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Three Top Tips for Driving Meeting Attendance at Virtual Events

Three Top Tips for Driving Meeting Attendance at Virtual Events

Tim Groot

CEO & Co-Founder

Many in the events industry will understand the term, Hosted Buyer Events. These sessions are simply the facilitation of meetings between suppliers and decision-makers in a pre-scheduled fashion during an event, conference, or Trade shows.

But for both in-person and virtual events, the key to success for these hosted buyer or structured meetings is simply ensuring that the meeting actually takes place! Easier said than done?

After running 50+ meeting programs and facilitating 150,000+ Hosted Buyer meetings, we took a look at the data and insights from these events and found three top tips for structured meeting success.

1. Pack your Attendees Agenda and Provide Focused time.

We often see hosted buyer or structure meeting sessions running throughout the day–from 9 am to 5 pm. This unstructured format results in the attendee having meetings scattered throughout the day. While this might appear appealing and suggest flexibility in the attendees' agenda, our data shows that back-to-back meetings will result in higher attendance rates. 

Dedicating a section of your event agenda for these structured meetings and ensuring your attendees have back-to-back meetings can result in a 30% increase in meeting attendance!


2. Don't Overlap Content and Meeting time.

We've discussed having dedicated sessions for your scheduled meetings, but it is also critical to ensure that content isn't running parallel to these sessions.

Our data shows that a meeting is 39% more likely to happen when no content coincides with these sessions.

These hosted buyer or structured meeting sessions need to be an integral part of your event experience, with dedicated time when there is no content taking place. If there is content taking place simultaneously, meeting attendance will be 39% lower. But also, doing a dedicated day only for meetings does not have the same impact. Ensure the content AND the meeting time is part of the overall experience.


3. Keep it Short and Keep it Quick!

You want to pack your attendees' structured meeting time with quick, valuable introductions. Our data shows that meetings of 15 minutes or less have 20% higher meeting attendance.

Conversely, the longer the meeting, the lower the attendance rate for a hosted buyer or structured meeting sessions. 

These conversations should be a 'get to know each other' introduction. After which, people can always use the chat/meeting request functionality to schedule more extended conversations if needed, either during the event or after it.