Our online-only working has changed our expectations for events, and left us craving sensory and personal experiences. Digital storytelling has become a powerful weapon in our ‘online event’ arsenal, helping our brand messages to reach people across the world despite restrictions on travel and gathering. How will this shape the future of ‘offline’ and blended events?
Online events: the benefits and downsides
The online event has become a vital way of keeping in touch with clients and forming stronger professional relationships. They started out of sheer necessity, but there are actually some advantages of ‘going virtual’.
The benefits of online events include:
- Bigger (potential) attendance/reach
- Lower Costs
- Greater reach (no need to travel)
- On demand viewing (if you miss the live event)
- Budget-friendly (more available to invest in digital assets)
The problem is that online events need to be really engaging to keep the audience’s focus. This means holding interest with simple but resonant messaging, Q&As, polls, and immersive experiences using Augmented and Mixed Reality and Audio-visual technology. All these help to delight the participants and stop them from checking their inbox!
Giving your audience a distinctive, AMAZING experience will build excitement and foster that important emotional connection too.
What is the future of ‘offline’ events?
Online, virtual events are cheaper, impactful, and the return-on-investment may seem quite favourable – so there is a valid question of whether ‘offline’ events still have a future.
Of course, in-person, ‘offline’ events will be back, but they need to offer more to participants. The seal has been broken; people want the immersive digital experience, but also the human connection of meeting and chatting with colleagues in their industry or field.
The solution is the ‘Blended’ or ‘Hybrid’ event. These are live, in-person events that use immersive digital assets, combined with a strong online event.
Harnessing the power of digital storytelling with a Blended event
Blended events can have a more ‘selected’ physical audience, with a cosy and intimate setting. This fosters a stronger emotional connection. You should use digital assets like AR, MR and AV technologies to provide immersive digital storytelling experiences that will delight in-person delegates.
For online participants, there are a lot of distractions to compete with, so you need to really focus on this segment with well-polished online features too. Remember that many participants will watch later on-demand, so try to make it good enough that people will want to go back and watch it again (and show their colleagues too).
Blended and Hybrid events have big advantages:
- Fiscally prudent
- More engaging experiences
- Attract more participants
- More accessible
- Stronger digital storytelling (most impactful)
- Viewers can watch again later, on demand
With a scaled-down physical event, your blended experience has more available capital to invest in valuable, engaging and high-quality virtual content. You can also be really targeted with these digital assets and create different versions for each selected audience. It is easy to do this with Hyro’s storytelling software.
Time to tell your story?
A Blended or Hybrid event is the best way to tell your story, whatever it is. They can greatly increase your exposure with long-lasting digital assets that can be leveraged in multiple ways to form personal connections with larger audiences.
They can also be used to produce super-focused messages which resonate with selected groups. Your business can use these to grow and differentiate itself based on strong brand visuals and human values.
If you need help in creating custom digital content for a Hybrid or Blended event, Hyro is the first place to look. This softwareis capable of producing tailored, compelling experiences that will amaze and inspire.
