Over a year and a half on from the start of the pandemic…
…multiple businesses have successfully transitioned from physical to virtual exhibitions with the support of online exhibition platforms.
What’s more, they have increased their overall brand prosperity in doing so – and in several different ways!
If you’ve yet to run an online exhibition and are considering it for your brand or business, or you’ve run virtual exhibitions before and want to build and improve on what you’ve done so far, read on to discover the incredible impact it has had on other brands in the last couple of years – and how you can reap the benefits, too…
Here are 5 ways that online exhibitions have positively impacted brands:
1. Increasing brand awareness and equity
Perhaps most significantly, online exhibitions have provided brands with a new kind of exposure to their ideal audience.
For starters, they have allowed brands and businesses to invite unlimited numbers of attendees, as opposed to limiting their ticket sales, meaning that this exposure is greater and more global.
Virtual events have also been shown to have a positive impact on brand equity, and research has found that 84% of event attendees leave with a more positive opinion about a company, brand, product or service after it’s been promoted at an event!
2. Harnessing greater opportunities for engagement and interaction
Online exhibitions have also provided brands with a new means of engaging the audiences that attend.
Although many brands say that engagement is one of their greatest challenges during online exhibitions and virtual events, 49% agree that engagement is their largest contributing factor to event success.
Conversely, Wild Apricot’s research found companies and organisations who didn’t attempt to engage or couldn’t engage attendees in their virtual event were 150% more likely to be unsuccessful.
In fact, research has found that 30% of event attendees are more likely to speak to a person in a virtual booth compared to a live booth! It’s also far easier to implement other means of engagement in a virtual setting, such as 3D models that delegates can explore, quizzes, downloadable content and more – all without them needing to queue.
3. Significantly reducing time and financial expenditure
One of the greatest benefits of utilising or being part of online exhibition platforms is that it costs significantly less than hiring, attending and setting up in a physical venue.
According to Wild Apricot, 84% of organisations that ran a virtual event in 2020 reported spending less money on virtual events than in-person events.
This means that brands have more funds to feed back into their future events, spend on developing their products and services, or investing in a more expensive bespoke platform.
Whilst the latter is more expensive than an off-the-shelf solution, this will allow you to implement greater engagement opportunities, such as the ones described above. What’s more, without physical interactive elements, the risk of transmitting diseases such as the coronavirus are entirely mitigated.
The Gravit8 solution, for example, has so many clever engagement tools that it’s worth investing in over more standard solutions – and it’ll still cost less than running a physical event!
Virtual exhibitions are also a huge time saving resource, giving brands valuable time back (that they would have otherwise spent travelling or setting up physical stands) to focus on developing and promoting their products and services.
4. Increasing lead generation and sales
As one of the main purposes of an exhibition, this probably goes without saying. However, the real impact that online events has had on lead generation and sales for brands is not to be underestimated!
For example, the organization IMC_di states that their sales volume jumped 116% as a result of their digital trade show. TechCrunch also doubled their overall event revenue in 2021 by implementing virtual events!
As noted above, as well as gaining brand exposure to their ideal audience, online exhibitions have enabled brands to reach a larger and more diverse range of professionals, too. Going back to TechCrunch, they had over 10,000 attendees at their virtual event, which included some high-profile delegates and speakers!
This means that lead generation opportunities are also increased, as you can capture attendees’ data (with their consent) when they sign up to the event.
5. Swelling their marketing funnel
Research from Markletic shows that 45.7% of marketers say the primary goal of virtual events is to generate a pipeline.
With consensual data gathered from the event, including general demographics and interests, brands have been able to transfer this into their marketing funnel and benefit from it long after the exhibition has ended!
How can you also reap these benefits?
According to Bizzabo, 92% of marketers agree that online exhibition platforms and software makes it easier for them to achieve business outcomes.
By utilsing the right online exhibition platform and software, the above outlined benefits and more could be witnessed by your brand, too!
We have a fantastic free guide which details all the things your chosen platform should include, but as an example, the Gravit8 virtual exhibition solution will enable you to:
- attract unlimited brand and business prospects from across the globe
- engage and interact with your audience more impactfully than ever before
- save significant time and vastly reduce your financial expenditure
- see your lead generation and sales figures soar
– and much more!
So, if you’re looking to garner similar rewards from your online exhibitions, get in touch today and we’ll show you how you can achieve this through a demo of the Gravit8 online exhibition platform and software!
