In-person, virtual, webinar or hybrid? Know your business goal

Digital will continue to support events of all formats to meet increased attendee expectations of convenience and value, while event professionals are also relying more on in-person meetings to foster and nurture relationships.

These are some of the findings from a recent Forrester report and survey, entitled Level Up Your Event Platform Capabilities. It highlighted how organisations can best optimise event and meeting outcomes and reinforced how planners are determining event format choices based on the business goals they want to achieve. These goals can range from increasing revenue, to improving customer experience, efficiencies and business agility to accelerating digital transformation.

With planners now well-versed in both traditional in-person and next-generation virtual event strategies, they have a better understanding of which formats work most closely with what they are trying to achieve.

Hybrid formats best support larger audiences where conveying information and relationship building are important, with respondents saying they find hybrid events most valuable for larger external events related to awareness/brand building (54%), executive briefings (46%), and user/customer conferences (44%). Hybrid was also seen as the preferred format for large internal gatherings like annual sales trainings (chosen by 56%).

Virtual formats got the highest rating among respondents for boosting customer understanding.

Webinars, meanwhile, were seen as equally powerful for driving revenue and for increasing product adoption (48%), and unsurprisingly, perhaps, 71% of respondents found in-person events increased customer and member engagement, while 58% said they worked well for lead generation and 51% for deepening customer relationships.

These factors are closely aligned with the top goals for hosting in-person events, namely expanding the customer base, building reputation more broadly and delivering a great experience. A respondent in the healthcare sector also shared that they use webinars to drive ongoing education and adoption of new types of therapies, and they track adoption rates following each event.

The report also looked at how event teams are struggling to capture the right data and activate it, while assessing event impact also appears elusive.

The Forrester survey was commissioned by Cvent to evaluate how meeting strategy and event execution has evolved over the past few years and where it is heading in 2023. Forrester conducted an online survey with 509 respondents, alongside interviews with global meeting and event decision-makers.