can award badges to users that actively engage with your brand and participate in events regularly. For instance, if somebody has been a subscriber from the very start, awarding them a “Golden Subscriber” badge is a great way to acknowledge them.
Similarly, users will be able to earn recognition by going through your content and completing exercises. Once they reach a high enough level, you could award them the “MVP” status that comes with perks.
Conclusion
Creating and hosting a virtual event can be challenging especially if you don’t know where to start. We shared some popular event ideas that make for great virtual events that you can organize to boost attendee engagement with your brand.
Event Espresso helps you organize virtual events by making it easy to set up online event registrations. It also lets you create an event website and host your virtual event using Zoom.
Check out our Recommendations for hosting virtual events with Event Espresso.
Ready to start hosting virtual events? Try the Event Espresso demo today!