Hosting an online seminar, summit, or virtual event needs tremendous hard work. Organizers have to ensure that attendees have a great experience and that everything runs smoothly. They want great ROI from these events.

It’s important to focus on what you should be doing to make the event a great success. However, organizers must also be aware of the mistakes to avoid. Your audience will resonate with the online event only if you have planned everything carefully.

That includes a detailed analysis of everything that could go wrong while hosting virtual events. From poor attendance to tech failures, being aware of these five virtual event mistakes will allow you to focus on engaging your audience.

Let’s understand them in detail:

1. Untested technology

Hosting online events brings certain technological challenges with them. It could be landing page glitches or poor internet connection. The last thing you want is your guests not being able to see or hear each other.

The whole purpose of virtual events is to connect individuals across different geographies and time. Not being able to communicate effectively due to technical issues doesn’t serve the purpose. For this reason, organizers must ensure that each host has working audio, decent lighting, and good service.

Troubleshooting the technology beforehand is the way to go. Even though you cannot control an electrical analomy that may interrupt the session, you can come up with a backup plan to avoid such disasters.

2. Poor production

Organizers are very well aware that engaging the audience is the biggest challenge when it comes to hosting virtual events. Poor production is equivalent to fixing another nail in the coffin. Your virtual event should flow seamlessly which means that you know what content will be up next and speakers are aware of when to chime in.

Being underprepared is surprisingly a common mistake. Everything should be properly rehearsed, scripted, and mapped out well in advance. You want to avoid awkward transitions, loading screens, and unnecessary wait times.

Apart from that, you can play pre-recorded videos if anything goes down or the speakers face a technical issue.

3. No promotion

The hallmark of a successful virtual event is the presence of all the attendees. It’s only possible with the right promotion strategy. In fact, relatively small online events necessitate 3-6 weeks for promotion. Even though planning an online event is essential, dedicating all the time to it is not the right strategy.

Before declaring the event date, you must dedicate a good portion of your time to both planning and promotion. Consider leveraging online ads, cross-promotion opportunities, email marketing, and social media marketing to reach a wider audience.

Your hard work can only be appreciated if the target audience is aware of your event.

4. Not choosing the right platform

Choosing an online events platform that does not meet the goals is another common mistake that organizers fall prey to. Because of the diverse range of event management platforms, they find it difficult to finalize the right one. Going for the cheapest alternative doesn’t bode well for many.

An ideal platform will offer innovative tracking tools and allow you to run everything smoothly from start to finish. With Beetsol you can offer the most tailored experience for your audience. Not just that, you can create multilingual pages to boost audience engagement.

5. Ineffective content creation

Many organizers make the mistake of too much or too little content which certainly takes a toll on audience engagement. For instance, if there’s too much content, the participants will most likely be looking for comfort breaks, lunch, or session changes.

On the other hand, if you have too little content, the guests may not feel like participating in it and will most likely be killing time. You have to find the perfect balance. The content should be enough to act as a hook for your attendees attention and to add value to the reason they joined the event.

Conclusion

By avoiding the aforementioned mistakes while hosting online events, you can make the event memorable for everyone involved. You need to choose the right event management platform, create engaging content, promote your event, troubleshoot technology, and ensure smooth production to get the most out of your investment.