Hybrid Event Planning in 2022: Read the complete guide here
The Ultimate Guide to Content Engagement
Welcome to a new model for better life sciences events. Now, each in-person, hybrid, and virtual event is designed for maximum audience engagement and ROI.
Get the Most of Your Event
An engaged audience is critical to event success. Consistently delivering exceptional events is challenging for any enterprise or organizer, especially when boredom or distractions hold back organizational goals.
Audiences continue to evolve, as does the technology to support effective and interactive events. To make the most of crucial events, you need to understand audience behaviors, preferences, and feedback. This understanding, paired with the right technology and ability to reimagine event success, can help organizations increase event engagement and productivity.
What is Content Engagement?
Content engagement is any action attendees take to interact with your presenters and their content that provides you with data. In short, content engagement allows you to more effectively communicate with your audience and allows them to communicate with you.
Prioritizing content engagement means rethinking event structure, activities, and tools to drive more active and engaged participants. By using event content engagement strategies and leveraging engagement data, you can hold more effective events.
Survey Features
Gamification
Conversations
Slide Interactions
Accessible Resources
Event planning
When setting event goals, it’s helpful to remember:
- Desired event outcomes: What do you want attendees to do?
- Event budget: Practically, can you achieve specific goals within your budget?
- Event type: For example, a virtual conference may have different KPIs from an in-person conference.
Presentation and moderation make or break event success
Good presentation and facilitation play important roles in events and meetings. Even the most audience-centric events require the right structure to keep participants engaged and on track, rather than silent and distracted.
To set the stage for the best presenters and moderators:
- Do your topic research and know your audience.
- Understand differences in knowledge and experience.
- Set times for focused responses.
- Involve quiet participants with engagement strategies.
What is Content Engagement?
Read more about content engagement and why it matters to your event →
Why Content Engagement Matters
Content engagement helps audiences learn something new and share important insights.
Successful life sciences events use content engagement to improve value and productivity. Leading event professionals understand the impact of engagement strategies.
Planning the right event content and interactions creates better attendee experiences. Content engagement creates opportunities that facilitate better conversations and information exchange.
Below are a few reasons why content engagement matters in life sciences events:
Knowledge transfer and retention are key
An engaged audience learns and retains information better. An engaging event creates opportunities for peer-to-peer, peer-to-presenter, and attendee-to-organization exchanges.
Impress audiences
Content engagement leaves a unique impression and helps your organization stand out. A smooth, interactive content experience provides attendees with useful materials and interactions.
Address lower virtual audience engagement
According to our 2021 Virtual Events Survey, 47% of event planners experience significantly less engagement in virtual event settings compared to in-person life sciences events. As more events go virtual to reach more people, it’s critical to plan for maximum virtual engagement.
Improve future events with data & audience feedback
To create more effective meetings and events, event professionals must identify what works and what doesn’t, as well as common audience praise and complaints. Data-driven content engagement solutions give you event analytics and gather real-time and post-session feedback.
How to Increase and Measure Audience Engagement
As an event planner, you put a lot of effort into planning an event, putting it together, and managing it to make sure everything runs smoothly. But how much do you put into generating audience engagement, capturing participation data, and measuring the impact that your events have?
If you are only capturing attendance data, you are missing out on tons of valuable information that can help you demonstrate value and show ROI. If you don’t measure engagement data, you’re letting improvements that need to be made for more effective events slip through the cracks.
Important Event Metrics
Engagement with presenters/sponsors
Response rates for live polls, Q&As, and surveys gather opinions and show contributions to discussion.
Engagement with each other
Activity in conversations demonstrates networking and knowledge sharing.
Content engagement
Views, notes, and downloads of important resources indicate content usefulness and attendee interest.
Event evaluations
Post-event feedback and post-tests assess attendance satisfaction and learning outcomes respectively.
Aggregate data
Track overall engagement to measure event success.
Individual data
Individual data, like engagement rate and questions answered incorrectly, can enable highly specific follow-up, which is essential for training and compliance.
Event Engagement Strategies
Pre-event surveys
Engage your audience from the moment they sit down, before the event begins. Survey responses can be a springboard as you start your event; responses inform speakers on the audience’s topic knowledge and interest and gather useful data for business decisions.
Q&As, polls, and surveys
Encourage attendees to participate while also helping you collect opinions and address inquiries. The more engaged your audience is, the more likely they are to retain information from the presentation.
Gamification
According to Scientific American, motivation comes from 3 critical elements: autonomy, value, and competence. Gamification features like leaderboards and polls for the fastest responders give attendees a sense of control, reward, and competitive validation.
Slide and content interactions
During the event, content is the main form of interaction for attendees. In fact, for virtual guests, the content becomes the event venue itself. Measuring slide and content interactions helps you increase audience engagement by gauging the effectiveness of certain materials.
Conversations
Encourage quiet participants to submit questions digitally, so they can have their questions answered or opinions voiced without needing to verbally speak up. By checking discussions, moderators and presenters can pull from audience questions and comments to provide answers and explore relevant topics.
Push notifications
When your event uses software, push notifications cut through distractions. Push notifications nudge your audience, making them a great way to get higher engagement. You can also track interactions with push notifications to evaluate interest and effectiveness.
Post-event surveys
Understanding your attendee experience is crucial to measure attendee satisfaction and guide event improvements. Ask quantitative and qualitative questions like “How satisfied were you with the speakers and sessions?” and “What did you enjoy most about today?”
Life sciences events depend on knowledge exchange. It’s no surprise that leaders in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry are rethinking events as a key brand differentiator in a competitive space.
In life sciences meetings, content engagement matters because it creates relevant learning opportunities, and addresses communication requirements to meet your organization’s goals.
Organizations are listening, measuring their audience engagement and making data-driven moves to improve experience and productivity.
Medical Advisory Boards
To gain actionable insights and recommendations to address obstacles and support needs, pharmaceutical companies are prioritizing engagement in advisory boards.
How to Increase Engagement at Medical Advisory Boards
Read more about maximizing feedback at ad boards →
Investigator Meetings
To ensure successful execution of clinical study protocol, pharmaceutical companies focus on investigator meeting engagement and attendee event data to identify knowledge gaps and address challenges.
How to Increase Engagement at Investigator Meetings
Read more about boosting clinical trial success
Continuing Medical Education (CME)
To engage healthcare professionals, address practice gaps, and improve organizational competence, healthcare organizations are taking an interactive and learner-focused approach in an increasingly virtual landscape.
How to Increase Engagement at CME Symposia
Read more about addressing practice gaps in healthcare →
Choosing the Right Event Platform
Build the necessary foundation for smoother presentations, more engaged audiences, and satisfied stakeholders.
The right event platform streamlines content engagement. With the right event technology, your event can successfully engage your audience and accomplish your objectives.
To pick the right event platform for your event, there are a few factors to consider. It's important to consider event type, engagement features, and reporting.
Event Type
In an increasingly digital landscape, event organizers need a flexible platform for a smooth experience across all types of meetings.
In-Person
Virtual
Hybrid
Engagement Features
Important engagement features for events include:
- Survey features
- Gamification
- Conversations
- Slide interactions
- Accessible resources
Built-In Data Reporting
With built-in data reporting, the right event platform gives you a deep understanding of your event’s effectiveness.
Collect data from your audience with detailed reporting on which members engaged, which slides were compelling, cross-meeting trends, and more.
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Ready to make life sciences events meaningful?
Learn how to make an impact with our content engagement software.
About Array
At Array, we help life sciences organizations of all sizes and budgets increase audience engagement by 80%.
Our content engagement software, and built-in engagement analytics and reporting make it simple to define, boost, and track audience engagement. We power in-person, hybrid, and virtual events with content engagement technology and managed iPads.
Array Content Engagement Software
Learn about our event platform →