When it comes to ROI (return on investment), the benefits of exhibiting virtually rather than physically are clear to see.
In fact, 78% of businesses agree that hosting virtual exhibitions lead to a positive event ROI.
And we’re not just talking about how much of a financial profit your business makes from an event; virtual exhibition ROI also covers other KPIs (key performance indicators) such as an increase in leads, new business partnerships and networking opportunities and more.
The question, however, is how you can utilise your virtual exhibition software to the max to achieve the best possible ROI for your business or brand. Read on to find out…
To achieve an outstanding ROI with your virtual exhibition:
1. Fully utilise its interactive elements
Virtual exhibition software should include functionality to offer as many opportunities for interaction as possible. In fact, this is one of the top features that the Gravit8 solution centres around!
The more interactive you can make your exhibition, the greater your visitor’s engagement and retention will be, and subsequently, the greater the chances you’ll have of making a sale or capturing leads during the event!
Just some interactive elements you can include in your virtual exhibition include the following:
- Gamification, including interactive quizzes, virtual treasure hunts and more for the chance to win prizes.
- 3D models and demos that visitors can physically interact with.
- Choosing the most engaging members of your team to man stands.
- Live and video chat functionality with your exhibition stand staff.
- Private booths with live and video chat functionality to allow your visitors to network with each other.
2. Integrate plenty of exciting content
For many exhibition attendees, events are all about what they can learn and take away from it.
The more content you can offer (including video tutorials, downloadable guides and so on), the greater the confidence visitors will have in your brand and sector expertise, and the more likely they’ll be to strike up a business relationship with you.
Be sure to include calls to action and forms to complete in order to access this content as well, as this will help to boost your lead generation ROI, too!
3. Make it accessible across all devices
Another of the beauties of virtual exhibition is that many of them (Gravit8 included) can be accessed on several different devices. This means you’ll not only increase the accessibility of your exhibition (meaning greater ticket sales), but will mean higher retention rates once your visitors check in.
For example, if a visitor needs to get up from their desk for any reason during the exhibition or one of their devices cuts out, they can remain connected through mobile devices. So, be sure your event is optimised for every device possible!
4. Take advantage of its recording capabilities
The problem with live exhibitions is that, once they’re over, there’s no recording that your visitors could come back to if they missed anything. With virtual exhibition software, however – and Gravit8 in particular – any talks, video and phone calls and conversations can be recorded at the click of a button, and even turned into VOD (“Video on Demand”) content.
This is a great opportunity to boost your lead generation ROI, as you can ask your visitors to submit their details in order to access the recordings long after the exhibition has closed its doors.
It also provides you with helpful content and resources that you can use to gather more leads and revenue in the future (e.g. by charging a small fee for access).
5. Include virtual sponsorships
According to Event Manager Blog, sponsorship is the second highest revenue stream for virtual events at 29.7%, so this is certainly worth incorporating within your exhibition.
The opportunities to incorporate sponsorships in your virtual exhibition software are almost endless, including before your event (within your email marketing, in your social media campaigns, on your website and so on) and within the event software (including logos on virtual banners, videos and downloadable content). This is something we can help with at Gravit8!
6. Choose the best speakers – and make the most of them!
It can be tempting to hire a wide variety of different speakers to talk about a particular topic that they specialise in. However, this can get expensive very quickly, and therefore reduce your overall revenue from an event.
One of the many advantages of virtual exhibition software is that your speakers won’t need to worry about travel, accommodation or running across one end of a live venue to the other to participate in multiple talks.
So, be sure to choose relevant, well-known speakers that will attract plenty of visitors to your event and who can talk about a variety of different topics in different areas of your software (e.g., conference stages, private booths and Q&A sessions) to keep costs down and bring ticket sales up!
7. Integrate your software with social media
Some virtual exhibition software solutions, such as Gravit8, will provide a functionality to enable visitors to share their thoughts and experiences about an event directly to social media.
Visitors will likely want to show their contemporaries and other professionals that they’re taking part in the event through their social media accounts to boost their credibility.
So, ensure that you capitalise on this by encouraging them to share their experiences directly from the software – ideally with a branded event hashtag that people can follow.
This will not only help to encourage last-minute ticket sales and registrations, but it will also put your exhibition at the forefront of people’s minds for your future planned events.
Additional tip – ensure your virtual exhibition software of choice can record your ROI metrics fully!
It’s all very well maximising your ROI-boosting opportunities, but without the ability to measure this, you won’t be able to uncover insights into what actually produced that ROI.
For example, you might end your virtual exhibition with a hundred fantastic leads; but if your software has provided a number of different places for delegates to provide their details, it will be difficult to know which of these places was the most effective in getting those leads.
This will subsequently leave you blind to what to include again or exclude when planning your next exhibition. Therefore, be sure that you choose software which enables you to collect, analyse and report data in order to do this. Again, this is something we can support you with at Gravit8!
It’s also important to remember that ROI is not the be all and end all of your event success.
While it is of course one of the most important KPIs for your event, you will also need to keep in mind other essential metrics for success, such as the feedback you get from your exhibition attendees, as well as their engagement during the event and the amount of time they spend there.
Thankfully, all these metrics are easy to measure and analyse with the Gravit8 virtual exhibition software solution!
Discover Gravit8
Whatever your idea of ROI for your event or other KPIs you are hoping to ascertain, the Gravit8 solution offers all the avenues you need in order to achieve them, and all the data and reporting capabilities to measure the success of every aspect of your event!
If you’d like to hear more about this, contact our team today, or arrange a demo of the Gravit8 software with us to see this for yourself…