4. Hosting Crisp and Memorable Virtual Events

My job revolves around ensuring we master virtual events. I’ve discovered that the key to success is to be crisp and memorable. By focusing on these two principles, you’ll achieve most of what’s needed to create a successful virtual event.

Being crisp means avoiding three-hour-long virtual conferences or summits. Virtual events are different from in-person events. In-person events can be 2 – 3 days because people have blocked their time.

They’ve traveled for it. They’re not doing anything else. They’re moving around the whole day. You cannot keep someone’s attention the same way for 3 hours on a virtual event. 

Crisp also includes the second component of agility. You cannot go on for 20 minutes in a session. Instead of doing 30 – 40 minute sessions and having five sessions stretch over 2 hours, what is stopping you from doing 10 10-minute sessions? Do 3 of those and wrap up in 30 minutes. Nowhere does it say that an event has to be 2 hours long; an event could be 30 minutes long. So be crisp, be agile.

The immediate takeaway is that anything longer than 45 minutes will cause people to lose you completely. The ideal time span is 25 to 40 minutes.

Second, any session longer than 10 minutes will likely lead to attendee drop-off. 

What you want is you want to assume that everyone has the memory of a goldfish. Attention spans are limited, and holding their attention for more than five minutes on screen is difficult.

This means that even if you have a 10-minute session, your screen needs to keep moving. Either you’re showing a deck, running polls, or pulling up statistics and drawing attention to the screen by asking for it. SHOW, NOT TELL. 

This is only how you will grab them back to the screen while they are scrolling their email on another window. 

Doing things like spending the first 10 minutes of your virtual event introducing the guest is very stupid. They don’t need to know the guest. They need to know what the guest is going to speak about. You can introduce the guest in a one-liner on the chat with a LinkedIn URL. Always remember to show, not tell, and be crisp. Then there’s being memorable.

Being memorable means providing surprising, shocking, or unique content; otherwise, the event is a waste of time for both you and the attendees. It’s not always about learning or thought leadership; your content can also be fun or different.

We have a virtual roulette table at most of our events. We run a competition and give away awards. These could be simple, like a $10 pizza coupon, but that keeps people excited and on their toes.

We’ve also incorporated virtual DJs and 10-minute stand-up comedy sessions into our events. The good thing is that these engagements are much cheaper to run online than an in-person event. You can create an engaging virtual event for under $1,000.

There are hundreds of ways to make a virtual event engaging, but the two mantras that have worked for me every time are show, not tell, and be crisp and memorable. If no one remembers what you said at the event or what happened at it after two days of the event, they’re never going to come back to you.

If I were recommending virtual events, I would suggest creating a monthly masterclass series. Host a deep-dive session each month for six consecutive months. Keep all sessions virtual, maintaining a consistent theme.

For example, if you’re a RevOps SaaS tool, create a six-month masterclass series titled ​‘RevOps for Enterprises.’ For each 45- to 60-minute masterclass, invite an impressive RevOps expert to interview. The audience will attend to learn from the expert.

If you do this consistently over six weeks or six months, you can generate significant market awareness where previously there was none. One such event is like a drop in the bucket, but with each consecutive event, the ripple effect grows. Your attendance can grow from 20 in the first event to 200 by the time you do the sixth event.

The series should be structured, with each episode following a clear and intentional format. This way, you can tell the attendees that they are going on a journey from event 1 to event 8. This encourages participants to enroll once and remain engaged until the end.

Invite a different speaker for each episode. Each speaker will promote the series by announcing their participation, which drives attendance.

This builds awareness, establishes thought leadership, and creates a pipeline of engaged prospects who have learned enough about you to be more likely to respond to outreach. Your emails will not land in their spam inboxes.

The cost for this is absolutely zero because you can do everything organically. You can do it for free on Zoom. For a company with an ARR of less than a million dollars, the first thing you should do is create a masterclass series that runs over 6 to 8 episodes, either weekly or monthly, depending on the ops overload you can manage.

I’ve also done this at Airmeet, where we started an event series called Eventions. We held monthly events for six consecutive months, calling it Season 1. In 2019 – 2020, we hosted a remote work series with one episode per week for eight straight weeks. Within two months, our organic traffic grew consistently, driven by word-of-mouth sharing. People were sharing those videos on their own.

While it sounds simple, the challenge lies in execution: attracting the right speakers, encouraging them to promote the event, and converting event recordings into bite-sized content. For instance, a one-hour recording can yield ten one-minute snippets.

This has to be executed at a certain cadence. You can’t just do two events and then drop it. The biggest challenge is that people often stop after one or two events due to the effort involved, concluding that it’s not working. This rarely generates any pipeline.