As an industry, we have a great handle on how to do both in-person and virtual events. However, it is only recently that hybrid events have become a reality that event planners need to navigate.
Before 2020—and the great virtual re-imagining of event experiences —simply streaming your keynote address online or adding a few lackluster webinars to your itinerary was enough to call your event hybrid. Expectations have been raised and hybrid events are under pressure to become much more sophisticated.
Use hybrid innovation to engage and impress on event day
You will know first-hand that there’s something magical about event day: the early start, the excitement of arrival and check-in, the happy exhibitors, the terrible coffee, the many conversations with attendees and customers, and the sore feet afterward.
These incredibly impactful experiences are what we call ‘moment-in-time’ events. The action happens over several hours and marketers build anticipation and energy around a single engagement.
Two of the most popular styles of hybrid moment-in-time experiences are:
- Simultaneous hybrid events: Present a simultaneous experience for virtual and in-person attendees where content is live-streamed from the event venue. This supports a virtual audience by providing access to the in-person action.
- Hub and spoke hybrid events: A central in-person event in a physical location—the hub—that additional groups of people join remotely. Spokes are used to coordinate smaller breakout activities that enable group discussion or networking.
No matter the style of your hybrid event, with a hybrid event platform you can improve how you execute moment-in-time experiences. Jomablue helps event organizers and marketers to:
- Create a variety of rich experiences across virtual and in-person touchpoints from one platform.
- Streamline every aspect of hybrid event delivery—including marketing, ticketing/registration, check-in, session management, exhibitors, surveys, and evaluation reports.
- Easily foster interaction between attendees (both live and online), sponsors, and speakers in ways that feel natural and using shared interfaces (rather than multiple platforms).
- Measure performance and gain insights across every facet of attendees’ experience in one place.
A new style of hybrid offers amazing continuity of experience
When you have the tools to support more sophisticated hybrid events, you can also create more impactful interactions across a broader window of time and space to positively influence how audiences perceive the event experience.
This is the next evolution of hybrid: events that extend over weeks and are delivered through a tailored mix of in-person and digital touchpoints creating a highly personalized journey.
Why should you aspire to this hybrid event approach?
- Hybrid events delivered over a longer timeframe build and maintain momentum with audiences pre and post-event to deepen your engagement and rapport with attendees, attract more attention to content, and build a sense of community.
- Hybrid event platforms like Jomablue let you understand how people are engaging with your content and interactive experiences, helping you apply data-driven marketing and personalization tactics as an event unfolds.
- This powerful continuity of experience helps to firmly distinguish your event in a person’s memory, and therefore their future impressions (and decisions) about whether to engage with your brand or organization.
How does it work?
Before attendees even set foot in your venue you can inspire feelings in them that can be deepened throughout the delivery of a significant ‘moment-in-time’ event such as a conference or expo, and further augmented by a range of touchpoints afterward.
- Before event day, you can bring people together for intimate workshops either in-person or virtually. Pre-event-day interactions are a great opportunity to promote event-day activity and shape the content to target key segments of your audience, creating clear linkages to forthcoming onsite activities. The best types of activities include:
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- Workshops on related topics or skills
- Networking/social opportunities
- VIP ‘behind the scenes experiences that tease the major event
- Media dinners that create interest and excitement.
- After event day, you can offer targeted activities based on an analysis of how attendees behaved. Jomablue’s platform captures and interprets data about how both in-person and virtual attendees interact with your experiences to help you determine who was highly engaged and the topics that appealed to them. Using this data you could invite your most eager audience members to:
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- Meet a speaker or attend a free webinar on a more targeted topic
- Participate in a product demo that matches their interests
- Learn more about your services or meet with a salesperson (i.e., lead nurturing)
- Network with like-minded people to debrief on event content
- Join sessions for ongoing collaboration or peer support.
Skilfully continuing your relationship with audiences beyond a moment in time, using a mix of virtual and in-person options, is an effective way to create a positive, lasting impression of your event and your organization.
Now is the moment to rethink your ability to deliver hybrid events
Running a more advanced program of hybrid events doesn’t have to be significantly more complicated when you adopt Jomablue’s all-in-one event platform.
By using the Jomablue hybrid event platform you can:
- Engage customers over a longer period with the support of streamlined, powerful features.
- Capture data and uncover deeper insight to reliably guide conversions and illustrate ROI.
- Provide additional, targeted customer touchpoints to move leads along the sales pipeline.
- Do more with your content with richer, longer experiences that give audiences greater choice.
Unlock more ‘wow’ moments and transform more of those moments into lasting memories with Jomablue—a platform designed to make it easier for event organizers and marketers to excel at hybrid events.
