Rising costs and dwindling budgets are making it more and more difficult for business marketers to run events. Today, instead of hitting the road many companies are hitting the Web. E-Centric recently talked with Don Best, director of marketing for virtual events provider Unisfair, about the pros and cons of hosting gatherings online.
E-Centric: Are clients mainly gravitating towards virtual events because of the cost factor?
Best:Cost does play a big part in it. One of our clients completely eliminated doing road shows in favor of one virtual event. They said it was 50-80% less expensive. Another client is in the process of doing a 15 city road show. They took some of the less performing cities out [of the schedule] and augmented [their coverage] with a virtual event. They’ll still have the intimacy with the 100 or 200 people in those cities, but now another 500 or 1000 people who couldn’t attend in those areas can now attend virtually. Another large client had a corporate mandate that they had to reduce their event spend by 20% this year and 50% next year, so they now do their sales and marketing training virtually.
E-Centric: What types of virtual events are the most popular with which types of clients?
Best: For media clients, going into the virtual events business is a natural extension. That was our sweet spot up until two years ago. And now the enterprise companies that sponsored those events are now starting to do events on their own. Media clients love to do trade shows and job fairs, while enterprise clients use us for demand generation and partner showcases, things like that, as well as internal training.
E-Centric: Are there sorts of events that work virtually better than others?
Best: It really depends. The technology is there to make it work. It’s not really the type of event but more the effort that goes into the event. It’s like this: In the physical world, you can rent a convention center for three days. But if you don’t dress up the hall and have the content and the speakers you won’t have a good event. Out of the 500 events we’ve run, sure, some have been duds. And we’ve developed best practices and shared them with our clients.
E-Centric: What do you advise clients not to do?
Best: Don’t not put any effort into it. Because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are three components to any event, real world or virtual. You’ve got to generate compelling content, you’ve got promote it to generate an audience, and if you want to have sponsors, you need to recruit them. Those three components take similar efforts as in the physical world, but here, you’re eliminating the physical logistics.
E-Centric: How are clients tracking the ROI of their virtual events?
Best: For demand generation, it’s the number of people who registered and then attended. When you come into an event, the organizer knows everything the attendee is doing. If they watch four conference sessions on CRM and if they go into the CRM booth and download five pieces of collateral on CRM, if they have communication with the booth rep in the CRM booth, the organizer can see they are really interested in CRM. At the end of the day, attendees can be ranked by interest.
E-Centric: How long do the virtual events typically run?
Best: Generally, you see a one day event as a promotional focal point, with prize giveaways and live interaction. There’s a virtual buzz around it. Then, the event is available on demand for a time period. Take Cisco, for example. Cisco is building an ongoing environment called Cisco Partnerspace. They want their partners to collaborate and create synergy. This is open all the time. Cisco holds periodic live events, but the rest of the time the partners and the public can come and go and gather information as they need. It’s not like Second Life where they want you to go live. It’s a B-to-B professional atmosphere—they know their clients have real lives. The analogy in the physical world is that instead of renting a convention center for a week you rent it for a year and do what you want with it.
