9 reasons why hybrid events are crucial for your business

Hybrid events matter for a business because they remove the venue's capacity limit. You keep the energy and relationships of an in-person event, and you add an online audience that can watch, ask questions and become leads, without travelling. The recordings then feed your marketing and sales for months.

A hybrid event is a conference, trade show, seminar, workshop or other meeting that combines a live, in-person event with an online component. The key word is combines: remote attendees should be able to take part, not just watch a stream. For the debate on whether hybrid is here to stay, read are hybrid events the future?

Which business events work as hybrid events?

Any event with a core group that benefits from meeting in person, and a wider group that wants the content, is a good candidate:

• user conferences and customer days
• product launches and demo days
• partner and reseller summits
• customer training and certification sessions
• sales kickoffs for teams spread across offices
• industry panels, meetups and awards

The venue can be your office, a hotel, a conference centre or a studio, as long as it has reliable wired internet and room for cameras and sound.

9 reasons why hybrid events are crucial for your business

1. You reach more people than the room holds

A venue has a fixed capacity, and every extra seat costs money. An online ticket does not need a chair. At the 16th Deep-Sea Biology Symposium in 2021, a hybrid conference studied in Frontiers in Marine Science, 422 of the 581 participants joined online. For a business, those extra attendees are prospects, customers and partners who would never have booked a flight.

2. More people can take part

People with caring duties, disabilities, small travel budgets or visa problems can join a hybrid event. That widens your audience and shows that you take inclusion seriously. Make the online side accessible too: the W3C's accessibility guidelines ask for captions on all live audio content at level AA, and captions also help people who watch with the sound off.

3. Sales gets better data to follow up on

Online registration and attendance tell you who signed up, which sessions they watched and which questions they asked. That is far richer than a stack of badge scans. Share it with sales so they can follow up on real interest, for example by sending the recording of the session a prospect watched. Tell attendees at registration how you will use their data, as the GDPR requires transparency and a clear purpose. Our article on how event marketing can grow your audience covers the follow-up in more detail.

4. One event becomes months of content

Every streamed session is also a recording. Cut it into clips for social media, turn talks into articles, publish panels as podcast episodes and offer the full sessions on demand. It also solves a classic conference problem: attendees no longer have to choose between two great speakers in parallel tracks, because they can watch the other one later.

5. Sponsors get more to buy

Sponsors want visibility with the right audience. A hybrid event can offer them online placements alongside the usual stands and signage, such as a sponsored session, a virtual booth, a branded poll or a mention in the recordings. That can make packages more attractive and help cover the extra production costs.

6. Attendees can engage in more ways

Live Q&A, polls, chat and online breakout rooms let both audiences take part. A moderator who brings online questions into the room makes remote attendees feel present. Engagement is not automatic, though. In the Deep-Sea Biology Symposium survey, only 44% of participants interacted with both the online and the onsite group, so plan shared moments on purpose.

7. You can cut travel emissions

Travel, especially flying, drives most of an in-person event's footprint. A 2021 study in Nature Communications by Tao and colleagues found that moving a conference from in person to fully online cut its carbon footprint by 94% and its energy use by 90%. Hybrid conferences with carefully selected in-person hubs could cut both by about two-thirds while keeping more than half of participation in person.

8. You are more resilient to disruption

When a speaker cannot travel, a storm cancels flights or numbers drop, a hybrid set-up gives you a fallback. Speakers can present remotely and attendees can switch to the online ticket, so the event goes ahead instead of being cancelled.

9. You can control venue costs

Because part of your audience joins online, you may be able to book a smaller venue and spend less on catering and travel support. Be realistic: you also pay for cameras, sound, a platform and the people who run it. In the Frontiers study, the hybrid budget was slightly lower than an estimated in-person budget for the same number of people, while online-only would have been considerably cheaper.

When is a hybrid event not worth it?

Hybrid is not the right choice for every event. Skip it when:

• the value is almost entirely in private, in-person conversations, such as an executive dinner
• your budget cannot cover a good stream, because a poor one damages your brand
• you have no one to host the online audience
• your revenue depends on in-person tickets and remote tickets would undercut them

Online attendees also find it harder to give the event their full attention. In the same survey, 53% of online attendees said it was hard to set aside time for the meeting, compared with 18% of onsite attendees.

How do you get started?

1. Set a goal. Decide what success looks like, such as qualified leads, pipeline or customer renewals.
2. Design for both audiences. Decide what remote attendees can do: ask questions, vote, network or even present.
3. Choose one platform. The Frontiers authors recommend a single place for talks, Q&A and messages.
4. Book the venue and the production team together. Check the venue's internet, sound and camera positions before you sign.
5. Promote to both audiences and price the tickets separately.
6. Follow up fast with recordings and personal outreach from sales.

Our step-by-step guide to hosting a hybrid event covers each step, and our overview of hybrid event hosting platforms compares the software. For online-only formats, see our virtual event marketing ideas.