Because we can’t gather in person, embracing and understanding virtual events right now is crucial to your sales strategy and business goals. In the end, we’re all attending and planning virtual events to make up for the inability to sell and develop customer relationships in person, right? Let’s figure out what you’re doing about sales in this virtual world, starting with your event website metrics.
Depending on your product line and sales strategy, you’re going to have different key performance indicators, or KPIs, to judge whether the event is a success. So, you want to look at what types of information you can get out of a virtual event, and what makes sense for your goals to prove ROI.
For one, there’s direct sales to consider. Could your product or service be sold through the event, using traditional Ecommerce? Should we build out a limited time run store, specific to this event? Can we actually sell access to this event?
Or, would a series of complex forms help to complete your sales process? And does your event feed into an existing sales portal already created elsewhere? This is, again, a website, so the data it contains can be passed over when necessary.
Obviously, we’re going to want to pull customer data at the end, but we want to know first what statistically is a KPI to you and what’s irrelevant data.
Is there an automated marketing platform synced up to this virtual event that we need to be able to pull and push data from? What from this event needs to feed your Salesforce, Hubspot or whatever CRM tool you use? How much of this data do you want in your CRM? Since there’s so many different things that we can track, we’re really going to need to fine-tune those KPIs.
Information like: How the attendees used the site, the total number of minutes spent in live webinars, live chats, live web calls, and who downloaded what information is pretty much table stakes in our minds. These are just a few of the metrics we can typically get from all live events. Depending on the complexity of your event, there’s other things we can see from the virtual event space. It really depends on what tools you pull in to best meet your audience needs and your company goals. There’s so much information that is available, depending on what you put into your virtual event, that it requires a long discussion when you start building.
We may read like a broken record in this blog series, but you’ve got to spend some time looking at how to measure your goals, and that should help you determine the tools you need to fill your virtual event space.
So, what’s the last piece of the puzzle to planning a successful virtual event? Check out the final blog in this series covering timeline and marketing considerations for virtual event planning, here.