Imagine you are hosting a virtual event. Now how do you plan on glueing the audience to the screens? Since virtual events gather a global audience online, it is difficult to keep the audience engaged and entertained throughout. But if you wish for the audience to be hooked to the screens, you ought to go beyond the mainstream visual experience. Your attendees must be attended in a way that they do not miss much from the in-person experience. Of course, you cannot just bore them with chit-chat. Virtual events demand careful execution, from setting up an animated environment to immersing the audience. Fortunately, digital technology has enabled us to create engaging virtual tour experience that replicates real-life environment. It allows people to virtually visit a place sitting comfortably on their couch.
If you are an event organizer looking for ways to enhance the online experience for the audience, then virtual tours are the answer. Virtual reality has altogether changed the face of digital interaction. It saves one from the hassle of travelling down to physical locations and instead allows people to take a tour online. For instance, complete digital museum tours are available over the internet for people to entertain themselves residing at far ends of the world. It minimizes the need to travel and is abundantly beneficial. That is how most real estate property sales today are made online using architectural animation walkthroughs.
Learn more about virtual tours and how it benefits the event industry.
Tips for Creating an Engaging Virtual Tour Experience
But the question here arises, how would you make the virtual tours engaging and interactive for your online visitors? If you are creating an artistic display of the campus building, you must consider all the elements that would inform and educate the students about their dream institute. This would help you secure a promising number of admission applications from students worldwide. Likewise, with an engaging virtual tour, you secure the loyalties of online customers. Now, whatever product or service you wish to sell you only have to present it using a product virtual tour. After all, it is up to you to market your business convincingly to a global audience.
Here’s how you can enhance the virtual tour experience for your online audience.
Communicate Your Purpose
First and foremost, you need to identify the purpose of the virtual tour. Like, brainstorm why you wish to create a virtual tour. How would a virtual event audience benefit from these tours? What would you earn out of these tours? Once you have a clear agenda, make sure to convey it to the audience. For instance, personalize the experience for the visitors by communicating what’s in it for them. For instance, a virtual product demo clearly specifies how the product benefits you. It states the specifications, features and mechanisms for the people to understand and make an informed decision about their purchase.
Just like that, when you welcome prospective candidates to a virtual recruitment event, your job is to familiarize attendees with your organization. For that matter, a virtual tour of the corporate building is used to familiarize attendees with what awaits them. Applicants are guided to explore the workspace and become acquainted with the company’s culture. You can either use written content, voice or guided buttons to communicate the purpose of the tour with prospective employees. In fact, you can guide all your event attendees to go through the tours to have an up-close look at their future workplace.
Create Immersive Walkthroughs
The most convincing thing about virtual tours is the immersive walkthrough experience. Your viewers may be visiting the college campus for the first time from over the screens. Considering that, it is your one chance to immerse the viewers in the tour. You can grab your audience’s attention using high-quality visuals and interactive tools. This helps virtual reality visualizers create a 3D animated walkthrough experience. This allows the audience to enter walk mode exploring the space from the basement to the rooftop. Not just that, the complete virtual tour experience is enhanced using advanced tools and software.
Here’s how you can enhance the immersive experience for your audience.
- Add realism to the scene with weather conditions, day or night view
- Work on lighting, as it does half of the convincing work
- Make the walkthrough experience easy to navigate for the users
- Make the walk mode experience compatible with a VR headset device
- Create an interactive experience for the user to open doors or switch lights
Install Navigational Buttons
When you enter a campus building, you usually see directional signboards that guide your way to the dean’s office or library. These directions help students who are visiting for the first time. Just like that, virtual tours have embedded navigational buttons that help visitors tip-toe through the space. It serves the purpose since virtual tours are meant to familiarize the students with the entire campus space. Also, the navigational buttons take the person back and forward whenever they like. This has an element of inclusivity for the visitors who are not compelled to witness the entire space in a hasty manner. In fact, visitors have the autonomy to inspect the space just as they would when visiting the site in person.
So, it is important to ensure that navigational buttons guide them in the right direction. Here are a few considerations when installing navigational buttons to your virtual tour.
- Make the entire space explorable
- Ensure an easy click system for everyone to navigate independently
- Test the functionality of the walkthrough
- Make sure it is compatible across all devices
- Work on the quality of renders when switching from one scene to another
Build Brand Story
Virtual tours are much more than an attractive visual display of a physical environment. It should be personalized so as to speak your brand story. Obviously, the virtual tour is meant to engage the audience within the scene as if they are present at the location. Thus, it is important to speak about your brand, company culture, agenda and more for the viewers to envision their future. Once you build a brand story and communicate it to the audience, they are bound to take quick action.
Here’s how you can create an engaging virtual tour experience for the audience by communicating the brand story.
- Communicate how your brand is distinctive from competitors
- Use company logos, colours, and themes to personalize the tour
- Communicate your company agenda and goals
- Use convincing brand slogans to entice the viewers
- Embed social media channels to guide the audience in the right direction
- Share personal stories, testimonials and business journey
- Get alumni members to speak in favour of your brand
Finally, you should be sure that your brand story is unique, engaging and highly informative compared to others.
Add Informative Content
When working on college campus tours, do not just focus on high-quality visuals. Students are looking for much more when they click on the tour videos. In fact, you must guide students where their department is located or how far the hostel is from the campus location. The best thing about animated video tours is that you can customize them however you like. For instance, it allows sharing informative content to thoroughly brief your audience about the campus facilities, building, departments, faculty and more. To be more descriptive, you can share information about available programs, scholarship opportunities, transport facilities, financial aid and semester timeline. Either use written content on the screen or voice-over to make the experience more engaging for the audience.
In addition to this, if your prospective students are residing at far ends of the world, be sure to brief them on online lectures, assigned faculty, hostel and residential areas, health facilities, career opportunities, and more. This way, you secure abundant admission applications for your online courses.
Embed CTA Buttons
Do not just use virtual tours to entertain or inform your audience. In fact, you can use the virtual tour to the best of your advantage by installing CTA (call to action) buttons. This compels the visitor to thoroughly explore the space and take quick action. For instance, in the case of a virtual exhibition, you can get the viewers to put the item in a shopping cart. Then, redirect them to the payment page to simply secure yourself a good number of sales. Businesses today use trusted strategies to attain quick action from their customers. For instance, the product virtual tour can have embedded buttons such as, Click Here, Get Started, Register Now, Learn More, or Buy Now!
One of the most effective ways to engage your audience within virtual tours is by driving them to action. Likewise, in a virtual open day, you can instil action by allowing ‘Apply online, Call a Counselor, Take a Demo, Take the Course, or Enter FAQs. These simple acts help convert viewers into potential applicants. You have nothing to lose when virtual tours push individuals to take quick decisions to engage with your brand. Just like that, when creating a virtual office experience, you can install CTA buttons at each departmental booth for candidates to easily apply for the open positions.
Final Thoughts
Virtual tours are now considered the most powerful tool to convince the behaviours of potential customers. It is considered a great digital marketing strategy to present the product and services to the world. Basically, this helps build a strong connection between your brand and the user. An engaging virtual tour experience is created with high-quality visuals, a convincing brand story, a guided directory and informative content. So, if you wish to win the loyalty of your customers at a sales event or receive a maximum number of admission applications from your virtual open day, then virtual tours are the way to do that.
Virtual Days being the top virtual events platform, assists event organizers in promoting their brand and engaging a global audience through creating stunning virtual tours. So if you are ready to shake the marketplace, we welcome you to a new realm of virtual reality experience.
