There’s no denying that COVID-19 drastically changed our lives and how we communicate with each other. These changes affected the way we conduct business today. Many companies have relied heavily on hybrid meetings and corporate virtual events to get through the pandemic.
Most of us have also collaborated with a trusted virtual event company to organise these events. However, now that we have the safety of vaccines and booster shots, one would think that things will slowly go back to the perceived normal – in-house meetings and events. That said, many businesses didn’t just adjust but thrived after adopting the virtual or online setup. It’s why companies are actively looking to adopt a hybrid work and corporate event model that will offer them the best of both worlds.
Here’s why hybrid events are the future of networking:
Massive Reach & Increased Turnout
If you collaborate with an online event solution company to organise a hybrid event, you can expand your reach through a live and virtual audience. An in-person event presents multiple restrictions, such as location, limited venue capacity, and more. A hybrid event allows you to invite as many people as you want without worrying about the location or size of the venue or changing the venue to accommodate everyone. It gives attendees who cannot physically come to the event the opportunity to participate in it virtually. You can invite speakers and participants from across the world without worrying about accommodations and more.
Higher Audience Engagement
Corporate virtual events with a live element give you the chance to boost your live and virtual audience engagement at the event and days after that. Virtual attendees can actively partake in the event, ask questions, comment, like, and share the event. They can also interact with other participants, just like in-person attendees. The in-person participants will benefit from promptly networking with each other and engaging in the aforementioned online activities. You can use an event app to connect your virtual attendees with the in-person ones for seamless networking opportunities.
Reduced Event Expenditure
Live events cost significantly more than virtual and hybrid events as you have to pay for accommodations, travelling, catering, venue, and more. Arranging a hybrid event will help you cut down on these costs. That said, you will need to assess the costs of the virtual elements of the event, such as the audio, cameras, online platforms, etc., required for the event. It’s best to coordinate with a virtual event company to arrange everything within your budget.
More Sponsors
It’s no surprise that hybrid events will bring more sponsors to the front due to the benefit of increased virtual reach. Since there will be more attendees and a large pool of target audience, sponsors will be more than happy to sponsor the event and advertise their products. Moreover, they will also have the ability to partake in the event virtually by setting up virtual booths and giving presentations regarding their products via video conferencing. Moreover, thanks to the digital component of the event, you can have more than one sponsor.
Promising Marketing Opportunities
Working with an online event solution to arrange a hybrid event will open up more marketing opportunities for your company. After a marketer establishes its target audience for the event, they will benefit from a maximised reach, recorded sessions, immediate feedback, and data of all the conversation, responses, and feedback received throughout the event. It means that they can analyse the content later and create effective marketing campaigns for their next event.
Event Flexibility
An undeniable advantage of hosting a hybrid event is the flexibility it offers to you and the attendees. For instance, if an attendee is unable to join the event in person for whatever reason, they can simply join in and contribute virtually. The hybrid nature of the event enables you to avoid unexpected setbacks and avoidable issues.
Moreover, these events work best in the current climate due to the ever-changing COVID-19 restrictions. After all, not every employee or event attendee will be able to reach the event venue timely or at all. In such cases, hybrid events come to the rescue as they allow everyone who wants to partake in the event to do so without worrying about being physically present.
Reduced Environmental Impact
Depending on the scale of the in-person event you organise, it will require a lot of short or long-distance travelling for the attendees to reach the event. You might have attendees coming in from the other end of the country or world to participate in your event. All this travelling is certainly not great for the environment as it will contribute significantly to CO2 emissions. It’s where hybrid events enable you to cut down on the environmental impact of hosting corporate events. They will allow your attendees to reduce their carbon footprint by joining the event virtually. Moreover, it will also save your remote employees the hassle of packing a bag and travelling to an entirely different country or city to attend an event on a tiring schedule.
The Bottom Line
The reasons mentioned above are only some of the many benefits of hosting hybrid events and why they are the future of networking. These events have the potential to be fruitful, profitable, sustainable, and accessible to all. They also make it easier to collect data from virtual and in-person attendees via surveys and pools, ensure seamless event recording, and enable marketers to reuse valuable data for future events.
Hybrid events also provide safety and flexibility to those employees who are understandably worried about COVID-19 or cannot join the event physically. They also help you navigate the restrictions imposed by the local government. It’s why we strongly urge you to explore this contemporary, highly relevant event mechanism and explore the benefits it presents to your corporation. The more quickly you adopt this mechanism, the better it will be for your business, as it will allow you to step into the future!
