The pandemic has unrolled a world where digital transformation is critical for survival. Regardless of the industry, you are part of, interactions must be moved to digital platforms, especially in the event industry, where attendance is usually in more significant numbers.
Hosting virtual events is not as easy as sending out zoom invites. Hundreds of variables come into play – starting from participants being hesitant to attend a virtual event to ensuring access to all participants. Adding on, there are other variables that aren’t in the control of the event management team, such as laptops running out of charge, microphones and earphones being faulty, or even noise from the participant’s or speaker’s surroundings. Keeping this aside, it is imperative to digitally innovate every stage of the virtual event to provide your participants’ and speakers’ a seamless transition.
Before we transform every stage, let us delve into the event industry’s broader facets, and how to change them digitally with a thorough event planning.
USER EXPERIENCE
The success of a virtual event lies in the participant’s experience. One of the key objectives of an online event must garner as much attendance as possible.
Since the digital transition has been relatively new, people would still be skeptical about attending online events. There are people out there who aren’t as tech-savvy as the rest of us. The event must cater to their requirements as well and should focus on complete audience engagement.
Technology or tools used at every stage must be intuitive and straightforward enough for anyone to get through with minimal or zero assistance. This way, participants will trust you considering the effort put across to ensure their convenience.
The future of the event industry lies in technologies such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. It is time that the sector harnesses immersive experiences starting now. Incorporate immersive experience sessions to guide participants through the technology and its background – this way, you ensure your participants are ready for your future events.
Even though VR and AR have mainly been used for promotional purposes, the gaming industry have been involved in hosting all VR games for a while now. VR League is one such community that hosts championships for Esports. That’s right, all participants take part in the event in virtual reality. Few of the esports played at VR Leagues are Echo Arena, Onwards, Alyx, and so on. Grab a sneak peek into their fabulous world.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING
Many speak about AI and ML taking over the world in the future. Well, news flash – it already has! AI and ML have made their way into every aspect of our day-to-day lives to collect data and learn from them. These codes are so advanced that they can predict our actions well before we know about them.
The event industry can tap into this data and make experiences more personalized. Taking feedback would be easier – deploy a chatbot to your attendees instead of them filling out forms. The data collected by the AI can help in crafting agendas and objectives for upcoming online events.
Deploying chatbots on your websites on landing pages or even on your Facebook page, and collect information when people interact with the chatbots. For instance, 42chat is one such chatbot that can be deployed real-time during your event or conference and have conversations with your attendees.
With that, let’s move on to digitally transforming events.
SMART EVENTPLANNING
With the whole world behind doors and looking out through their screens, teams must collaborate online.
Event experiences will be seamless for the participants if it is seamless for the team. Speaker Engage does just that. Event organizers can create, collaborate, and craft events seamlessly through Speaker Engage – an intuitive cloud-hosted event management platform. It has everything from speaker and sponsor management to communication to content curation to social media campaign tracker, and so much more. Using Speaker Engage can not only move your team online but do so with ease and poise. Adding to that, it can also save you loads of time. Speaker Engage can also store documents and contacts within it, by the way.
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
As mentioned before, User Experience plays a huge role in an event’s success. This is where programmatic advertising software comes in.
Programmatic advertising enables you to post ads with little or no human interaction. The software also allows event organizes to laser target their audience and advertise directly to them. With budget and ad-targeting algorithms, the software will recommend the best-performing sites to post ads – based on historical data, while eliminating unnecessary media spending.
While posting ads, take into consideration the engagement quotient of the ads. It must be designed to provoke action from the viewer. Predictive analysis and AI can help pinpoint the different types of interactions or engagements that work with your audience.
Adroll is one such software that collects data, analyses it and suggests better marketing decisions from targeting to placement to pointing out better performing ad copies.
Getting your event noticed has to do more than interactions and engagement. Take a look at how you can get your event noticed.
SENDING OUT INVITES
E-invites go from e-mail marketing to filling forms to automated curated experiences. From filling out registration details to uploading pictures and downloading the event schedule – all of it needs to go online. Preferably on a single platform that is easy to use and share.
At the invite stage, it is most crucial to establishing trust with your participants. The more comfortable and more user-friendly the invite and the following registration process is, the more they would want to attend more of your online events.
Along with the invite, share a few videos or talks that are either educational or fun – your call. The aim is to keep them entertained and engaged. Speaker Engage has a few in-built templates to send out as invites to your potential attendees.
LIVE AT THE EVENT
Once an event goes live, the need of the hour is to keep them entertained and engaged. Agendas must be charted out to ensure the same.
Technologies are available that can track a person’s body language and eye movement to calculate their interest. Collecting this data would allow event organizers to customize their events further.
While moving events online, interactions must also be moved online. Online chatrooms and lounges must be incorporated to keep your attendees mingling and socializing with each other. It is here that you can experiment with AR and VR tech – guiding your attendees through the experience to ensure zero hand-holding in the next similar experience. These experiences can be improved and scaled, as suggested by your AI through the chatbots that collect feedback.
Airmeet, a virtual event hosting platform, allows attendees to be seated(virtually) in a lounge and interact with other attendees. The speakers and event organizers can congregate in a separate backstage area and they can also visit the lounge to interact with their attendees.
AFTER-EVENT EXPERIENCES
Even with offline events, there were always after parties – so why not have it online? Organize a simple catch-up session after your events, host an online concert, or even a movie screening. These after-event social experiences grant the attendees a peek into what they may expect from the next event you organize.
Always make sure you take feedback from the attendees. Conduct surveys that can help you tweak and improve on your attendees’ event experience.
With all that said and done, the future of the event industry is banking on hybrid events. With several countries lifting restrictions, people can attend events in small numbers. At the same time, events must also be run online for the rest of the participants to attend. This hybrid model ensures that your events have high attendance and reaches people across the globe.
With rampant digital transformation, event organizers have to adapt and evolve at every stage to dish out better user experiences for their attendees.
Ever since COVID-19 drove us all home leaving vast swathes of conference spaces empty, there has been a lull in offline marketing activity. Smart marketers have seen to it that there is a new replacement for this empty space and have revived the concept of virtual events.
Yes, it doesn’t sound as exciting as going to an actual event where the opportunity for networking is huge and the chance of signing up your next lead is really high. In case of a virtual event, however, you might be talking to someone who is in their pajamas and who is unsure of how online business networking works.
Love it or hate it, virtual events are here to stay. The huge savings in cost notwithstanding, marketing agencies have come up with solutions to all the problems described above.
With some clever tweaking of already existing platforms, virtual events can be hosted now with a virtual backstage, a virtual networking session, and even a virtual Q&A session.
Necessity, indeed, is the mother of all inventions.
Unwilling to let go of crucial market share, companies are now leveraging virtual events in a big way to promote business and generate new leads.
Are you still on the fence? Well, you’ll find yourself in sparse company.
Even technology giants like Microsoft and Cisco have jumped onto the virtual event bandwagon.
Worried About Leads?
If you already have a well-established marketing strategy, you have everything you need to host or attend a conference. But now that the game has gone online, some rules of the game have indeed changed.
One of the most important questions that will no doubt pop up in your head is “How do you advertise your virtual event?”
Yes, you can go the traditional route and create fancy ads and promote on social media. But wouldn’t you rather advertise it on a platform where you’re more or less guaranteed to get registrations?
A platform like the Speaker Engage Event Directory perhaps?
Speaker Engage has been deeply involved in all stages of event management for a while now. Our marquee software is the go-to resource for event organizers who want to conduct events at scale without the stress to match.
One of the things we noticed was that people were really clueless about how to drive registrations for their events.
It may look simple, but the power of a good listing is well-known to most marketers. Getting your event listed on well-established platforms like the Speaker Engage Event Directory can make or break your whole planning.
The “How To”
Before you list your event here, make sure your registration page is live and prepared to handle the traffic.
You will be greeted with a long list of upcoming industry events. As you can see, bigwigs in the tech industry have their events listed on our page.
At the top of the page, click on “Submit Your Event.”
In the “Submit Your Event” page, fill out your event details. Ensure you have a catchy 250-word event description on hand. Think carefully about the industry your event is catering to and select accordingly. In the Event Type dropdown, select In-Person or Virtual. Most importantly, enter the correct event registration URL. This is what people will use to register for your event from the Event Directory page
Once you’ve successfully submitted your event, our moderator will reach out to you if we need any clarification.
And just like that, your event is now listed on a high-traffic, spam-free, niche-relevant website!
Of course, you can even list In-Person events on the Event Directory, but we don’t think those are gonna take place any time soon. Until then, hosting virtual events is the way to go, and getting your virtual event listed is crucial to its success.
Imagine this. You’re pumped because you have decided to host your very first event. Everything is set in your head. The topic, the speakers, the invitations. You have even figured out what gift to give the attendees. But then it strikes you. You have no idea how to integrate the latest tech into your event, or even what that is. So where do you go? What do you do?
You turn to The Meeting Pool because they look like they know what they’re talking about.
The Meeting Pool is a dedicated platform for all things tech in the event industry. It’s a gigantic repository of the most updated tech news, an educative tool for all your tech-related queries.
So how does it work and what’s so special about it?
Simplification of Everything Complicated
The Meeting Pool has hundreds of articles on technology; this has already been said. They are neatly categorized into Apps, Business, Event Industry, Social Media, and Tech.
How is this helpful? As anyone in the tech industry will know, event tech comes in all shapes and sizes. You can categorize your requirements and localize your search with these sub-tabs, which allows you to narrow down on the solution to a specific problem without much hassle. If you’re a casual searcher whose dream of running an event is somewhere far down the line, an article like “Top Ten Apps For Keeping a To Do List” will come in real handy.
Customizable TECHBars
A unique offering from The Meeting Pool is its TECHBar, fully customizable – and comfortable – tech lounges for events. This “interactive and approachable spot” is staffed by the company’s subject matter experts on a variety of topics tailored to a variety of audiences. It also allows the audience/participants to use it as a catch-up space to have quick one-on-one meetings or to check their emails.
The added advantage, of course, is the full-time availability of their SMEs to answer tech-related questions. If any of your attendees feel that they need help with the event app, The Meeting Pool SMEs will also walk them through it, helping them experience your event to its fullest.
Event Tech Directory
Now we did say that The Meeting Pool was all about tech in the event space. Their Event Tech Directory proves it.
It acts as a meeting ground for tech companies and event companies by helping the former to list their technology while helping the latter to discover it.
The ‘Discover Tech Companies’ option helps event organizers to find their most appropriate tech supplier to ensure that you depend on the best tools for your event. As a tech company, you get the option to list your tech for that event organizer out there who really needs it.
And thus, a partnership is formed.
Another added advantage? You get to promote your event through The Meeting Pool, ensuring a much wider reach for it.
Industry Resources
The Meeting Pool is a pool of knowledge as well. It has a vast repository of whitepapers, infographics, and ebooks from events they have supported.
Event Industry Calendar
What better way for an event enthusiast to stay on top of what’s happening in the industry than a calendar that spans across verticals? That’s what the Event Industry Calendar does. For those who plan, organize, and attend events, this is the perfect place to know what’s what and where’s what.
Advertising Options
Remember when we said you can advertise with The Meeting Pool a couple of paragraphs ago? They have multiple options for this. For starters, the Event Directory Listing is free. You also have the option to upgrade your listing for better exposure.
The other advertising options are:
Display advertising: through banner ad positions
Content: by featuring your whitepapers, ebooks, and infographics on the platform
Contests: like custom interactive campaigns on social media
Newsletters: by being featured on their weekly newsletter
Ready to Dive Into the Pool?
So there you have it. The long and short of how The Meeting Pool can be your perfect accomplice in event management. The way we see it, they add a unique value to the whole idea by offering a whole lot of stuff, all in one place.
The Speaker Engage team has been working tirelessly to make the whole experience of event management as hassle-free as possible. We’ve invested day and night to design and develop solutions to challenges that hard-working event organizers face. The result is an intuitive and well-thought-out software to take care of all their needs.
We did it to create access for strategic opportunities that are available when they can engage with speakers, sponsors, and their community. We are so excited to get a stellar review we got from the folks over at Event Manager Blog (Event MB) here.
In case you haven’t heard of ‘em — unlikely if you’ve been in the event organizing scene for long enough — Event MB is the “go-to online resource for Trends, Technology, Innovation and Education for the event industry.”
Over the years, Event MB has published numerous reports that have since become industry-standards with around 120,000 downloads! So head on over to their site and download some of their awesome FREE content like Social Media for Events or Engaging Events.
You work for months on organizing your event with a fear of failure gnawing at your insides. Event planners, managers, and strategists around the world are all too familiar with this emotion. That’s exactly how we felt too while we were building the Speaker Engage software. But the joy of seeing the final product in action and being well-received more than makes up for it.
It’s Worth It
Speaker Engage is a fully-integrated, cloud-based platform, designed by event organizers for event organizers. Our aim was to pitch a solution to event organizers who want to curate and delight speakers and sponsors with engaging communications, content, and logistics to remove the chaos from event planning and execution.
And so far, it looks like we have figured out a way to help you get your job well done!
Let’s face it, organizing a mega event with a thousand moving parts is a nightmare!
A nightmare none of us are ready to face without a robust toolset at their disposal. Something like a Swiss Army Knife perhaps. Yup, that’s what Speaker Engage is for event planners and organizers.
And here are the pros of this Swiss Army Knife according to Event MB:
Centralized platform including speaker, sponsor, resource, and agenda management
Allows for multi-event management
Simple interface with real-time dashboards for managing speakers, talent and sponsors
Facilitates time-saving micro-actions
API integration capabilities
Email communications to speakers and sponsors
Influencer classification
Compliant with GDPR and PII policies
If your eyes just lit up, and you’re wondering why you haven’t already signed up, head over here and claim your free 100-day trial.
Here’s What You Get For Free
With Speaker Engage’s robust curation platform and real-time dashboard, event planning and execution become seamless. Instead of relying on disjointed emails, spreadsheets, and texts, stakeholders can create and centrally manage ongoing communication to build valuable connections, authentic partnerships, and collaborate to bring great ideas to life.
Did someone say “AI?”
Yes, we have that too. And not just as a buzzword. Our automated workflow that takes care of speaker curation, schedule management, and several other awesome features is powered by an intuitive and continuously learning AI system.
With a centralized content management system, organizers can now reinvent their communication strategy supported by AI to automatically optimize productivity.
What really sets Speaker Engage apart is that as event organizers, we’ve built a platform to cater specifically to the daily needs of planning and orchestrating events. Our AI-enabled platform helps with:
Speaker and Sponsor Community Management
Automated Workflows
Agenda and Session Management
Master List Management
Event-related Resource Management
Social Buzz Automation
Multi-event Analytics and Management
Email Automation and Tracking
Social Media campaign planning & execution (shhh.. It’s coming soon too)
Re-organize How You Organize Events
Yes, we know, AI-enabled this, AI-powered that. If you want a human touch, reach out to our product experts and schedule a demo here. Say No to excel sheets!
We will take you through all the features included in this power-packed software. Hope you don’t mind lengthy demos cause we’ve got a lot to cover.
