5 Tips for Turning Your In-Person Events Into Compelling Virtual Experiences

The annual Club Talentsoft conference is a key moment in the life of our company.  

For the past six years, it has brought around 1,500 people together—customers, prospects, partners, journalists, bloggers, and analysts—with whom we share our product vision, demos, insights, solutions, and so much more. Last year’s conference was held in Barcelona and, the year before, in Amsterdam.  

On May 12, we wanted to hold this year’s Club Talentsoft in an emblematic Parisian venue: the Carrousel du Louvre. Then in March, COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill, immediately forcing the Louvre museum to close its doors to the public. And in that moment, it became clear that there would be no possible way for this event to happen as planned. 

So, we decided to go virtual. It wasn’t easy shifting all of our plans at the last minute, but the end result has been truly remarkable. 

That’s why I thought I’d share five of the lessons I learned throughout this process to help other CMOs out there overcome these same challenges (I know there are many!): 

1. Trust yourself and your team for making tough decisions 

The difficult part about this wasn’t transforming Club Talentsoft into a virtual experience as much as it was about deciding whether or not going virtual would be the right decision to make. There was a lot of uncertainty surrounding this. For starters, the French government had forbidden large events, at first, until the end of April. Being that our event was originally scheduled for May 12, it was technically still “possible” for it to go on as planned.  

But there were also other financial risks involved: by going digital, we could lose the entire deposit we had made to secure the location. That’s why, at first, we considered moving the event to later in the Summer or even in the Fall, but that would have had a small impact on our broader brand and lead generation efforts. Not to mention, there was no guarantee—and there still isn’t—that COVID-19 wouldn’t spike again later in the year.  

Gaining a bit of a global perspective made making this decision easier. Selena, one of our marketing directors, is Italian and, as you can imagine, had been closely following the  

COVID-19 situation unfolding in her home country. It became clear that things were going to get worse before they got better. I’m not Italian (sighhh), but I also read the international press daily and saw what was happening there and all around the world. I tended to agree with Selena’s perspective. 

On top of that we also heard that many of our customers outside of France had seen the news about the Louvre closing and were not too thrilled about coming to Paris anymore.  It was at that point that we both had a terrible gut feeling that nobody would want to attend a physical event any time soon! That’s when we recommended pivoting to a virtual event. Fortunately, the rest of the management team agreed, and before we knew it, the ship had changed course!   

We also knew our marketing team could pull it off. Working in a marketing team in the tech industry is always a bit of a roller coaster. Growth isn’t linear. There are a lot of moments where fast acceleration, rapid pivots in strategy, and a need to respond quickly to competitive moves in the industry are commonplace.  That’s why we have a built a team of passionate, super engaged, and very resilient people. We knew that Chloe, our amazing Club Talentsoft project manager, along with Annie, Ida, and the rest of the team would be able to make the pivot beautifully. We also were confident that they could set aside what they had worked on for over 10 months and reinvent everything from scratch. We knew that our stellar product marketing team, led by Elodie, and all of our 100% engaged product managers, could do it too! And you know what? They did. In a week. One Monday, we welcomed Chloe (who had just come back from vacation!) with the news that Club Talentsoft was going virtual. The following Friday, she was already showing me demos of various virtual events tools. That’s what I call embracing change! 

We also couldn’t have done it without the support of our event agency, Hopscotch. They have worked with us on bringing the last three Club Talentsoft conferences to life. It’s always in times of crisis that you can really test the mettle of someone. The Hopscotch team was able to adapt to the new vision immediately and support us with their expertise every step of the way. We knew their world was thrown upside-down, too, but they came through for us in a very professional and personal way.  

2. Work on your message (but not alone) 

The original theme for this year’s conference was “Talent Diversity.” It was meant to focus on the need for companies to not only embrace all kinds of diversity – gender, ethnic, social, cultural – but also different kinds of skillsets, work ethics, leadership styles, and more. It's an important discussion and one at the core of our approach to talent management.

At first, I thought we only needed to slightly adapt the theme to address the realities of the current pandemic: for example talking about “Why leveraging talent diversity is critical in a crisis?”. But I soon realized that we needed a wider theme, a theme that would draw people in a more direct way. HR professionals, our primary audience, had really taken the brunt of the COVID-19 crisis: from dealing with urgent employee safety issues to managing remote work and partial unemployment (and well beyond). Many had already been on-call 15+ hours a day to deal with the crisis. Many are still managing the fallout of it all. It became clear that we had to start from scratch, start from the current context and what our audience was living right now.

So, what would they want to hear about on June 16, the new date of Club Talentsoft Virtual?  What could we offer that would be useful during these unprecedented times? Instead of venturing a guess, we decided to ask them directly.  

We divided up the work and got on the phone to interview HR leaders all over Europe to better understand their immediate concerns and how we could program conference content (workshops, panels, discussions, etc.) that would specifically address those needs.  Even though these HR leaders were incredibly busy, they took to time to share their insights and opinions with us. We learned something incredibly valuable through this: even amid a crisis, people are willing to share what they think and feel. There was not a single HR leader that told us, “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to talk to you.”   

This is how we came up with the new rallying cry for Club Talentsoft Virtual: “Respond. Reflect. Reboot.” Check out the conference manifesto to learn more about what it means.   

The funny thing about this entire situation is that it took us two months to come up with the original theme for the conference; this time around it only took two weeks to land on a new theme, get it validated internally, and ensure that all 42 speakers were aligned. What I learned is that if you listen to your audience closely and have the unique opportunity to work with a small, yet highly motivated and autonomous team, you can get out of the “consensus-building” rut (I’m sometimes guilty of asking for everyone’s opinions)—and actually move fast to make positive and meaningful change happen.  

3. Find the right platform 

Even before we decided on our new message, we had already started researching virtual event platforms. We could have chosen a classic webinar platform (which we have been using quite a bit lately since we’re unable to host live events at this time) to host Club Talentsoft Virtual. But we wanted to go “all in” and create a truly unique experience. I also believe that this was the right time to experiment and try new things.   

If there’s one clear outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that it has shifted B2B marketing’s reliance on live events—from traditional trade shows to massive corporate extravaganzas (i.e. Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference). There’s a good chance that things will NEVER go back to the way they were before.   

That’s why this was a great opportunity to learn how to use different tools and platforms. Of course, we did a bit of research around what larger U.S. tech companies, like Adobe and Microsoft, have done around their own major virtual events. But that kind of “compare and contrast” can be a bit intimidating because those companies have vast resources we simply don’t have.  For example, Sirius Decisions recently hosted an amazing virtual event where Maroon 5 was invited to perform. Even though that had inspired our thinking—we even considered asking our co-founder to play the guitar!—it was more relevant for us to learn from what the great marketing team at EcoVadis did with their Sustain 2020 event, something that went from live to virtual in just two weeks! 

In the end, we decided to move forward with an immersive platform that would replicate the setting of the Carrousel du Louvre, where guests could visit the virtual exhibition hall and to attend workshops and other interactive experiences. Our goal was to recreate the feeling of attending an in-person event by making it possible to “stroll through” digital exhibitions stands that could be fully customized (and decorated) by our partners. We were given an opportunity to do something unique, so we thought we might as well have a little fun with it! 

We also wanted to create a space for people to chat —just like they would at a physical event. And here’s the added bonus: since we’re not limited in space, as we would have been in a live setting, the event is now open to everyone. This has transformed Club Talentsoft Virtual into a much larger event than we ever had ever imagined and has now expanded its reach to audiences across all geographies. What a unique way to share our brand and our insights with the entire world!  

Even more, the content shared at Club Talentsoft Virtual will live on for many months and feed our many marketing programs and initiatives. In fact, this is an area of event planning that we’ve really embraced with open minds and open arms: how to effectively manage the post-virtual event experience. Because our event is 100% digital, we will now have access to insights on our attendees (behaviors, interests, etc.) that we would have never had at a live conference. This will make it possible for us to approach post-conference follow-up in more relevant and personalized ways than ever before. #SummerofChange, here we come!  

4. Think in “digital” 

At first, I thought, “We already have all the content, we just need to make it all digital.” Again, I was proven wrong. 

Because we can’t ask our guests to spend their whole day in front of a screen—and because holding an event online means fighting for their attention at all times—we decided to keep things short and sweet. With 8-minute keynote addresses (down from 15) and 20-minute panel discussions (down from 45), the conference will now last only a total of three hours. This required being ruthless—something that does not come natural to me—but we had no choice.   

And anyone who has ever tried to cut a keynote speaker’s time in half will understand what I mean when I say that making these changes definitely required a bit of strong persuasion. Fortunately, our executive team has grown so used to my covid19 “do this or else” mode (!) that they all very kindly agreed to adapt to the change in format.  

Moving everything to digital also involves a lot of technical gear. While we decided to stream our three keynote addresses from a studio, we thought the rest of the content could be streamed from our speakers’ homes (whether they are customers or partners). We sent them direction on what cameras and microphones they should order, and clear directions on how to manage their visual and sound environment. There was nothing too challenging about this; we wanted to keep things simple.  

Here again, it’s all about change management: it was one thing for our internal and external speakers to agree to participate in a virtual conference; however, once they realized that their living room or kitchen (and possibly their kids in the background) would end up being a part of this virtual experiment, they were a bit less enthusiastic.   

That’s why we decided to be very explicit about our expectations of the event. In kickoff calls with our speakers, we made it clear that we were not expecting studio-quality image or sound. For us, authenticity and engagement mattered most. People are planning to attend Club Talentsoft Virtual to get useful information and advice on the Future of HR, not because they expect the entire experience to be filled with beautifully-produced shots. As such, we wanted to ensure that, across all of our content, the tone would remain humble, candid, and in the voice of our customers and our audience.  

All in all, the most important thing coming out of this was to be crystal clear about objectives and expectations upfront. This had a major impact on lowering the anxiety level of everyone involved.  

5. Remember, “done” is better than “perfect” 

Club Talentsoft Virtual will take place in a little under three weeks. It may not be perfect—or as perfect as we imagined it would be when we first started working on our live conference plans last July—but there’s really no alternative. We weren’t going to forgo an opportunity to connect with our customers in a meaningful way. Our team has worked hard on developing products and ideas that are ready to be shared with the world. For us, taking a chance on this virtual experiment was better than doing nothing at all.  

No one really knows what the future holds for large, live conferences post-COVID-19. So why not take this opportunity to try new and immersive virtual tools, learn by trial and error, and perhaps even outdo ourselves—now and well into the future. After all, that’s what experimenting is all about, right? 

We’re excited and curious to see how this event turns out. If you are too, please join us! The Club Talentsoft Virtual magic happens on June 16. You won’t want to miss out!