How to Become a Virtual Event Hosting Pro

Want to host a virtual event but not sure where to start? Unsure how to engage with a remote audience? If you’re looking for some guidance to make your virtual experience as memorable and impactful as in-person events, we can help! 

Virtual experiences are still new to many marketing teams, so we created a comprehensive playbook just for event marketers, hosts, and their presenters. Our ultimate guide for event hosts and virtual presenters is full of best practices, step-by-step tips and tricks, and new ideas to help you launch a successful virtual event with Zoom Events.  

Keep reading for some highlights.

One of the fastest ways to disengage an audience is with choppy audio and poor lighting. And worse, if a presenter can’t interact with participants or view their own slides, it can be unnerving for everyone involved. When planning your virtual experience, it’s worthwhile to create a pre-show plan that takes the following into consideration:

• Technology: (internet bandwidth, livestreaming platforms, operating system updates)

• AV: (external lighting, microphones, virtual mixing, and streaming software)

• Personnel: (who will answer questions from the audience? Do your guest speakers know how to use the platform or know where to look? What contractors do you plan to use?)

• Timing: (session length, how to avoid dead air, intentional networking breaks between sessions, cue-to-cue)

We know this doesn’t come easy and takes some practice, so we’ve filled our Zoom Events presenters’ guide with some of our favorite lighting tools, suggestions to look at the online audience (instead of themselves on camera), script reminders, and a sample template for creating a Run of Show to keep your event running smoothly. 

Once you’ve finalized your tech needs and planned for a dry run, now’s the time to get creative. One of the biggest advantages to virtual events is the ability to extend your brand reach beyond the walls of an expo hall or in-person headcount. And with Zoom Events, hosts can brand a webinar or meeting with their company logo, colors, custom banners, and backgrounds via Zoom’s Session Branding. Meanwhile, your participants can inject their personality into an event with virtual backgrounds, wallpaper, nametags, filters, and avatars. 

Don’t forget about networking! Just because attendees are remote doesn’t mean they can’t connect virtually. The Zoom Events virtual networking feature enables participants to create networking profile cards for easier interaction with peers and extend their connections after the event concludes. Be sure to add some extra time into your agenda for socializing with intentional breakout sessions complete with icebreakers and promoted themes.

Our ultimate guide for event hosts and virtual presenters includes step-by-step instructions to brand your virtual event, get started with virtual networking, customize attendee profiles, and tips to create interactive content such as surveys and polls. 

Event marketers live and breathe data, which is yet another reason virtual events have catapulted into the mainstream. Collecting data from an in-person event can be challenging, as booth scans and session registrations aren’t always an accurate reflection of ROI. But with Zoom Events, you can access analytics around the most popular sessions, number of chat conversations, livestream views, recording views, Q&As for follow-up, and more!

Available as a downloadable report or live dashboard, event hosts can use this valuable data to make informed decisions for follow-up events or lead-generating conversations. Even more, sessions can be recorded to the cloud or your desktop to distribute post-event for additional training, replays, or as gated content to capture leads and keep the momentum going. 

Don’t let the thought of hosting a virtual event or learning new event software keep you from providing an incredible remote experience. Check out the Zoom Events ultimate guide for event hosts and virtual presenters to access our complete support database and learn how to maximize the performance of your event to become a virtual event pro.