And so the day finally arrived and we were about to try our perfect market fit wings and fly out in the corporate world. We wanted to make more people experience what it is like to have a friction-free workday by automating recurring tasks in their organization and take our SaaS solution Zervicepoint to the next level for our customers.
As tradition serves when something new is born, this time a new company, we wanted to tell the world! As we had experienced badly written, corporate bull-shit press releases and stiff white collar key-note events one too many times, we now had to do something different and host a virtual event that reflected our way of working and culture.
We were prepared and had worked hard for this to happen, but the timing could have been somewhat slightly better. As you all know Covid-19 hit the world and it was challenging to re-think how to create a physical event in a digital world and make the engagement happen at the same time. How would we get people to join our event by not physically being present? How could we host an even better virtual event and get our message across? And how could we be personal and professional at the same time?
The outcome was to host a virtual Housewarming party where we during a 2h live-stream mixed interviews with our partners, customers, and other business friends with tips from our team member’s special interests. Then weaving in our story and where we are now heading and as icing on the cake, we made a flirt with the TV morning shows, and this virtual event ended up to be a success!
Would you like to host a virtual event yourself?
Here is some advice to think of along the way.
1. Adapt to the current situation
Try to look at your current situation from an outside perspective and ask yourself; What are our boundaries to create an awesome project or event? It can, for example, be Reach. We are not able to invite as many people as we want. State the obvious boundaries as our brains tend to look at the risks first and not the opportunities. Then jot them down and answer them by bringing the solution instead. If you have gone beyond that state in your brain and reach a higher level of consciousness, you can instead ask yourself; If we were to launch a project or host an event on another planet without our privileges or tools what would it look like? You choose.
2. Skip the Blast from the Past
Look for the future and re-think how you look at corporate events and your content marketing, ALWAYS, and not only when a crisis hits your business. Reconsider after every campaign, event, or webinar you host to see what you can tweak to reach your set goals even higher next time. Then you’re always prepared even in hard times.
3. Dare to be personal
Don’t take your business too seriously. People always want to have some fun and that is for work as well! Then you will almost automatically create great content that is interesting for many people instead of only a few and reach higher engagement levels.
4. Use digital tools as your personal assistant
Today we are served with a great selection and variety of different digital tools and it can be overwhelming to find the right one for the right occasion. If you like to host an event see yourself as the creative agency who would like to host it on a tight budget and google away. You’d be surprised what great free tools there are out there. For this event, we used Stream Yard as our live streaming studio.
5. Define your target group
Yes, it is that simple. Many of us, especially in marketing and sales we are often too fixated to get OUR message across, we tend to concentrate only on what we would like to say and not what our audience would like to hear.
To check if you are on the right track with your content, visualize your audience, and put yourself in his or her shoes for a while. Then bring the ideas of what you want to talk about to the table. Or simply reach out and ask one or two people if you don’t have a clue where to start.
The outcome and the process of making the shift from physical to virtual as fast as we did is something I am very proud of being part of and we received great feedback from our audience along with high engagement during the event. The best part of all this is that we have now tried the concept and can easily add it to other events this coming fall. All in the name of being agile which is crucial if you like to survive as a business, in the long run.