Life science virtual events: 5 ways to ignite your event

By Minna Satchi and Claire Nicholson | Reading time: 3 minutes

Life science events: 5 ways to ignite your event

Virtual events have really come into their own as a distinct event type over the last 12 months, particularly for the life science industry. We’re passionate believers that virtual events are here to stay long after the Covid-19 pandemic.

We have all seen the impact that a virtual event can have in creating accessible, inclusive, sustainable events with the added advantage of reducing pressure on life science lab and travel budgets.

But lifting the format from a flat, 2-D experience to create an impactful, enjoyable, community-based conference that generates actionable insights seems to have evaded many virtual events.

Here, we’ll discuss how to create lead generation opportunities and to make your virtual event stand out, so that delegates will remember it long after the event has finished.

1. Build an immersive, interactive environment to keep your delegates happy

As with any on-site conference, the venue is central to the look and feel of the event. Virtual venues should optimise user experience for ease of navigation, but the real key is to ensure that these enhance rather than impede a delegate-centric experience.

Unlike a physical space, having a bespoke virtual venue gives you a unique, customisable, time zone friendly facility that is open all hours – and can be used for multiple campaigns and future events for minimal iterative cost.

Creating a venue doesn’t mean you have to use a cookie cutter website. By incorporating elements of your brand, products and collateral, delegates will start to feel part of a select community from the moment they enter the conference. This can then be enhanced by adding elements of interactivity throughout the agenda and the virtual venue.

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2. Delegate interaction is vital for engagement during your virtual event

Sitting and watching virtual presentations can be an isolating and uni-directional experience for your life science delegates, but by ensuring delegates have the opportunity for real-time interactions you can give them the feeling of being part of something bigger, and the opportunity to inform and impact the direction of the conference.

Networking, presentations, posters, Q&A, polls, meet the speaker sessions, gamification, virtual audience, social media, the chance to share their content , or providing real time support are all great ways to interact with your attendees – and will also show you what they are interested in, giving your sales team greater insights into what customers are thinking about the research, your life science brand, and your products.

 

3. High-production quality can drive impactful presentations at your virtual event

With so many interruptions in a delegate’s day, agendas for a virtual event need to be varied to keep your people engaged – mixing up the style of your content will help with this.

Remember that each session doesn’t just need to be one-note presentations – fireside chats, expert panel discussions, lightning talks, demonstrations, and early-stage researcher sessions can be used to elevate and vary your agenda. Breaktime on-demand content, such as short research updates, virtual poster presentations, tutorials, or product demos can also be used to further educate and inform your delegates.

 

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4. Identify and follow up your hot leads with precision analytics

With conscious planning and identification of data you would like to obtain, your virtual event can provide a variety of actionable insights and follow-up opportunities.

For example, preconference metrics measuring delegate recruitment campaigns will give you an indication of which platforms have been most successful in driving registrations.

Following the event, you can take a detailed look at how your delegates have interacted with your content, what questions were asked, what the most popular session were, or how long individual delegates have watched presentations for.

Taking your event analytics down to the individual attendee will enable you to profile delegate interests and help pull them through the sales and marketing funnel.

5.  Hybrid events – the best of both worlds for the life science industry?

If you are heading back into on-site events, it’s worth considering a virtual element to give you a hybrid event to incorporate the best of both worlds. Physical events are great for face-to-face networking and gaining those all-important meetings, whilst the virtual element will give you global reach and delegate granularity.

By keeping branding and messaging cohesive across the physical and virtual events you can deliver a seamless experience for your all delegates.

Want to see how you can take your virtual event to the next level?

Get in contact to see how we can help you by emailing us here

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