Held in Paris every June, SITL is Europe’s leading international event for the transport and logistics industry. When we were forced to postpone our 2020 event, we were determined to send a strong message to our community that we were still there to help them through the COVID crisis.

There were three components to our digital event – livestream webinars, thematic virtual tours and our Match and Connect programme to facilitate one2one meetings. The event was delivered on the Vimeet platform and was completely free to attend.

Having already secured around 80 speakers for our event, including some former French government ministers, the team were able to convince them all to livestream their presentations at our digital event. Meanwhile, our sales team were able to persuade every exhibitor contracted for the physical show to take part in our digital event.

SITL Digital attracted over 5,000 attendees over four days, of whom 1500 were completely new to the SITL database. They could request virtual meetings with the exhibitors (and vice versa) using the Match and Connect tool and 480 such meetings took place.

For the virtual tours, we identified different themes and then selected exhibitors accordingly, each of whom provided a video pitch. Attendees could then choose their virtual tour, watch the videos of interest and make direct contact with the sales reps who were available during the event via Zoom.

Building on the success of SITL Digital, plans are already underway for a hybrid event in 2021. Customers were impressed with our digital tools and services and we definitely see a place continued place for virtual tours, Match and Connect and live streaming from the main conference stage alongside our face to face event.