Unisfair

Bringing The Event To You

Some of the most important parts of business are making connections, following leads, and communicating with future prospects. Many companies participate in Expos, Conventions, Trade Shows, and many other eCommerce events for this reason. Today, business travel is on the decline and smaller companies are missing potentially valuable associations. However, many people are meeting and engaging with colleagues from around the world online.

Virtual events allow companies to connect in an online environment in a space that feels

similar to physical events. Attendees can watch online presentations and participate in live conferences without the hassle and costs of travel and scheduling.

Unisfair have been the pioneers of evolving virtual events and online venues for 10 years.

Joerg Rathenberg, VP of Marketing, Answers A Few Questions About Virtual Events & Unisfair

How do you define a “virtual event“?

A virtual event is a gathering of people sharing a common virtual environment on the internet to learn, interact, explore, and network. It gives attendees control over a rich and stimulating environment, hosted by a trusted organizer. Participants can navigate to different locations, engage with subject matter experts, and network with peers who share similar interests and objectives.

In your opinion, what are some of the best features Unisfair provides for virtual event sponsors and attendees?

We have evolved along with the market, and are focusing not just on events, but on virtual engagement solutions that enable our customers to embrace virtual environments for everything from lead generation and community building to training and recruiting.

Earlier this year, Unisfair announced V9, a game-changing new release of our web based platform. The Virtual Engagement Center is the always-on location where companies can create any number of virtual venues hosting any number of virtual events. This is fueling the industry to move from episodic virtual events to always-on virtual engagement. Customers, prospects, partners and employees can engage with vendors, peers and industry experts, wherever they are and whenever they want.

In addition, our Webcasting Studio enables our customers to produce and broadcast their own webcasts by plugging high-end professional video and audio gear directly into their computers and broadcast right from their offices – they can even use the built-in laptop cameras. This has a huge effect on bringing down the costs of virtual events, rather than using external production service.

How can small businesses get involved in large virtual events?

Unisfair has customers of all sizes, from small companies to large multinational corporations. A number of small companies use Unisfair successfully for lead generation and customer events. And Unisfair is leading the industry with its self service capabilities, which allow customers to create their environments without having to rely on 3rd party creative firms. This combined with the capability to produce and broadcast right from your desk makes it possible even for small companies to reach large audiences. Because of our subscription model, the monthly cost for hosting the platform is not very high. The cost per lead or attendee can be an order of magnitude lower than for physical events.

What can businesses who hope go virtual do before, during, and after events to ensure a beneficial experience?

Prior to the event, email marketing campaigns are the most effective vehicle to drive registration. Your house list will likely serve as an effective source of registration. Consider renting or purchasing highly targeted lists with additional names. Your conversion rates here will be lower, because this new audience may not be familiar with your company or product offering. Include an agenda as part of your email. Many people want to know the program in advance, so they can plan to attend the entire event or part of it. One of the best practices cited by our customers is to incentivize registration by offering free gift cards (e.g. iTunes, Starbucks) to early-bird registrants. This incentive should be prominently displayed on the registration page.

Leveraging social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube can help you create excitement and increase registration. Adding social media as part of your pre-event promotional strategy is popular and cost-effective – many of the tools are free.

Create an “Event Page” on your Facebook page, an “Event Invitation” in LinkedIn, and Tweet about your event regularly, before, during and after the event (don’t forget to create a Twitter #hash tag). Launch a pay-per-click Facebook ad for the event. You can also create short, promotional 20-30 second video clips and launch a YouTube ‘channel’ for your event. Also activate the social media tools within the virtual platform environment. This allows attendees to reach out and promote your event while it is taking place.

When the event is occurring, engage with attendees in a creative way. For example, hold surveys, polls, group chats and networking sessions to allow the exchange of ideas among attendees. This provides the ability to better assess their interest level in specific products, ideas or themes. Also, leverage advertising panels, logo banners, environment-wide announcements, and green-screen videos of “virtual hosts” to generate a feeling of ‘live’ excitement. Send reminders to all attendees driving them to scheduled webcasts, forums, or giveaways.

What advice would you give to a smaller business hoping to hold their own virtual event?

Although virtual events can be created in a shorter time frame, don’t underestimate the amount of preparation that goes into them. Virtual attendees have short attention spans and will quickly turn to other tasks if they are not captured by your content. On the other hand, a virtual event allows you to grow the number of registrants by 100% and more, compared to a physical event.

Here are several best practices to keep in mind:

• Create exciting and outstanding content
• Choose well-known keynote speakers that will draw attendees
• Be to the point – 20 minutes for each session is enough
• Start promoting your event at least 6 weeks prior to the live day
• Some events have high sign up rates on the live day, so don’t stop your promotional efforts
• Attendance rates are usually around 50%, so you need 2000 registrants if you want 1000 live attendees
• Train your booth staff before the event and provide them with FAQ’s in advance

Unisfair is growing fast and adding new events all the time. What do you think accounts for the success of Unisfair and virtual events?

One of our big assets is our excellent customer services and support team, which has the experience of hundreds of events per year, and routinely receives great reviews from our customers. Most of our team members have previously worked in the events business and know what it takes to run successful physical events, as well as virtual ones.

Clearly, the need to cut costs has driven more people to us as they look for more cost effective ways to generate demand and nurture prospects or train customers, partners and employees. Unisfair helps reduce event cost while reaching dramatically larger audiences without the need for travel.

Today however, marketing leaders understand that it’s not just about bringing people together in a more cost effective manner, it is about creating continuous virtual engagement – building lasting, more profitable relationships with their customers. As a result, Unisfair has evolved from the early adopter status to becoming widely used. In particular, marketers are seeing virtual engagement as a successful and proven component of the digital marketing mix.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts

I want to thank Joerg Rathenberg as well as Sarah Tonzi and Lisa Tartar (once again) for taking the time to help me out. Joerg gave thoughtful and detailed answers with a lot of valuable advice for all businesses. Many people I’ve interviewed usually speak a bit more abstractly about how to be successful but Joerg goes step by step and provides a direct and useful blueprint for both creating and participating in virtual events. I’m excited to see how these events grow and change and I look forward to the possibility of attending some myself.