Unshuttered: Top Tips to Reopening a New Economy Through Hybrid Events

Focus on the journey, and the destination.

While the world is carefully starting to open, it isn’t likely to go back to the pre-shuttered lockdown that was 2020. For the events industry it offers a unique opportunity and challenge.

As we still face restrictions around travel and budgets, all events including trade shows, conferences, job fairs, training, product launches and even weddings, worship or speed-dating are all ripe for a virtual or hybrid experience which merges in-person participation with digital elements. But they require the right platform and understanding of how-to increase engagement by displaying products and services correctly to drive attendees to sessions, events, and booths. It’s a process, not a one and done activity.

Tips to maximize a return on experience for every attendee:

Understand Your Audience

Virtual audiences require more than just packaging up your convention center event and trying to replicate it online. They have different needs. It’s so much harder to keep audience attention and focus through an online event when the attendee is 5 inches away from the off switch. It requires an interactive experience to not only raise attendance but keep people engaged once they get there. The key to humanizing an event is first understanding the audience make up and that each attendee grasps and absorbs information differently. The hybrid experience needs to market to the senses, allowing for various kinds of learners – visual, auditory, or kinesthetic – to fully connect them to your message.

Develop Your Pre-Game

You’d never organize an in-person event without telling people about it. This isn’t field of dreams – build it and they will come. They won’t. Attendees are craving engagement after 15 months of near isolation. By providing attendees with pre-show materials, downloadable collateral, and on-demand content to help them learn more about the exhibitors and their organizations will help build their event journey and increase your sponsorship potential. Offer short, meaningful training through videos and surveys to understand exactly what they’re looking for to earn their attendance and ramp up their excitement to join.

Personalize Every Experience

By creating an interactive experience through Augmented Reality promotions and advertising enhances the learning experiences and product visibility. Deliver engaging experiences through in-session polling, live chat and Q&As, gamification and contests. The attendees will be engaged and the follow up will be tailored to their specific engagement while providing quality data to the coordinators, sponsors, and exhibitors. Win-win for a positive ROI.

Nextech AR Broadcast Video on Vimeo

Virtual Experiences Inspiration on Vimeo

Extend the Post-Show Customer Experience

A big upside for virtual and hybrid events is the ability to have a global presence, extending the geographic reach beyond who your typical audience would be. Not everybody is up at 2 am be able to join and participate in their session of choice. Expand your post-show reach by ensuring you’re able to reach additional prospects through multi-language options and that your platform of choice has a mobile companion application so those that couldn’t be there live can be there on any device via LiveX.

Nextech AR LiveX provides the platform to empower you to create events that inspire. Join Chris Burton, SVP Customer Experience at NexTech AR Solutions in the Digital Event Theatre with 3D AR Ad Network President, Hareesh Achi during International Confex for their keynote session titled “Restarting Our World with Augmented Experiences for the New New Economy; discussing how technology and AR are changing how we live, work, shop learn and play as we move beyond the COVID pandemic. With Nextech’s technology, International Confex will be the largest Hybrid program for the event industry.