From training sessions and team huddles to business conferences and networking events, everything has turned digital — and events are no exception.

For businesses, virtual events have become an avenue to stay connected in a still largely remote world. And the success that organizers have seen from virtual events is evident by the fact that 65% of marketers now plan to reallocate most of their live budget events towards organizing virtual events. 

But hosting a memorable virtual event is no cakewalk.

The long-drawn process of researching, strategizing, rehearsing, and conducting an event requires intensive effort. Bridging the gap between an offline and online event to give your audience a memorable time is perhaps the biggest challenge organizers face today.

Besides, it’s difficult to optimize your efforts for measurable results without the right event management software. Enter Zuddl – a 100% customizable event management solution for event organization and management. From summits to company offsites, conferences to virtual offices, we’ve helped our clients host incredible events by ensuring that key elements are addressed. 

Read on to learn what are the 6 key challenges of virtual events and how Zuddl can help address these issues.  

1. Audience engagement

How often have you found yourself wondering "when will this be over" while attending an online event? You’re not the only one feeling bored listening to one speaker after the other.

Even the most intricately planned virtual events can turn dull without the right tools to keep attendees engaged. And keep in mind that you’re already fighting for your attendees’ attention. With distractions like email, online shopping, and social media platforms just a tab away, you’ll need your event to be more attention-grabbing than anything else.

The bottom line is — if you don’t involve your audience in the event, their participation levels are bound to dip gradually, which directly impacts event success and retention.

Fix it with Zuddl

The platform enables organizers to boost participation and attendee engagement using a variety of tools. With them, you can encourage group discussions, invite people on stage, gamify your event, and more. Here are some of our most popular engagement features:

• Gamification: With gamification, you can incentivize participation and encourage your audience to take part in your event more. By assigning points to actions such as asking questions, answering polls, visiting booths, and awarding those on the top of the leaderboard, you make engagement fun and valuable. 
  

• Live polls: Everyone has a voice. Using polls, you can give your audience a chance to share their views and make them feel valued. 
  

• Join the stage: Replicate the in-person experience with this unique feature that lets attendees join the stage alongside speakers to ask them questions.
  

• Breakout rooms: Create the perfect atmosphere for attendees to interact within small groups, drive meaningful conversations, and network in Rooms.
  

2. Effective lead capturing

Events are an effective marketing tool so it’s a no-brainer that being able to track the number of leads or demo requests, etc. is critical. But this has always been difficult to do at in-person events. And at the same time, organizers have struggled to find avenues to drive lead generation at virtual events because of a lack of opportunities to give product demos, and address visitors face-to-face. 

Many events end up as nothing more than a lengthy video stream with no interaction among the audience, which hurts your ROI. (Click here to read more about how exactly do go about calculating ROI at your virtual or hybrid event)

Fix it with Zuddl

With Zuddl, you have the ability to customize your very own Expo Booth, and to give your partners and sponsors the opportunity to do so too. Here’s how booth features help with your lead generation:

• Tiered sizes: Have the ability to choose from booths of three sizes with different customizations and options for configurability, branding, and messaging.

• Showcase your brand: With widgets like videos, image carousels, files, and call-to-action buttons, you can play attendees product demos,  share marketing collateral with them, as well as exclusive perks like coupons. 

• Live booth staff: A live representative can staff the booth and connect 1:1 via video call with your attendees to immediately answer any questions or doubts, and drive more interest in your products. That human connection is invaluable. 

• Register interest: Participants have a ‘register interest’ button to convey their interest in any brand in a booth. Once a participant has registered their interest in your booth, you’ll be able to see their name and email address which can effectively help you run more targeted post-event lead nurturing campaigns.
  

3. Lack of proper control for organizers

Organizing an event - any event - with hundreds and thousands of participants is never easy. Besides bringing so many people together, running an event seamlessly is a daunting task. 

Platforms like Zoom and Google Meet don't offer the intuitive control you'd expect for maintaining the rhythm of your event And while event management platforms give you far more control over how your event pans out, using the software in itself is a challenge.

Fix it with Zuddl

With Zuddl, you can steer the flow of your event with ease and confidence. Organize meetings, conferences, and summits of any capacity with Zuddl's intricate and easy-to-navigate moderator features.

• Completely self-serve: Zuddl is 100% customizable, meaning that you can customize every aspect of your event, from lobby to networking. There’s no coding required at all.
  

• Virtual backstage setup: Ensure everything goes as per the schedule with intuitive backstage for every live session. Give your speakers a space to practice and do a quick run-through before going live.

• Manage multiple sessions: You can easily oversee different live sessions with a separate backstage setting for each session. Experience the backstage feel of an offline event with the control options to manage every detail of the session.

• Seamless control: Make your live events power-packed with pre-recorded videos, panel discussions, product launches, and presentations. Display these elements with moderator control for all your stages.

4.  Result-oriented and seamless pre-event marketing

With pre-event marketing, your goal is to increase registrations for your event while also generating more and more interest in it. 

To achieve this, your marketing efforts should essentially focus on creating curiosity about the event while making it easy for the audience to register. However, carrying out event-related activities manually can become time-consuming and chaotic with a lot of planning and data handling. 

Most event platforms only ‘step in’ after the pre-event phase, leaving organizers stressing out about how to integrate their registrations with email marketing with the event software. It can be a huge mess.

Fix it with Zuddl

From creating appealing landing pages to convenient registration and reminders, Zuddl offers an easy and efficient alternative to take care of your end-to-end pre-event formalities. And thanks to ticketing and email integrations, you can manage registrations and pre-event marketing easily and seamlessly within one platform.

• Landing pages: You can create customized landing pages and share all relevant information about the event. Drive your audience to this page and increase registrations.

• Ticketing: Create customized tickets based on the days and sessions people wish to attend. With the ticket customization feature, you can offer your audience the choice to register only for the days or sessions of their interest.  

• Email integrations: Send your registered participants announcements, reminders, and countdown emails before the event to keep them updated and ensure maximum participation. 

5.    Storyboard and presentation options

The lack of attractive presentation options is another critical challenge for virtual events, directly impacting audience retention. 

Most virtual speakers deliver their talks with a presentation. But research shows that 79% of people believe presentations are boring.

Without an immersive setup to present visual content, you miss out on opportunities to make your event more interactive and impactful.

Fix it with Zuddl

Zuddl offers game-changing features to deliver content in a virtual setting. You can use multiple formats for your sessions, allow speakers to share their presentations and content easily, and transition between images and videos with ease—taking your events a level high above boring presentations.

• Play pre-recorded content: Add pre-recorded videos to your event to make it more accessible for participants and speakers from varying time zones. 

• Smooth transition: Whether it’s an image overlay or a push video, keep your attendees engaged in between sessions or speakers.

• Zero lag: Audio-video lags have no place at a virtual event. Thanks to zero lag at Zuddl, you’ll be able to live-stream and share content with no glitches, buffering, or audio issues. Offer a seamless experience to your speakers and audience alike. 

6. Event management and coordination

A significant reason why organizers avoid event management software is the struggle of operating the tool. A lack of tech support from the company only adds to the inconvenience.

With little knowledge of the tool, you can neither make the best use of it for planning your event nor help your participants with any queries. Besides, any glitches during the live event can end up spoiling the entire experience.

Fix it with Zuddl

The Zuddl team offers you support throughout the entirety of your event —before, during, and after. 

The platform was designed and built by leaders in the event industry; our CEO Bharath Varma used to run an event management agency called Phoenix Live which hosted live events for companies like Microsoft, Deloitte, Google etc. So we know how important it is for you to have a partner who counts your success as our own.

From onboarding to a knowledge base to assistance during your live event, the team is always there to help.

In conclusion…

Virtual events are a key ingredient of any marketing and lead generation strategy. Hosting an unforgettable online event can do wonders for your brand. So before planning your next event, think about how you can include these six elements and make your event flawless.

While the backend process of planning the details of your event can be taxing, the right event management software can help you host the event of your dreams. Ideally, the software should allow you to engage with your audiences, organize multiple sessions simultaneously, and offer seamless control of the live show.

With Zuddl, you have a simple and efficient solution to ease the process and your experience of running the show! We’d love to show you a live demo of the platform. Just click here to set up a time to chat with us.

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Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.