Virtual events have become integral to modern event planning, offering unprecedented flexibility and reach. They are becoming increasingly popular each year, as seen by the growing market size. A report points out that the global virtual events market is valued at USD 79.66 billion and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.7% during 2025-2030. However, hosting a successful virtual event requires thoughtful planning, innovative tools, and a keen understanding of your audience.
If you’re gearing up to host virtual events in 2025, this comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know.
Virtual events are online gatherings where attendees participate remotely, using platforms designed for live interaction, networking, and engagement. These events replicate many aspects of in-person meetings, from keynote speeches to breakout sessions. Simultaneously, they also introduce unique advantages like real-time analytics and greater accessibility.
While virtual events certainly hold advantages, you will soon realize they also introduce complications all their own:
💡 Pro Tip: Platforms like Hubilo address these concerns head-on. It arms planners with high-tech tools like conversion prompts and personalized communication that promise high engagement rates while creating networking opportunities.
First things first- before organizing and promoting your online event, you need to ask yourself: “What do I wish to accomplish by hosting this event?” This question is fundamental to help you decide which virtual events to host and have a clear goal that will lead your virtual event to success. Below are four different types of virtual events:
If your goal is to educate your target audience, you might want to consider hosting a webinar. The term “webinar” is a combination of the words “web” and “seminar”. The host can be joined by other presenters to talk about a specific topic and to answer questions that attendees might have.
Webinars are ideal for delivering focused content, such as training sessions, expert talks, or product demos. Their simple format—typically a single speaker or panel addressing a virtual audience—makes them versatile and easy to execute.
Hubilo’s Webinar+ elevates webinars with advanced engagement tools like gamification, AI-driven analytics, and branded virtual spaces.
Download Hubilo's Webinar Success Blueprint to get our Essential Planning Checklist for Winning Events
This type of virtual event is perfect if you’re looking to gather a large audience but don’t have the budget for a big venue. Similar to an in-person conference but held online, virtual conferences are built around a live, complex agenda that includes keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more. Attendees are given the opportunity to exchange ideas with one another and to build new relationships. To make your virtual event more engaging and interactive, you can use features such as live chat, polls, and Q&As.
Involving both in-person and virtual attendees, these events are perfect for town hall meetings, company-wide events, training sessions, and more. It can be time and money-consuming to organize an event inside your organization for a large crowd, especially when people have different schedules or live in a different timezone. Internal hybrid events allow attendees to gather and interact at the same time without being at the same place.
Trade shows and exhibitions thrive in a virtual setting with tools like virtual booths, live demos, and one-on-one chat options.
Hubilo has features like customizable virtual booths and detailed analytics to track exhibitors' engagement and ROI.
Virtual seminars and workshops are centered around skill-building, hands-on activities, or focused discussions on niche topics.
By integrating Hubilo’s interactive tools, you can create seminars that captivate and educate your audience.
Going virtual is still an unfamiliar concept to people who are used to organizing in-person events. As human beings, we are often reluctant to change, and planners wonder if they can reach the same level of engagement with virtual vs in-person events. The reality is that the growth of virtual events is proof of its many benefits. By hosting virtual events, organizations will:
1. Reach a Broader Audience
Attendees only need two things to take part in a virtual event: an internet connection and a computer or a mobile phone. Not only can organizations reach out and make connections with people from all over the world, but they can also gather a large audience without worrying about the space.
2. Save Time & Money
Planning a virtual event will save you the hassle of booking a venue and save you from other costs that come with in-person events, like food and beverage, additional staffing, traveling, and so on. Although virtual events still require planning and coordination, they allow planners to save a tremendous amount of time. Attendees also save time and money because they do not have to travel to take part in the event.
3. Easily Collect Valuable Data
One of the advantages of virtual vs in-person events is its ability to collect and measure important feedback. Virtual events can easily be monitored to determine audience engagement. Knowing important information, like how and where attendees interacted and how long they stayed at the event, will help you make your future virtual events even more successful!
4. Have More Flexibility
Virtual events offer both the host and attendees a lot more freedom than in-person events. As mentioned earlier, there are many types of virtual events, and you, as a planner, can use your creativity to customize your event. For instance, you can invite guest speakers from anywhere, offer different language options, and even use interactive elements to make your virtual event engaging.
5. Make Connections
Thanks to virtual events, organizers and attendees living all around the globe can connect with each other from the comfort of their homes. Making new connections is good for your company as it can lead to business opportunities. It can also help you stay updated about the industry trends to stay ahead of the competition.
6. It Is Eco-friendly
While in-person events require attendants and organizers to travel, sometimes from the other side of the globe, –we’ll let you take a minute to think about the carbon footprint it causes–, virtual events do not. In addition, with virtual events, there is no paper wastage. It helps organizations host eco-friendly events that lead to a cleaner environment.
7. Amplified Engagement
The key to a virtual event success is the attendees engagement and interaction. Because the audience can attend the event from their homes, it makes the event more personal, which tends to become more engaged.
Read and Learn: How to Add Energy, Impact, and Results at Every Stage of Your Webinar
Hosting your event on an event platform will give you the opportunity to use features to interact with your attendees, such as chat boxes, polls, and surveys.
Event planning consists of important fundamentals. All events, whether they are physical or virtual, rely heavily on a detailed strategy, and to do that there are a few key details you should consider.
1. Stellar Marketing
Similar to physical events, virtual events require comprehensive marketing. Without a targeted and effective promotion strategy, your attendance numbers could be greatly affected.
2. Meaningful Content
Content is the foundation of your virtual event and therefore should be relevant. Keep your attendees engaged and interested with powerful keynotes and topics that are tailored to them!
3. Analyze Data
Data will help you determine the success of your past and future virtual events. Capturing attendee and engagement data will help you measure your ROI for each event and activate the buyer’s journey.
Planning a virtual event involves several crucial steps that ensure a smooth and engaging experience for attendees. From setting clear objectives to curating content, each phase contributes to the overall success of your event. Follow this step-by-step guide to streamline your planning process and maximize impact.
💡 Pro Tip: Use Hubilo’s all-in-one platform to manage speakers, agendas, and audience engagement seamlessly. From setup to execution, Hubilo simplifies every step of hosting a virtual event.
A virtual event platform is a software that allows users to host virtual webinars, conferences, hybrid events, and much more with relative ease. Attendees can participate in both peer-to-peer interactions as well as one-to-many interactions, which makes virtual event platforms unique! Their many features go beyond standard video conferencing software and will help you make your virtual events more engaging.
We’ve gathered the best key features that some virtual event platforms offer!
When planning a virtual event, planners should look for a platform that offers customization features. Being able to combine the company’s branding with interacting features will help build a one-of-a-kind virtual experience for the audience. So when choosing a virtual event platform for your event, look for customization features like:
Similar to in-person events, it is essential for your attendees to stay engaged during an event while being able to communicate. Be sure to choose a virtual event platform that offers features like chat rooms, polls, surveys, Q&A sessions, and more. Networking features must be easy to navigate and use. Many platforms use AI-based matchmaking algorithms that will help your audience connect with people who share similar interests.
This must-have feature will help you save time and costs when hosting your virtual event. And not just that- automation also makes meeting and event planning easier! When looking for a platform to host your virtual event, you want to choose one that is automated as much as possible, especially if you need to plan a virtual event quickly. Some automated features include event page creations, speaker data upload, and other processes and systems of the virtual event platform.
Sponsorship can be a good way to drive your revenue. Sponsors want to choose events that will give brand recognition to them, while having the chance to connect with a new audience. To attract sponsors and keep them interested, you can give them the opportunity to place their logo on your event page and to showcase their brand during your virtual event.
“What is a virtual booth?”, you may ask. It is a space within a virtual event in which sponsors and exhibitors can market their product or service by sharing videos and photos about their offerings. It allows one-to-one networking and encourages attendees to connect with each other and to participate in meaningful conversations.
When choosing your virtual event platform, make sure that it offers integration tools to help you store your attendee data in one place so that you can analyze important information faster and easier, such as session attendance and audience engagement. This will help you save time and money.
An event management software integration will help you plan, market, and manage your event efficiently, from your event website to your mobile event app.
Live broadcasting your virtual event is a cost-effective way for your organization to reach a broader audience and to boost audience engagement via live polling, Q&As, and more. Because it is live, it creates a sense of urgency among viewers who won’t want to miss the opportunity to participate in your virtual event.
Use email marketing to spread the word about your virtual event and increase registrations, but also to gather feedback from your audience by sending them surveys after the virtual event is over. Most people check their emails everyday, so email marketing is a great way to communicate with the participants at all stages of the event.
Hosting a virtual event may seem difficult, but with the right steps and the right tools it can be a breeze! We’ll break down the steps to take within each phase of the event, including before, during, and after.
1. Determine your goal
First and foremost, you need to determine what you wish to accomplish with organizing your event. Having a clear goal will help you with the following steps. Are you trying to make new connections? Generate revenue? Educate your audience? Having one or more goals to work towards will help you during the event planning process.
2. Select Your Target Audience
Once you’ve identified the reasons why you want to host a virtual event, the next step is to select your target audience. For whom are you organizing the event? Learning about the audience is necessary to come up with content that is relevant to them. It is also one way to increase attendance at virtual events.
3. Set Up a Budget
As you would come up with a budget for an in-person event, you need to do the same when planning a virtual one. The key is to identify all of the components that have a cost. Once you have done that, you can use a spreadsheet to help you manage all of your spendings and itemize them in detail.
4. Decide on an Event Format
Now that you know your goals, target audience, and budget, the next step is to finalize the event format. What type of virtual events are you looking to host? As already discussed, there are different types of events that you can consider, including webinars and virtual conferences. After you determine the format, you will have to choose a platform to host your event.
5. Invite Sponsors and Exhibitors
Sponsors and exhibitors are essential elements for your event and will play a role in your budget. Do your research and onboard highly reputed sponsors and exhibitors- your event’s reputation will depend on it, and it will keep the attendees excited which will attract more people.
6. Selecting A Right Platform
The same way you have to find a venue for an in-person event, you want to select a platform that will help you promote, execute, and manage your virtual event. When choosing a virtual event platform, there are many things to take in consideration, but most importantly, you want to pick a platform that offers key features that will allow you to accomplish your goals.
7. Promotion and Marketing Strategies
Even the best-planned event won’t succeed without effective promotion. Here’s how to create buzz and drive registrations for your virtual event:
A. Build Anticipation on Social Media
B. Use Email Marketing and PR Outreach
C. Collaborate with Speakers and Influencers
✨ Need help promoting your next virtual event? Hubilo’s built-in marketing tools make creating branded registration pages easy and running targeted email campaigns. Start your promotional journey today!
8. Testing The Selected Platform to Identify Technical Issues
Get familiar with the virtual event platform you selected ahead of time before the event. If you don’t know how to use it, it will give the impression to your attendees that you are not prepared for your virtual event, and they will quickly lose interest. Although some glitches are inevitable, doing a test run before the big day will help you identify possible technical issues.
9. Register Your Attendees
Ask participants to register in advance for the virtual event so that you have an idea of the head count. This will also avoid the server to be overloaded during the on-the-spot registrations. Don’t forget to include a feature on your virtual event’s website that allow guests to pre-register, as well as important information such as the time and date of the event.
10. Branding & Messaging
Keep in mind the essential branding guidelines while working on brand messages for your virtual events. Stay authentic; you want to give your target audience a sense of trust and authority. You also need to differentiate yourself and organization from your competitors in the industry and show your guest why they should come to your event. It is important to research your target audiences and to know about them. This will allow you to create branding messages that will invoke them. Most importantly, you need to stay consistent with your brand messaging across all media.
1. Share Crucial Information
It can be very frustrating not knowing what is happening during an event or how to use a virtual platform. So make sure to share with your audience important information like the agenda, a list of guest speakers, and a guide to help them navigate through the event. You want to make sure that your attendees have everything they need to have a good experience.
2. Keep the Audience Engaged
You might need to give a little push to your audience for them to start engaging. Remember that virtual events can host large crowds, which can make it intimidating for people to take part in a conversation. Luckily, there are ways to interact with the participants, for example by conducting polls, surveys, and Q&A sessions.
3. Don’t Forget to Take Breaks!
If you are planning an event that is long or has many sessions, there are chances that your audience will start losing interest or become exhausted quickly. So, include breakout sessions throughout the event. It will give your audience time to relax and a chance for them to connect with each other.
4. Interactive Features: Beyond Polls and Q&As
Interactive features transform your event from a one-sided presentation to a lively, two-way conversation. Here’s how to use them effectively:
5. Networking Opportunities and Matchmaking
One of the main reasons people attend virtual events is to build connections. Providing robust networking opportunities is crucial to delivering value.
💡 Pro Tip: Hubilo’s customizable attendee profiles make networking intuitive and impactful, ensuring every participant finds value in the connections they make.
6. Gamification and Leaderboards for Higher Engagement
Gamification is a powerful tool for turning passive attendees into active participants. Incorporating game-like elements can drive excitement, competition, and collaboration.
Gamification tools make it easy to implement leaderboards, award badges and even offer tangible rewards like discounts, exclusive content, or gift cards. Attendees stay motivated, engaged, and excited throughout the event.
7. Real-Time Interaction Analytics
Tracking audience engagement in real-time helps you adapt and improve during the event. With Hubilo’s live engagement dashboard, you can monitor:
This data lets you adjust your approach on the fly, ensuring no attendee feels disengaged or overlooked.
8. Personalized Experiences for Attendees
Nowadays, personalization isn't optional; it’s expected. By tailoring content and interactions, you can make every attendee feel valued.
9. Interactive Content: Making Sessions More Engaging
Content delivery doesn’t have to be a monologue. Make your sessions interactive:
10. Post-Session Engagement
Engagement shouldn’t stop when a session ends. Keep the momentum going with post-session activities:
Hubilo’s Snackable Content Hub allows you to repurpose event content into bite-sized clips, keeping attendees engaged even after the event concludes.
💡 Pro Tip: Keep attendees actively participating with Hubilo’s suite of interactive features. Whether through networking, gamification, or real-time engagement, Hubilo ensures every attendee feels involved and inspired. Schedule a demo today to see these tools in action!
1. Stay Connected!
After the attendees leave the event, ask them for feedback. This process will help you understand your audience preferences, and will help determine the strengths and weaknesses of your event. You can use the data to make changes, or not, to your future virtual events.
2. Collect and Analyze Feedback
After any event, it is important to gather feedback from the attendees to understand how you can improve your future events. It can be uncomfortable for people to give honest feedback, so use an anonymous system to gather accurate data. A good way to determine your event’s success is to look at the attendance, the audience engagement, and to measure the event ROI. This important information will help you make your next virtual event even better by including elements that your audience liked, and modifying or forgoing parts that they did not.
3. Post Photos and Videos On Social Media
Use your social media to share photos and videos of your successful virtual event. Make it shareable so that people who attended the event can also share it on their social media. This will give make potential future participants want to come to your next event!
The work doesn’t stop when your virtual event concludes. To truly understand its impact and refine your future events, you need to measure success and analyze your outcomes effectively. Here's how to do it:
Virtual events generate a wealth of data, and knowing how to use it is key to measuring success. Look at:
Platforms like Hubilo offer real-time analytics dashboards that make it easy to track attendee behavior and engagement during the event, helping you identify what worked and what needs improvement.
Gathering attendee feedback is essential for understanding their experience. Create short, targeted surveys to collect insights on:
Keep your surveys simple and incentivize responses with a small reward, like a discount on future events or access to exclusive content.
💡 Pro Tip: Hubilo’s platform allows you to automate post-event surveys, saving time and ensuring you collect valuable feedback from attendees.
Ultimately, your virtual event should deliver a return on investment (ROI). To assess this:
Platforms like Hubilo provide comprehensive post-event reports, helping you calculate ROI and determine how well your event aligned with your objectives.
The key is to find your target audience and to do research. This will help you understand how to attract people. Once you know your target very well, you want to promote your event and can do so by using tools like marketing emails and social media. It is important to highlight the benefits of the event, as well as to invite reputed guest speakers. Finally, planners must make it easy for attendees to pre-register for the virtual event by creating an easy-to-use landing page layout that can sign guests up with no problem.
1. Invest in Production Quality
When it is finally the big day, the last thing you need is technical problems. That would leave you and your audience frustrated and you would not make a good impression. Remember, you want your virtual event to be successful and keep your audience engaged. So, to deliver a fully branded experience for your virtual attendees, it’s necessary to spend on the production quality.
2. Create Interactive Sessions
Make your remote audiences feel like they’re an integral part of the conversation by using features like surveys, chat boxes, quiz sessions, Q&As. Engage with the attendees by making the event a little personal. Planners can send gifts and goodies ahead of time and start the event with some icebreaker questions. To make your virtual event even more fun, incorporate gamification. Host a virtual scavenger hunt and reward the participants with prizes!
3. Leaderboards
Make your virtual event even more fun and keep your attendees engaged through gamification. To encourage their participation, you can award them prizes and awards throughout the event. Attendees can earn points by registering to sessions, participating in conversations, or by playing online games that organizers can plan ahead, such as an online scavenger hunt.
4. Take Breaks
Staring at a computer screen for long periods of time can be hard on the eyes and it can be challenging to stay focused. So if you are running a long virtual event, don’t forget to allow time for the host and participants to relax.
5. Interactive Content
Encourage attendee’s participation and engagement by using interactive content such as surveys and polls, interactive quizzes, virtual booths, etc. A virtual event does not mean that you should forego swag bags! Give the opportunity to your guests to download resources from their swag bag so that they can access it later.
6. Interact on Social Media
To boost interest and participant attendance, interact on social media prior, during, and after the virtual event. This will give you the opportunity to start building a relationship with them, and attendees will be able to connect with each other before the event. After the event, share photos and videos of the event to show your event’s success and make the missing audience want to come to the next virtual event.
7. Virtual Photo Booth
No need to be at an in-person event to have a photo booth. Because they are a lot of fun, you can be sure that a virtual photo booth will attract people to your virtual event. You can sponsor with other brands and incorporate their logo to the pictures, or you can create branded photo templates for your organization. Making even more fun by offering filters; this will keep your guests engaged. Virtual photo booths also offer the possibility to save and share photos easily within the booth.
Networking is a key element of any event. Although virtual event platforms cannot replicate face-to-face gatherings, they can allow one-to-one networking. Virtual event booths are analogous to the stands you see at in-person events, and they make it easier for sponsors, organizers, and attendees to connect. Other virtual event platforms’ features allow people to message one another, do video calls, or book in-person meetings. So don’t forget to offer dedicated time for networking during your next virtual event.
Choosing a virtual event platform that offers analytic and reporting features is a must to help figure out your virtual event ROI. As a host, you can track your event’s ROI before, during, and after the big day using a real-time metric dashboards, which is a feature that can be found in many virtual event platforms. Measuring the ROI of your virtual event can also be done by using the data gathered during virtual events to weigh costs versus benefits. Doing is beneficial for you to be able to make revision for future virtual events and to keep delivering excellence to your stakeholders.
According to a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, approximately 67% of all marketers have increased the time and money they invest in webinars and other virtual event solutions. Professionals also plan to be attending more virtual events each year. So yes, virtual events are here to stay!
Hosting virtual events helps you reach a global audience while saving time and money. Isn’t it awesome?
Most experts recommend a virtual event to be 3 to 5 hours long to ensure consistent levels of audience engagement each day. Remember to plan small breaks for your audience to relax!
Choose to host your virtual event on a fun platform like Hubilo. Thanks to its many features, you will be sure to keep your audience engaged and entertained. Employing gamification in your event activities is another great way to make your virtual event fun!
You can require attendees to pre-register for a fee, sell premium tickets, on-demand content, as well as merchandise and event swag.
Encourage your audience engagement by using features such as live chat, polls, and Q&As.
If your goal is to reach a global audience, you need to pay attention to the time difference with other countries. Hosting your event in the middle of the day should be a good compromise.
Not necessarily, but because they offer many features, we highly recommend hosting your virtual event on a platform if you want it to be a success among your attendees.
If you are ready to get started but wonder how much it costs, you can check our different plans and packages today!
Virtual events are no longer just an alternative to in-person gatherings—they're a strategic asset for businesses in 2025 and beyond. You can host engaging, impactful events that deliver measurable results by embracing the latest tools, techniques, and platforms.
To succeed, remember these key takeaways:
✨ Ready to elevate your virtual event strategy? With Hubilo’s powerful features, you can create unforgettable experiences that drive real results.
Schedule a free demo today and see how Hubilo can transform your events!
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