Online and Live Events are part of our life. We register to an event upfront, than we reserve the time in our calendar. Eventually we go and spend the time in the actual event.

As an online event organizer, you are spending a lot of time to plan the event. This means planning the time, reserve the actual place were the event will take place and create appealing content, interesting speakers and preparing marketing material to attract users. Than creating a funnel of emails that the end result will be a payment for participating in the event.

This seems like a lot of work.
It is a lot of work !

Now, would it be nice after all this effort to increase the number of registration for the event. It also will be nice, if it was possible to increase the number of participants although the event is fully booked. This seems non realistic approach, how can you increase the number of participants in an event, if all the seats in the event are taken?

OK, The next 4 steps are the outcome of 3 years experience with live events. We learned that you can increase your event engagement by 40%. We normally advice customers to use this 4 steps method. Not only it increases their website engagement, some customers also take the extra mile and leverage this steps to increase their revenues.

1. Parallel Event Engagement

We all know that an offline event should have an online presentation, This sounds like something we read constantly in an online promotion book.
But, what that means? What do you need to do to make your offline event also an online one?

Lets try to define the basics first: In your offline event (a convention, lecture…etc), people will come, seat in their chairs and wait for the “show” to start. Your Offline event will start soon. The room is full and you only wish you could have ordered a bigger convention room with more seats.

Well, if you think out of the box, you actually have those seats available, You have even more seats than you reserved in the convention room. Those are virtual seats.
Now, the questions is, how can you set your online seats available for customers?

You will need to have 2 items to create a virtual seat. You will need to embed those in your HTML, so make sure you have full access to your webpage.

• A Live video stream of the event. This is pretty easy to broadcast from your event. There are many online broadcasting tools that you can use, like live stream or even using Youtube broadcast.
• The second items you need to add to your html page is a live chat room (a group chat). It will be located next or under the live stream. Note, it is important when adding a live chat to a live stream broadcast, to remember that load of chat rooms are much higher than normal html. Make sure your choosen chat room can handle the load. We recommend not to install a chat room software in your server unless you are absolutely sure your server can handle the load. Of course there are many chat services that take the load off your servers. Bonus tip: If you can custom the look of your chat than you can make it look as integral part of your page or site.

So what’s now ?
Now you basically done. It is set, your additional seats are ready for your event.
With adding the page to your offering, people will be able to join to the live event and even participate in the conversation, ask questions and send remarks to the event owner or the current lecturer.
Bonus tip: Some events managers, choose to present the online chat in a giant screen behind the lecturer. This is so powerful and encourage people to be active in the conversation.

Now for the extra, It is possible to leverage your new virtual seats to your benefit.
There are 2 options to use your new seats.

• FREE – you can add the page with combination of the chat and the live stream to your website and let anyone that is interested in the event topic, to enter the chat, and view the event.
• PAID – you can place the page behind a payment screen and let your users buy their seat for an online participation. This can increase the revenues dramatically as the number of online participants is much higher than offline participants. Note, best practice, sell your online seat in less than 40% of the original price, that will make your seats populated easily.

2. Combined  Event Engagement

Now that you set up your page with the live streaming and the chat room. You can increase the engagement even more for your offline participants. Let the offline participants to join the live conversation and send question to the live chat room.

As an event planner / owner, you have the option to print a banner in the entrance of your event. The banner will include a big QR code that will take your offline participants to the event chat room. Then they may log-in to the chat room. This will let participants in the event talk to offline and online guests. They could send questions to the chat room that will be shown in the huge screens. This will help speakers in the event to “sense” their audience and address their questions and concerns.

3. Analyze your event transcript

Your event was over. How was it?
The best way to asses the event success is calmly analyze it when all is cooled down.
Now you have the time to check when people have asked, complained or even praised during the event.

If you took step one and two, you have valuable information at your hand. You can analyze the outcome of the event, the questions that are being asked and what you need to improve for the next event.

4. Best SEO and for FREE

Now when all is over, you have left with a huge amount of data, the virtual events chat room transcript. Not many know but the chat transcript is highly targeted data. It contain highly targeted keywords your audience and customer used during the conversation. This is the exact same keywords, your potential customers will use to find your “online wisdom”.

What that actually means? What I can do with it?

Best practice: You can export the conversation into HTML, The transcript contains the keywords you need. Than add this HTML (after cleaning it a bit from unwanted sentences or phrases) to your website.

Since the event was targeting people from a certain domain, than the keywords are associated with your site. Google will scan them and will mark them as important.
The result will be, increasing your SEO rank.