Let’s talk about offline vs online vs hybrid events.
The industry has undergone significant changes due to the Covid pandemic which made many events transition to online. However, the pandemic is no longer in our agendas and we see offline events are getting back on track. Online experience doesn’t want to fully leave us which brings us to hybrid expos and conferences.
Each format has its unique benefits and drawbacks. Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of online, offline, and hybrid events.
Online Events
Entirely virtual, taking place over the internet through webinars, live streams, or video conferences. What are the pros and cons?
Pros
- Cost-effective for each party: More affordable than offline events, they don’t require venues, catering, or travel expenses.
- Accessibility: Online events are more accessible as attendees can join from anywhere in the world.
- Environmentally friendly: The world is advocating for sustainability and online events are there to support it: they eliminate the need for travel, reducing carbon emissions.
- Data collection: Online events provide a wealth of data on attendee behavior, participation rates, and engagement levels.
- Easy to organize: You don’t need to put the same amount of effort into organizing an online event.
- Keeping up with the agenda: Because online events are so easy to organize, you can quickly react to some big news and do events to address hot, trendy topics.
- Variety of topics and speakers: With online conferences, you can cover a number of different subjects, even very-very niche ones. You can also invite great speakers from different locations as they don’t need to travel.
Cons
- Limited networking opportunities: Online events lack the same level of in-person networking opportunities that offline events offer. Sometimes it is even impossible, especially if we’re talking about some workshops and webinars.
- Technical issues: Technical issues such as connectivity problems or poor video quality can occur and disrupt the event.
- Lack of engagement: It can be challenging to keep attendees engaged and attentive throughout the entire online event. It’s just impossible to give full attention to a day-long online conference.
- Limited branding opportunities: Online events offer fewer branding opportunities than offline events as they lack physical branding elements.
- No parties: I mean… That’s why people go to conferences, no?
Offline Events
Offline events are the traditional format where attendees physically gather in a physical location, such as conferences, trade shows, or seminars. Here are the pros and cons of offline events.
Pros
- Amazing opportunities for networking: Offline events offer unparalleled opportunities for in-person networking, building connections, and forming relationships. As this is one of the main reasons people visit events, it’s quite a big advantage.
- Immersive experience: Such conferences are more entertaining, allowing attendees to engage with the content and interact with the environment.
- Personal touch: Offline events provide a personal touch that online events can’t replicate.
- Strong branding opportunities: This format is just more PR and branding friendly than online events, with physical signage, merchandise, and branding materials.
- Meeting prospects in person: Offline events are the way for your prospects to meet you and build trust. Its is especially important for B2B businesses.
Cons
- Higher cost: Offline events are generally more expensive for everyone than online events due to venue rental, catering, and travel expenses.
- More difficult to predict ROI: As the costs are higher and it is more difficult to predict the number of people that will join the conference, it is more difficult also to predict Return on Investment. For organizers — because many attendees register just before the event, and for attendees it’s just difficult to calculate ROI in the event marketing in general. I will cover this topic later.
- Limited reach: Offline events are limited to attendees who can travel to the event location.
- Limited data collection: Software tools for event organizers don’t give a chance to gather all the data that might be interesting for event organizers as it is not penetrated enough in the attendees’ activities. For attendees such tools are in general quite useless when it comes to data collection.
- Hectic experience: As offline events are usually quite large, the experience that attendees get is quite hectic and they might miss a lot of interesting opportunities.
- More efforts to entertain people: Event organizers have to think about all the different activities for their visitors to stay entertained. Nowadays, people see a lot of extremely innovative things and the audience is constantly looking for new experiences.
Hybrid Events
Let’s look at the pros and cons of hybrid events which combine both online and offline components.
Pros
- Increased accessibility: Hybrid events make the experience accessible to those participants who cannot travel which increases the reach
- Higher ROI: Such events can provide higher ROI than traditional offline events as the margin is higher for online tickets.
- Different experience: Combining online and offline experience brings more creative ways of entertaining attendees.
- Networking: An important part of hybrid events is networking. The number of ways for meeting new people is higher as organizers have to think about making it accessible to both online and offline audiences.
Cons
- Technical issues: Just as with online events, technical issues can arise during the online component of the hybrid event, such as connectivity or video quality issues.
- Tools: It’s still difficult to find a good tool to organize a hybrid event on a high level (though I do really-really like Hopin).
- Increased complexity: Hybrid events are definitely more complex to plan and execute than traditional offline events.
- Low motivation to visit offline: If the event is not big enough and if the participants cannot see the value in coming in person, that might be an issue which can actually kill the event.
- Data collection: Hybrid conferences and expos do provide quite some data about online participants but we still see the issue with the offline audience.
It’s good to know that the event industry offers so many different formats: everyone can find the one that would work best for them. And I’m talking about both attendees and organizers. The market of online events is calming down, and the offline ones do not plan to die as was predicted at the beginning of the pandemic. Hybrid events might be the ones to choose as they provide flexibility and combine some of the pros of the online and offline events, but they are still quite complicated to manage. Though I’m sure, we will see more hybrid expos in the nearest future.
Ultimately, the success of organizing and yes, visiting the event depends on how well you plan and execute, regardless of the format.