Welcome to the world of virtual summits, where innovation meets opportunity head-on! Hosting a virtual summit has become a strategic and dynamic way for entrepreneurs and businesses to engage with their audiences. However, amidst the excitement of planning, organizing, and promoting your virtual summit, one vital aspect often gets overlooked: goal setting.
This is part of Virtual Summits 101!
When the idea first comes up to host an event, you might not immediately start thinking of your virtual summit goals, but maybe you should.
Overall you probably know you want to reap all the virtual summit benefits, including growing your audience, building your brand, and maybe launching your signature offer to a fresh new audience, but what are the specifics?
The success of a virtual summit heavily relies on setting realistic and achievable goals. In this blog post, we will guide you through a step-by-step process for setting goals for their upcoming virtual summit.
We will also discuss how to restructure goals if they are not met, ensuring increased effectiveness and reduced disappointment for future events.
Let's get started.
Setting Goals For Your Virtual Summit
Virtual summit goals are your guides through the entire virtual summit landscape.
By defining your objectives, you will create a clear vision, empower your team and collaborators, and leave a lasting impression on your attendees. Here are 5 steps to narrowing in on your virtual summit goals, so that you have a clear mission and roadmap for your big event!
Step 1: Define Your Objectives
The first step in setting your virtual summit goals is to clearly define your objectives.
What do you really hope to achieve through planning and hosting this event?
Identifying your core reasons behind hosting a virtual summit and really getting a clear picture of if you're focus is expanding your reach, building authority in your industry, generating leads or a little of all three will set the stage for success.
Clearly articulating your objectives will serve as a foundation for setting more specific and measurable goals.
Step 2: Identify Key Performance Indicators
To measure the success of your virtual summit, it's essential to identify a few key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and tactics. Some common KPIs include
- the number of attendees who register for your event,
- the engagement levels of those attendees and your speakers,
- leads generated through the event,
- sales conversions into paid tickets and posts event offers,
- as well as social media reach.
One tip, my buddy Liz Wilcox (From The $9 Email Marketing Membership) provided that I will always do moving forward, is to set a goal that isn't monetary at its core. For me, this translated into making sure I maintained a weekly date night with my husband and continuing to say 'YES' to things my kids wanted to do, throughout the planning and production of the event.
It was a great reminder that life goes on outside the planning of your event, and you need to. make sure you show up for your family and non-business obligations from start to finish!
Step 3: Set S.M.A.R.T Goals
Once you have defined your objectives and identified KPIs, it's time to set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T) goals.
S.M.A.R.T. goals provide you with a clear target that you're working towards and also help you track progress effectively. For example, instead of setting a simple goal to "attract a large audience," a more specific S.M.A.R.T. goal would be to "increase attendance by 40% compared to the previous year's virtual summit."
Setting goals that are just pulled together without taking into account your resources and your ability to achieve them (within reason) is just a waste of time. So ensure that your goals are realistic and achievable given your resources and market conditions.
Step 4: Break It Down
Now that you have some goals, let's break them down a little bit!
Breaking down your goals into smaller, actionable steps is crucial for staying focused and motivated throughout the planning process.
One way to help you monitor your progress, identify potential roadblocks, and then make necessary adjustments is to create a breakdown of the larger goals into smaller goals that lead to the bigger picture.
As you complete each of the smaller goals, you'll be working your way towards the larger completion to ensure your goals stay on track.
Step 5. Regularly Assess and Adjust
Set it and forget it will not work here... One of the biggest mistakes, outside of not setting goals at all, is to set goals that meet all the criteria we discussed above and then not pay them any attention or keep track of them.
You really need to make time to regularly assess your progress against the goals you set.
Analyzing the data from your virtual summit platform like HeySummit (including things like pageviews, registrations, live attendees, video replay views, and downloads...), along with engagement metrics, and attendee feedback to really evaluate if you're on track to meet your objectives.
If necessary, adjust your strategies accordingly.
What If You Don't Meet Your Goals?
And then, of course, there is always the looming fear that you don't hit your goals...
Because despite all the careful planning and execution, there may be instances where you fall short of your virtual summit goals. Instead of feeling discouraged, I encourage you to embrace the results and view it as an opportunity to reassess and learn from the experience.
In such cases, it's important to stay positive and focus on the learnings from the experience.
- Reflect on what worked well and what could be improved.
- Take feedback from attendees and examine areas where you might have fallen short.
- Use this information to refine your goals for the next time and make necessary adjustments in your strategy. For example, if registration numbers are lower than expected, consider increasing your marketing efforts or making adjustments to your value proposition.
Setting Goals For Your Virtual Summit
Let's wrap this up with some final words!
Virtual summits are big collaboration projects. They require a lot of time and energy to plan and produce properly, and setting realistic and achievable goals is a critical component of a successful event.
By defining objectives, identifying key performance indicators, setting SMART goals, breaking them down, and regularly assessing and adjusting, you can stay focused, and motivated, while measuring your progress.
Best wishes as always! Happy planning.
