With an uptick in acceptance of the virtual stage, we all noticed great examples of virtual award shows that have been taking place since 2020. The online format of award shows can drive sustainable ROI and expand your global reach. With the elimination of the physical venue, accommodation, catering, and travel expenses, you can relish these online events from remote locations.
With all these concepts and thoughts in mind, let us walk you through some best practices and ideas that can help you plan a successful virtual award show;
- Wisely choose your virtual award show platform
Selecting the best virtual event platforms is a bit complex and intricate. With several solutions available in the market, it is advisable to go for a scalable, flexible, and customizable platform that can make your virtual awards ceremony unique and remarkable.
While deciding on the virtual award show platform, ensure that it is backed by real-time customer support, is 100% secure and trustworthy, offers detailed reporting of attendee footprint, and includes excellent features and tools to drive audience engagement.
Remember to take a platform demo of the features and tools that you have chosen. It will give you an estimated overview of the virtual environment that the attendees, exhibitors, or speakers will access.
- Make way for sponsors
Sponsors can be an effective means to increase the ROI of your event. To lure or invite sponsors to invest in your virtual award show, you need to make them feel profited. Lead retrieval, more sales, enhanced global reach, or boosting the brand value are their areas of concern. To do this appropriately, you can choose to use dynamic banners, display their brand on the digital screens, or showcase their content on the social wall. Exhibitors can also utilize customized branding or creative templates to display their brand logo, color, and products. To facilitate seamless interaction between exhibitors and attendees, try to include features like virtual networking tables, AI-based recommendations, business card exchange, and B2B meetings scheduler. These practices will help create novel brand experiences, and exhibitors may also gain more potential leads.
- Easy navigation
With award shows happening online, you need to plan out things to hold on to the attendees or increase their stay time on the platform. The foremost step includes choosing an ideal virtual event solution that has a user-friendly interface. You can think of adding a tutorial video or an introductory guide to make it easy for your attendees to navigate on the virtual platform.
- Create an immersive virtual stage
To recreate the experiences of a physical award show, you need to design a virtual environment enriched with attractive 3D designs, eye-catching graphics, and captivating imagery. Besides this, you can also ask your event planner to include some creative virtual award show ideas to make the event more exciting. For example, you can add a thematic background, thrilling or clapping sound effects to make your audiences feel special. You can also ask your attendees to shout out at a time when an individual is awarded or praised for his endeavors.
- Promotion and Social media integration
Social media is the soul of this digital environment. People spend ample time on different social media platforms. So, you can start posting videos, pictures, or boomerang to arouse excitement among your followers, fan base, or potential attendees in advance. It will create hype regarding your online award ceremony among everyone and will lead to an increase in registrations.
To promote your online award show, you can use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to maximize your global reach. You can also practice email marketing to send periodic reminders to your potential audience. While sending the emails, ensure to create an impressive subject line and mention the names of some popular exhibitors of your event.
- Attendee engagement features
Engagement is the main criteria that decide the success of your online event. Diversions are just a click away for the virtual audience, so you need to include excellent features to keep them hooked and involved throughout the event. Let us learn some best practices that can boost the engagement level of your award ceremony;
- Consider keeping exciting award categories to keep the excitement and suspense alive among everyone. The awardees will feel special and valued through these humble gestures.
- Keep short sessions or add breaks between the sessions. We understand that it may get difficult for online attendees to continue sitting at a place for a very long time. Hence, to keep them engrossed plan out your session duration carefully.
- Get excellent speakers on board to make your sessions more interactive. Try conducting frequent live polls and Q&As to gauge the engagement level of your participants.
- You can also include a social wall to curate the feed from different social media handles and display the event-specific content posted by the attendees.
- Another notable factor that you keep on your platform to drive audience engagement is on-event announcements. It is a great strategy to keep the attendees engrossed by keeping them updated about the ongoing and forthcoming sessions.
- Leverage a live chat feature to foster 2-way communications with the speaker, exhibitor, and other attendees in real-time.
- You can also think of gamifying the virtual award show. Games like spin the wheel, tic-tac-toe, temple run, crossword, or word games are ideas to make your award ceremony even more likable.
- Track attendee footprint
It includes a complete record of attendee navigation, right from the count of registrations, number of downloadable content, messages sent between the attendees and exhibitor, number of times people used the live chat feature, and more. A comprehensive and detailed reporting gives you insights into the event and helps you measure the success of your virtual award ceremony.
Final Word
A virtual award ceremony is a special event for attendees who have worked hard all year to deliver exceptional results for the growth and development of the company. Presenting awards to the deserved candidates helps make them feel valued and motivated. If you manage to make your event super engaging and interactive besides, keeping your sponsors happy and driving a massive ROI, it is certainly a remarkable and successful award show.
