Hosting an event is definitely a nice way to grow your brand. Yet, this comes at a pretty high price. While it is obvious that in-person events require lots of investment. Renting booths, and venues, paying for accommodation, transfers, refreshments, or even full dinners, and hiring staff is not cheap. Furthermore, when one arranges pretty large events, they have to invest more money in hiring guards and generally increasing staff. Such expenses can inflate the final budget very much.
Another aspect that definitely should be considered is that attendees also have to spend money when attending an event. Even if the accommodation, food, and transfer are covered by the host (which places additional pressure on their budget), there are still other expenses that an attendee will have to cover by themselves.
So, especially during COVID-19 times, many companies switched to virtual events, and it doesn’t seem that this, in fact, reduced the costs by much. But why? After all, one doesn’t have to spend money on all the above-mentioned matters, pay for the speaker’s time, transfer, accommodation, staff, etc. Furthermore, attendees also can save lots of money by attending an event right from their homes. Hence, shouldn’t the price for virtual events be considerably lower than what we see today. Yes, it should, but the pricing is pretty complicated, and here is why.
Virtual Event Pricing
The first and one of the most important questions – should virtual events actually be so expensive? Vii believes that they shouldn’t! Therefore, Vii always aims to provide our customers with a great offer at a lower than usual price. Unfortunately, there are still aspects that keep prices so high, and despite Vii’s hard work to reduce the costs of virtual events, there is still a mountain to climb. It is pretty hard to overcome the current market trends. But we still believe that the only way to make the industry prosper is to offer quality services for a great price. Let’s take Yadoo as an example, but we will return to this matter a bit later.
Why do Other Companies Charge So Much for Virtual Events?
We have already discussed that virtual events don’t have the requirements of in-person ones. That’s obvious. We also can’t ignore the fact that virtual events are still pretty expensive, even though logic tells us that they shouldn’t be so. However, the harsh reality often proves that the rabbit hole is way deeper than we expect it to be. Let’s take a look at aspects that made virtual events as costly as we know them today:
- Rapid Software Development
Everything in this world comes at a certain speed. The identical principle can be applied to technology development. Just like flying a fighter jet, one may complete their mission at a cruise speed, when no one has to be crunching and spending sleepless nights on bug fixing and finding solutions for problems that not a soul could even think about a day ago. Or one can switch to the afterburner mode and complete the mission much faster while burning many times more fuel.
COVID-19 caused the same effect on the industry. With the rising demand for virtual events, the companies had to switch to the afterburner mode, which allowed the industry to gain speed and momentum to meet the demand but significantly increased the prices.
- The Need for Training
Since the industry developed so fast, the majority of people simply had no idea how to implement innovative technology for their businesses. Therefore, everyone, including Vii, had to develop special training programs for their customers to make sure that they could utilize the new opportunities to the fullest extent.
- Infrastructure
While it may seem that virtual events don’t require any infrastructure, it is not true. The key factor here is that when running virtual events, all the infrastructure is hidden under the hood. Streaming, servers, resource management, storage, et cetera, are provided by 3rd parties and usually, considering a high demand, are pretty expensive.
- Misjudgment of the Event Scope
When the industry made its first steps in virtual events, even despite training, customers still had wrong expectations. Therefore, they often made their events much larger and more complex than they actually needed. Virtual events are to be more focused.
All these reasons, in fact, result from the same problem – a huge demand. It was the rapidly increased demand that has become a major gamechanger for the industry. While it made the industry boom, such rapid development came at a price. In our case, the price was the rising costs. When a sudden demand for virtual events appeared, the industry had next to nothing to offer, so everyone had to invest billions into technology development. Which greatly increased the price for the end-user.
Steps Vii Took to Reduce the Price
As we have already said, Vi took certain steps to make virtual events cheaper. So, here are some of our efforts to reduce the price:
- Well-Considered Offer
We worked hard on our offer to help our customers save money. By choosing Vii, one can host a single event or an unlimited number of events (one at a time). Therefore, if you want to test the waters in the world of virtual events, you can try our single-event solution. To see whether you achieve your goals or not. In turn, if you are a large company or business entity, by choosing our unlimited event solution, you can host any number of events during the chosen period, but only one at a time. Therefore, you save money on each separate event.
- Involving 3rd parties
One of the most obvious ways to reduce prices is to involve more companies to increase the number of available offers. Therefore, we created a dedicated marketplace for 3rd party services to help our customers to choose the best price among the available options.
- Advanced Training
All our offers include a special training course to help people avoid mistakes. It consists of several meetings with our specialists. We made it very simple, and thanks to our personal approach, Vii can help everyone learn how to host virtual events completely independently.
Yadoo
Currently, we are working hard on our new product – Yadoo. It is our latest virtual event solution that meets all the market requirements. Yadoo is fully GDPR compliant and safe. We support up to one thousand simultaneous attendees. Our offer includes a customizable web-based hall, 4-8 booths, reception, and an auditorium. Yet, the most fascinating aspect is that we don’t require an annual commitment and offer a 14-day money-back guarantee.
We want to make our new product available and useful for everyone to help people run their events individually. Therefore, we paid special attention to the back office to make it easy-to-use, robust, and reliable. We want to give our customers everything they need to allow them to manage and customize their environment, change the content, brand, and configure their events.
Vii believes that the future is behind teaching people to encourage them to host their events individually, therefore, helping them save money. Check out our website to learn more.
Future of the virtual events
So, do virtual events even have a future? Indeed recently, the virtual event market has significantly decreased as companies aimed to return to live events. However, Vii believes in a bright future for virtual events. We aim to help businesses of all sizes reduce the overall cost of hosting events by helping them go online. Here are the main reasons why we believe in the future of virtual events:
- The Price Will Decrease
Even though virtual events are still relatively expensive, they are already cheaper than conventional ones. And this tendency is likely to remain. Vii already offers a cost-effective solution for companies to run virtual events. Simultaneously, Forbes believes that many are turning virtual, and all sectors will have to adapt to keep up with demand. Since the demand has lowered by a certain level and there is already available infrastructure for hosting virtual events, the price will decrease.
- Special Appliance
Today, it is obvious that virtual events won’t substitute in-person ones. However, both types of these events will have separate spheres of use. For example, some companies switched to hybrid events, combining positive features of both types. Therefore, the most fundamental aspect is that virtual events have their own spheres of the appliance. Today, it is all about choosing what is best for one’s business, and flexibility is always a great thing.
- Familiarity With the Idea
Several years ago, only a few of us had such an in-depth knowledge about hosting virtual events, but this has changed dramatically. Over the past several years, numerous companies (including Vii) offered various training programs to help hosts learn how to host virtual events and get the most from them. Undoubtedly, the need for training programs added to the final cost of virtual events. It is already clear that the need for such in-depth training programs has decreased and continues to do so. Therefore, we can expect the price to go down.
The modern world is all about diversity, and virtual events offer a great opportunity for businesses of all sizes to arrange B2B events, engage their employers, and introduce new products & services. The more the world gets familiar with the virtual event industry, the more obvious it becomes that virtual events are here for long. Despite the fact that it is very unlikely that humanity will fully move to virtual events any time soon, virtual events will still remain a part of our lives. Slowly but surely, the virtual event industry will come to a balance of supply and demand. Therefore, offering quality services at a fair price.