How to Promote Engagement at Hybrid Events

Promote Engagement at Hybrid Events

Any event be it physical, virtual, or hybrid comes with its own set of challenges. But for hybrid events, it can be a little difficult because you need to engage two segments of audiences. Hence, this is why it becomes more important to devise the format of your event and choose your end-to-end event solution more carefully. 

It is essential to make your hybrid event highly engaging, interactive, and packed with features to deliver memorable experiences to your attendees. Let us walk you through some excellent ideas that you can use to promote engagement during hybrid events;

Facilitate 2-Way Communication with live Q&A Sessions

Make sure to promote 2-way communication at your hybrid event. Address the questions of both in-person and virtual attendees and make both the audiences feel important. It will keep each attendee involved and hooked throughout the event. Through live Q&A sessions, audiences can get the answers to their questions, interact with speakers or other attendees on a real-time basis. 

Conduct Live Polls

Organizing live polls during your hybrid event is an excellent way to promote engagement among the audiences. It helps you obtain better insight into what factors are creating trouble or challenge for your attendees. Through this significant information, you can make relevant modifications to improve your future events. We need to understand that some people are not very comfortable interacting in front of everyone. An online poll enables reserved attendees to involve and interact at a hybrid event.

You can use live polls to ask questions regarding what features are being enjoyed by the attendees or their views about the relevant discussion. So, it’s an excellent method to strategize your content based on the needs of your attendees.

Therefore use live polls to promote engagement among both in-person and virtual attendees to keep them hooked and involved throughout the event.

Keep Shorter Sessions

Deciding the duration of your sessions is a notable factor. You don’t want any of your audiences to feel tiresome during the event. Hence, this is why it is important to plan your sessions with proper breaks. Also, make sure that your sessions are not very long as it will lead to attendee drop-off.

Consider keeping breaks, just before a vital session so the attendees can restore themselves, and you can fulfill the purpose of your session and deliver your message accurately.

Photo Booths

It is another notable factor that can help make your hybrid event more engaging and interactive. Through these branded digital photo booths, virtual attendees can capture several photos, and upload them on their social media handles. It will help increase the social presence and promote your brand and event to a wider group of people. 

Gamification

Gamifying your hybrid event is an effective way to arouse excitement and interest among your attendees. This feature works well with both physical and virtual audiences. Games like spin the wheel, word games, crosswords, and many more are excellent ideas to make your event more enjoyable. 

Additionally, you can also create a leaderboard challenge for your hybrid event. It will help keep the attendees excited to navigate each aspect of the hybrid event in the desire to score more points. You can keep exciting prizes and rewards for the top scorer. It will eventually promote engagement and drive attendees to spend more time on their hybrid event platform.

Make the Most of the Live Chat Feature

Most of the virtual event platforms include a live chat feature. It’s an excellent idea for your virtual attendees to spark discussions, ask more relevant questions and nurture new relationships just like attendees do at on-site events. You can keep this live chat feature accessible by both virtual and physical attendees to encourage more real-time interactions.

Create Engaging Content

Content is the king! It is the tool that helps create the first impression in the minds of your potential attendees regarding your hybrid event. Therefore, take time and outline the strategy of your content in a way that can lure more attendees. Make the content highly engaging and attention-grabbing. It will arouse a sense of excitement and suspense among virtual and physical attendees, and they would surely like to stay involved and hooked throughout the event.  Consider keeping the duration for your speeches and presentations short and crisp to keep the attendees engaged in the event without getting distracted or losing interest.

Ensure that the content you create for various social media handles is engaging and attractive.

Leverage the Right Event Technology

To host life-like events, it is necessary to choose your hybrid venue partner reasonably. Only your hybrid event partner holds the capability to successfully integrate both virtual and physical elements to offer remarkable experiences to your attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors. An events platform that has brushed its skillset can easily conduct live polls, quizzes, surveys, games, or other exceptional features to enhance the outreach of your event helps deliver more realistic unique experiences.

Other Notable Engagement Features

Features like a signature wall, social wall, emoticons, hoot, clap, or AI matchmaking are prominent ideas to add an interesting element to your hybrid event. AI matchmaking helps you with a list of people who share the same interest, thus paving the way for more meaningful connections. Similarly, social walls & signature walls are effective means to increase social presence, keep attendees excited and involved, and promote brand awareness. 

Final Word

Hybrid events may appear to be easier as you just need to integrate physical and virtual components. But, besides integrating, it is important to prioritize each aspect of the event. Right from planning, creating the content, promoting engagement and networking, to obtaining significant data analytics, make sure that you have an ideal hybrid event platform that can facilitate all of this to deliver life-like event experiences.

We hope the above mentioned ideas will be a helpful tool to notch up the level of your hybrid events and make them more engaging and interactive.

Looking for an end-to-end hybrid event solution? Book a demo with Dreamcast!