How to understand your virtual audience better

October 20, 2020

Article by https://samaaro.com/best-virtual-event-platform

The rise of virtual events has paved the way for businesses to conduct their networking events online and reap the numerous benefits of doing so. One of the most useful advantages has been the ability to delve into insights pertaining to their audience behaviours that they can re-incorporate into their own business practices. This has helped businesses get a more detailed understanding of their customers and adopt it back into their own offerings.

But some of the best virtual event platforms offer many tools that help businesses tap into all of this information, the most prominent of them being ‘data analytics’. These tools have made the process of capturing and curating data relevant to event performance all the more accessible for event hosts. Leveraging these intelligent tools empowers host organizations to optimize their event to the best of their abilities.

The following are some of the data tools that you can leverage to better understand your audience behaviour.

Attendee heat map

This unique tool gives hosts a visual overview of hot spots in their virtual events where attendee traffic is the highest, and subsequently the lowest. These heat maps are a highly beneficial tool when it comes to observing the different places in the event where attendees spent most of their time around. As such, this helps understand their individual preferences, thereby enabling hosts to strategically position, change, and replace different elements within the event.

Most downloaded resources

Throughout the event space, there are many provisions for audience members to download resources that are relevant to the event, and more importantly to their own unique, personal interests. Having a facility to track the most & least number as well as the type of resources downloaded by each attendee gives hosts details on the preferences of their audience. As a result of which, hosts can see what types of resources work best for different types of events and the audiences that attend them.

Live polls

Your online participants can be engaged effectively with the help of live polls that take place in real time. Here, hosts can pose many different questions to audience members within seconds, and receive answers, feedback, and more from attendees. This helps boost overall user participation and gives each audience member a greater sense of inclusion in the event, while also giving hosts a chance to get to know more about their audience as a whole.

Q&As

Similar to live polls, Q&As give attendees a chance to answer specific questions posed by hosts and interact with them in real time. Though simplistic, having this in your event is a great way to provide attendees with a more personal experience since they are actively involved in the verbal interactions. Questions that are specific to the execution/functioning of the event itself can open another door to acquiring responses from attendees.

Surveys

Conducting surveys is a great way to understand what your audience feels about the event. They give attendees a chance to share their authentic feedback relating to the different sessions or the entire event itself.

Surveys can be conducted during the event or a link can be shared post-event via mail with the attendees. From the organizer’s perspective, this feedback can be used to analyze what worked and what didn’t, and improve the attendee experience in the upcoming events.

Here are some of the questions that can be asked during surveys

On a scale of 1-10, how engaging did you find the sessions?
How accessible/easy to navigate was the virtual event platform?
What was your favourite part of the event?

AMAs

Often indistinguishable from Q&As, AMAs allow for a slightly more personalized experience for audience members since this time, they get to ask the questions of their choice.

Analytics is objectively one of the most important components of any virtual event, no matter what kind of event it is. These valuable insights help businesses become more attentive to their customers’ unique needs and thus enable them to adapt to their individual behaviours. If you are looking to host a virtual event of your own, then this should definitely be a prerequisite.