Do you often find yourself scrambling to collect whatever feedback you can once you’ve finished planning and hosting a virtual event? If you answered “yes” then take heart, because you aren’t alone. It can be tempting to put your feet up and relax after an even when, in fact, there’s post-event strategy and work to be done: research shows that 75% of leads are never followed up with after an exhibition, which translates into a whole lot of wasted time on marketing and planning.
Rather than let your event attendees walk out of the figurative door, instead, entice them to engage with you post-event so that you can collect valuable feedback. After all, feedback and data are critical to learning more about how your attendees interact with your events, especially if you regularly throw virtual events for the same audience. To collect that essential data, though, you’ll need the proper tools and know-how.
To that end, let’s take a quick look at the easiest ways that virtual event planners and marketers can begin gathering data after their exhibition, as well as the systems and tools that support their data collection.
Start with your surveys
Surveys are likely one of the first methods that may spring to mind when you think about collecting post-event feedback. That’s because distributing surveys to your virtual event’s attendees is both a quick and effective way of gathering post-event data and insight into your attendees.
The great thing about surveys is that they aren’t only painless for your attendees to zip through, but they also expedite your business’s process of gathering, analyzing, and implementing feedback into your future virtual events. The best way to administer and analyze said surveys is with robust event management software.
With strong surveys that you send out regularly after each of your virtual events, you can also enhance your marketing campaign efforts in addition to your future event planning. A wider variety of questions that you pose can yield an equally diverse range of answers, which you can then use as part of your tracking for different marketing campaigns to improve your web traffic. More web traffic means greater visibility of your upcoming events, so don’t skip on your surveys when it comes time to do some post-event legwork.
Keep an eye on social media traffic
Everybody has an opinion, and the likeliest place that your attendees will go to voice theirs is on social media. Keep an eye on what people are saying about your event on social media for a greater perspective on what your event did right and what it could have done even better.
There’s no good reason these days to ignore social media as a repository for the consumer – in this case, the attendee – data and feedback. There are more than 4.20 billion people using social media worldwide, which is more than 53% of the world’s total population, and there’s a good chance that the vast majority of your event’s attendees help comprise this figure. It’s time to start using a social media monitoring tool that works for your business’s size and scope of operations to find more people’s posts about your event and how it went.
Good social media monitoring tools can do pretty handy things and notify you about user mentions, but they’re only useful if you take the time to analyze their findings. This is where a quality collaboration software solution comes into play, namely one that comes with essential features such as project status updates that improve your campaign tracking and team management tools to track deliverables relating to your post-event analysis. It’s vital that you use good collaboration software that makes it easy for you and your teammates to rapidly disseminate your findings regarding relevant social media posts about your event and store all of that useful information in one place.
Social media posts don’t just elucidate the way your attendees feel about your virtual event after the fact; they also provide new avenues to build your brand on social media with an angle to attract future event attendees. The more insight you can gather from your attendees’ social media posts, the better your intentional posting becomes. You can ensure that every post, tweet, share, and interaction on your business’s social media page is of value and serves a purpose for an audience that’s interested in your upcoming virtual events.
Invest in activity monitoring
Considering that you’re in the business of hosting events, we’re going to go out on a limb and assume you also use activity monitoring tools. If by chance you aren’t using activity tracking technology, then it’s time to consider it for more informed event planning.
If you’re hosting a large event, especially if it’s a virtual one, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is likely your best bet for tracking guests and analyzing their data. It can also generate a greater number of conclusions that you can act on and implement as part of your future event planning, tracking, and analysis.
AI tools can also make it easier to create rules in real-time that make it so only the best data are getting through, which in turn enables you to make quicker decisions with only the most pertinent data.
Businesses that decide to invest in activity monitoring should remember that innovative technologies like AI, while immensely valuable in a post-COVID remote world, sometimes include security vulnerabilities that can compromise the privacy of the data they work with.
It’s important to keep your network and devices as protected as possible from data interception in the event that they’re running activity monitoring tools using AI technology. According to cybersecurity expert Ludovic Rembert of Privacy Canada, a virtual private network (VPN) may be the most attractive solution to invest in depending on the number of devices running tracking tools on your business’s network.
“Every piece of information you send over the internet, from pictures of your cat to your tax return, can potentially be intercepted,” says Rembert.
With a VPN, you can rest easy knowing that your devices’ communications are encrypted and aren’t at risk of compromising the privacy of attendee data that they’re tracking.
Summary
Collecting valuable feedback and data after your virtual event is easy with the right tools and a bit of vigilance. Start with the surveys you send out by investing in event management software that can blast out strong and carefully crafted surveys after each of your virtual events.
To best complement your event management software, make sure that you monitor what people are saying on social media and share your most important findings with your team members using robust collaboration software. Finally, invest in activity monitoring to get real-time insights into your attendees’ interactions with your virtual event and improve their communication experience.
