Covid-19 has had a huge impact on our lives, changing dramatically the way we live, shop, travel, work and, consequently, the core business of many industries.
Big events and live trade shows are for sure among the sectors which suffered most from the pandemic and, consequently, had to literally reinvent their way of doing business.
That is why a huge number of trade show organizers are now switching to digital trade shows.
Digital events: what do they bring to the table?
Contrary to popular belief, a digital trade show is not just an exact copy resembling the physical one. They are similar and yet very different: for instance, digital events can be accessed from all over the world, eliminating problems such as reach, capacity and the majority of costs attendees and organizers usually incur.
In times like these, they also represent the best way of conveying value content without health and public safety issues. From the comfort of our homes, Covid-19 is not so scary anymore. On top of that, compared to their physical twins, digital events are more traceable and have specific metrics that can be monitored to further assess ROI.
However, setting up such an event or exhibit in one is no easy task.
Let’s have a look at what elements play a fundamental role, and why we should keep an eye on them.
Content is King
In order to keep your attendees engaged, visitors and exhibitors alike, information stream should be top notch quality. No one would bother looking at a screen for several hours if what you have to say is not perceived as useful and interesting.
Producing good content is, however, only the first step: all material, be it video, presentations, software, etc., should also be tailored to your viewers, and always available on demand (so you can capitalize on latecomers).
Tools like live chat and private chatrooms should be freely accessible in order to boost connections and online business meetings between attendees.
On demand
Based on the target audiences the digital trade show is addressing, there must be a choice of content streams, videos and conferences.
A precise schedule should be communicated with live updates on what is actually going on in all sections of the event.
If you are a speaker, or someone from your company is, ensuring a final moment dedicated to Q&A will make the audience feel taken care of, nurturing leads you already collected during the presentation.
To meet the needs of indecisive viewers who cannot decide which conference to attend – while in a physical event they would be eventually forced to choose – digital trade shows give a powerful opportunity: 24/7 availability.
All content should therefore be available on demand the days after the event.
Measure ROI
One of the best things of taking part on a digital trade show is that everything is traceable, and therefore… measurable!
KPIs, online time, customer journey, number of leads and any other metric you can think of could be potentially monitored to assess performance, and measure ROI for future strategies. Needless to say, in a much easier way than in any physical event.
If your company is particularly data-driven, you can even tap into real time reports and analyze your performance outputs along the way.
