Virtual events can be challenging to organize. It is not just about putting together a line-up of speakers and throwing a show together at the last minute. Sometimes, organizing virtual events requires more time than physical events. It is certainly challenging but it is achievable, and moreover it is thrilling.
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Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, once said, ‘Change is the only constant.’ Marketers will do well to heed this mantra.
Businesses are evolving at an alarming speed. The way we produce and consume data has undergone a sea of change. And technology has a significant role in this transformation and will continue to be in the foreseeable future.
One of the most exciting and fastest-growing marketing verticals is event technology. To put it simply, event technology is any digital tool that helps event planners complete tasks quicker. The tools can be mobile event apps, event planning, management software, or event marketing software. Here’s a link to how to become an event technology strategist.
Looking at how technology is advancing, there will soon be a day when it will be impossible to hold an event without using technology. Event management technology has also benefitted immensely from new technologies. Now, marketers are using event managing software and stacks to make events more engaging, less expensive, and deliver better ROI to clients.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many events online. While this development has undoubtedly affected physical events, it has become a shot in the arm for virtual events.
For example, the ‘Event Marketing 2020: Benchmarks and Trends Report ‘says 85% of respondents believe in-person events are crucial for their company’s success. And 20% more marketers in 2020 (from 2019) believe in-person events are the most critical channel for achieving business goals.
Before the time of event technology, hosting an event involved a lot of manual work. Guest lists had to be written down one by one, while promotional material was limited to print and mail. Moreover, it was complicated to determine the effectiveness of the various parts that made up an event.
Today, event marketers have a fantastic array of technical tools and online event management software to help them manage every aspect of an event, right from marketing and ticket sales to collecting guests’ data. It won’t be wrong to say; event planners are staring at an unprecedented change in their job description. Thankfully, when it comes to business events, everything can be boiled down to two main drivers – education and networking. And these are leading the digital transformation.
Take a look at how you can leverage digital transformation to elevate your events!
Artificial intelligence is a significant driver of many aspects of our lives, and it has not spared the event technology space either. For example, Gartner says that by 2020, chatbots will handle 85% of customer interactions. But here lies the opportunity.
60% of event planning professionals didn’t use any event planning software until 2018. It means there is a lot of scope for someone who has just started on their path to becoming an event technologist. Here are a few tools one must know while planning to host their first online event.
The industry is also moving away from gut instinct to data crunching to arrive at decisions. Now, event planners-turned-strategists are being asked to provide KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and other metrics to show how impactful their event is and to provide tangible results.
Significant events are a soft target for data thieves, compromising the safety of guests. Event strategists must be aware of such loopholes to prevent them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has moved events to the digital space, where technology is paramount. Communication has also become fast, flexible, and personalized, affecting consumer behavior and expectations.
Events are also facing an existential threat from highly accountable, alternate customer engagement mediums like digital marketing. Event strategists must show why businesses will continue to need events while also mastering digital marketing to create new revenue streams. Here is a checklist to help you keep track of things while organizing a virtual event.
A major challenge with virtual events is protecting the privacy of guests. Guests must have access to their data at all times, with the right to remove it, correct it, and restrict its use. And there will soon be new regulations on data profiling, i.e., using data to predict user characteristics.
Events are also more interactive today (an opportunity to maximize the event’s potential). A business event is a chance to convert the guest into your client.
As events evolve in context, content, and complexity, the stakes increase, so engaging a professional event technologist is the logical solution.
Event management technologists can reduce workloads through automation, bringing down operational costs. They also bring access to exclusive insights and data analytics that can improve event ROI and guest experience.
There is also a considerable gap between businesses and effective utilisation of IT infrastructure, leading to missed opportunities in growing market share, revenue, customer satisfaction, and market speed. An event technologist can bridge this gap. They can also enhance logistics, administrative, and communication efforts.
Finally, event technology strategists, with their specialized knowledge, will also know the best way to protect guests from physical and digital threats.
If you want to become an event technology strategist or if you want to upgrade your skill, we have the resources to assist you. Head over to Speaker Engage for a free demo and win yourself 100-days of Free Trial!
With the current global situation, it is indeed wiser to stream events online. As we move forward, the world learns to live through and with changing circumstances every day. There have been exponential digital advancements in the last couple of months in the event industry, with the sector being pushed online. The event industry has not only adapted but evolved with digital innovation, fitting into the new normal beautifully.
As always, the backbone of the event industry is its audience. Their satisfaction and experience encourage the industry to move forward, to create better and more impactful events. As the sector transformed digitally, the customer or the attendee interaction, satisfaction, and experience were also taken to a new level. The user journey was mapped and studied at every stage to make each experience better than the previous one.
Let’s take a look at a few areas that can be digitally transformed to benefit the attendee.
Registrations have always been a cumbersome process. The tiny text, multiple checkboxes, and not enough space to put in your e-mail ID are enough to frustrate anyone. With digital transformation in place, attendees will not have to struggle filling out papers or even forms.
Registrations can now be done through your already existing IDs, with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others. Event organizers make use of third-party tools to collect registrations, or these accommodate features into their applications. This way, the attendees are relieved of repeatedly typing in data and trying to scroll through multiple forms to see which box is yet to be filled. The virtual 2020 Virgin Money London Marathon that took place on October 4th saw over 35,000 participants worldwide. The marathon could be run from anywhere, and the miles would be tracked on their phones. The event even had its official app, powered by TCS. All you have to do to register and enter the event was download the app and register through it. There are more ways to garner attendees than hand them user-friendly methods to register. Find out what they are.
Previously, events had the drawback of being held at venues that were not accessible to all. It is not practical to purchase an entry to an event and fly halfway across the world to attend it.
With live streaming in the picture, anyone can attend events from literally anywhere. Digital transformation has granted event access to even the remotest corner of the world. An event could be held in New York, and someone from Sydney or London could be a part of it by logging in.
An event that made heads turn recently is the launch of the iPhone 12. On October 13th, Apple held a live streaming event to launch and update its new range of products. The live streaming experience was nothing less than magnificent, as it always is—millions of people across the world tuned in to watch the launch and to enjoy the experience.
Event experiences are evolving even as we speak. As Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality make their way into the event space, attendees are introduced to immersive experiences.
Bringing AR and VR into events will help spike curiosity and incentivize people to attend and interact with fellow attendees. These technologies have primarily been used as promotional material at a few stalls across conferences and exhibitions. However, recently they are making their way to the mainstream event industry. Toyota is one such company that invests heavily in AR to wow its customers.
Esports is one of the verticals of the event industry that AR and VR thrive in. Esports championships taking place worldwide have attendees or participants take part from their homes, interact, play, and compete on VR or AR platforms. Britain even has its esports association to keep the attendees updated on their upcoming events.
As mentioned before, the event industry rides on the attendee’s satisfaction. While events being accessible across nations is commendable, they must also be mobile-friendly to be truly accessible.
Not everyone has access to laptops, tablets, or even large screens to view events. All event-related processes from registrations to the final streaming and all processes in-between must be mobile-friendly.
It is not just a question of accessibility; it is also a question of generating user traffic via mobile phones. Out of 4.5 billion active internet users, 3.5 billion are active mobile internet users. Taking these numbers into consideration, it is wiser to host mobile-friendly events.
An event’s attendees are a powerful resource for promotion. Regardless of how far we’ve come in marketing techniques and strategies, the age-old ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing still prevails and holds great value.
All event attendees promote the events they attend by default. Either by telling people about it personally or by posting about it on social media. Posting on social media would increase the reach, and that is where attendee-powered promotions come in. These days, there are many tools available that help attendees post event-related content on social media without going through the hassle of preparing content themselves. All event streaming platforms now allow attendees to share pre-designed posts on the attendee’s social media. On Speaker Engage, however, the public sharing link enables event organizers to share the link with their attendees, who can easily then share pre-designed posts on their respective social media platforms. This way, event attendees do not have to spend time on phrasing, link, hashtags, and likes while posting about the event. One click and the post is up.
The growing popularity of AI in understanding data and utilizing it for making decisions is an incredible ally in the event space. AI can be used to communicate with the attendees instead of having personnel for the same. Not only would AI respond faster, but they would also have quick solutions to attendee’s queries.
AI-powered chatbots have now become essential in the event industry. Mostly owing to the fact that there is a dearth of volunteers physically available to run around and help attendees. On virtual platforms, especially since it’s a new experience for many, queries would be pouring in from everywhere on everything ranging from software, hardware, agenda, and bandwidth issues. Chatbots are deployed with pre-programmed data that would help deliver the right solutions to attendees with a personal touch. For instance, 42Chat is one such chatbot that can be deployed for virtual experiences, from conferences, exhibitions, virtual events, live streaming, and even graduation ceremonies.
With digital transformation paving the way for smoother and better experiences for attendees, it is not a trend an event organizer can afford to ignore. The way forward is digital, be it for any industry, and it is here to stay. The onus is upon event organizers to ensure this transition to newer technologies is made easier for all.
Transform your event attendees’ experiences and make sure they come back for more. The only way to do so is to make sure you’ve organized an unskippable event. The only way you can organize events better and bigger than your previous ones is by managing your event using Speaker Engage. Get yourself a free demo with Speaker Engage and elevate your attendee experiences.
We are in the era of virtual events. And today, without geographical constraints, enterprises can achieve their event goals with the help of video streaming services that leverage state-of-the-art technology.
Virtual event management can be tricky. It’s not just about bringing together speakers and setting up a show at the last minute. Virtual events require more intensive planning than physical events. And that is precisely why you need a partner to plan and manage your virtual event. It would help if you had a partner who can design and manage events flawlessly and seamlessly.
With Speaker Engage, you can plan and organize one hell of a virtual event. It can also be your event planner, and its in-built functionalities can ensure smooth communication between your speakers and sponsors.
Make the whole experience of event management and planning uncomplicated with Speaker Engage. The platform offers solutions to event organizing challenges by its intuitive and well-thought-out functionalities. As a fully integrated, cloud-based platform Speaker Engage helps event planners curate and delight speakers and sponsors with engaging communications, content, and logistics to remove the chaos from event planning and execution.
Speaker Engage is designed and built as a platform to cater to the daily needs of planning and orchestrating events. Create and centrally manage ongoing interaction with the robust curation platform that will help you build valuable relationships, genuine partnerships and collaborate to bring great ideas to life. Through an automated workflow and dashboards, you gain seamless communication that increases your productivity.
Main Features of Speaker Engage
Finding the right speakers for a suitable event can quite quickly turn into a nightmare. This is where Speaker Engage becomes relevant as the management of event speakers and sponsors is one of the prime functionalities of this platform. There are real-time dashboards that allow you to get information about Speaker and sponsor management. You can also review speaker allocation based on their roles and track email communication.
Get insights on speaker approval/rejection status from the easy-to-read speaker dashboard. The sponsor dashboard gives you the status of sponsors – secured, not ready, and those in the pipeline. The dashboard notifies you of any speaker/sponsor missing information to speaker and sponsor profiles that need to be filled out before the event.
Speaker Engage functions as an email marketing tool too. It allows you to create email templates that can then be used to populate email forms. You can either sent out emails individually or as bulk notifications and schedule them in advance. On the dashboard, you can see how many total emails have been sent and opened.
Using the account home dashboard, you can create and access an event to add speakers, sponsors, and other contacts. The platform lets you add a professional touch to your email templates, with which all email correspondence that goes out concerning a specific event looks uniform and professional. You can also customize replies, thank you notes, and confirmation messages.
The repository of concluded events in the past ensures that you can borrow a lot of information from them for ease and efficiency. You can import relevant data from past events to your current ones, saving your time while creating new events.
As a centralized content management platform, speaker Engage lets you store all relevant documents and files at the same place. You can request and save materials such as speaker bios, abstracts, and presentations to each speaker and session profile. You can also store resources like contracts, research articles, and flyers in the Resource Tracker to provide all team members access to necessary information.
Speaker Engage’s speaker influencer score is developed precisely for selecting speakers by identifying how influential they are. Speaker Engage calculates their score by considering their social media followers and the frequency and engagement rate of the content they share, among other things. This helps event organizers make accurate decisions on their speaker selection.
Summary
Speaker Engage is the right partner for flawless event management and planning. This event management platform lets you keep track of many aspects of speakers and sponsors coordination in one place. While it includes various functionalities like email marketing and agenda management, seamless and effortless communication, assured data security, centralized content management forms the platform’s backbone. Partner with Speaker Engage today to take your event to the next level.
The event industry is undergoing a digital transformation. Owing to the current situation thrust upon the world, it is imperative that we, as event organizers, ensure that audiences across the globe can access event experiences through technology.
The internet is brimming with virtual events. From webinars to tutorials to panel discussions to training sessions to publishing books, event organizers have transitioned physical events to online events. The transitions are, however, not so easy. It is challenging to duplicate experiences of a real live event online. Difficult, but not impossible.
A successful event has only one secret ingredient – a great team working on it like a well-oiled clock. It is not enough to host events online; one needs to plan and manage them to ensure that they reach maximum people.
As mentioned before, a great team ensures a successful event. And what a team needs are seamless collaboration and coordination to provide your audience with a unique virtual event experience.
Here are the top 5 reasons you should get your team on Speaker Engage, chalk out your virtual events, and leave your audience enthralled!
Speaker Engage can accommodate your entire team online, allowing you to work together seamlessly. You can add your team members and assign them roles, events, and access to event-related tasks. This way, your team members will be notified when assigned an event, and they can log on to Speaker Engage and get organizing.
Speaker Engage also has an in-built dashboard that provides a bird’s eye view of event activities. You can keep track of the number of speakers and sponsors contacted, the number of resources available, and even the number of emails sent across.
Collaborating and planning out events on Speaker Engage ensures that every member of your team is an integral part of this digital innovation and transformation.
No event planning is complete without space to store critical data. Be it resources to be used during the event, pre, and post-event marketing creatives, brochures, invites, presentations, and the list goes on. Speaker Engage is equipped with a Resource Tracker, capable of handling all your event-related resources. You can even categorize the resources according to your preferences.
Added to this, Speaker Engage has inbuilt functionality to set agendas for every event. You can include information like the speaker, their presentation topic, business purpose, date, time, and place of the talk (now that we’re all digital) and papers or presentations that the speaker may need to use during the lecture as a reference.
All the data you need to plan and execute a spectacular event can be collected, stored, and utilized on Speaker Engage.
Anyone who has worked on Speaker Engage would know the flawless system set up to facilitate communication among the organizers, speakers, and sponsors.
The platform comes with various email templates, and the platform allows you to customize your email templates. Emails can be scheduled; speakers and sponsors can be notified separately or in the bulk of any new development. The best part – any information required by the organizer can be requested from the speaker or sponsor through the platform.
Additionally, event organizers can communicate with all stakeholders, from volunteers, vendors, and even those involved in transport and tech.
With seamless communication in place, organizers like you and I can look forward to executing a smooth and well-planned virtual event.
One of the best features within the platform is the Social Media Planner, helping organizers maximize their outreach. Organizers can create social media campaigns, add posts, upload images, descriptions, and assign review responsibilities to team members. The social media planner and calendar make it easier for organizers to scale their promotions.
Once the posts are approved and ready to go, the posts show up on a public sharing link, which can be embedded into any website. This public sharing link allows the public to access and share posts created by the team across social media platforms. It will enable them to track their promotions within Speaker Engage.
Having an in-built feature that scales promotion and amplifying the event across social media platforms is a definite advantage to those using Speaker Engage to manage their virtual events and become part of digital innovation!
Speaker Engage also has an event directory. Although not an in-built feature, the event directory is part of the Speaker Engage benefits, which will help you elevate your virtual event.
The Speaker Engage directory is a fool-proof method to get noticed and peak your registrations. The event directory is a premium space to list all your events, sorted by industry, to ensure that your audience knows your virtual event is verified. This way, once listed, you can ensure that your event can acquire premium status, taking it to the next level.
Speaker Engage is a multi-faceted platform catering to the event organizers’ event organizers to make lives more comfortable and smoother. Planning and advertising your virtual events on Speaker Engage enables your team members to take control and accountability, creating a space for complete clarity and transparency in the planning phase. This allows for executing a virtual event where your audiences share experiences that ensure that they are satisfied and are eager for more events from your side.
If you need expert guidance or help in planning your event, reach out to us at support@speakerengage.com, and we can help you pull off the event of your dreams!
You might have already considered switching to virtual events for the foreseeable future if you’re in the event industry. Ever since the pandemic hit, virtual events are a new reality, whether you like it or not. While there are many platforms and tools/softwares that claim to help organize seamless virtual events, only a few are worth their claims. Two such are Microsoft Teams Live and Speaker Engage.
Microsoft Teams Live is an extension of Teams Meeting and takes live video streaming to a new level. Users can broadcast video and meeting content to large online audiences using Teams Live events for a spectacular experience.
While that is the case with MS Teams Live, Speaker Engage helps you with the event management. This fully-integrated, cloud-based platform makes the complete experience of event management as easy as possible. It makes managing and executing events easier through centralized content management and automated workflow as you can curate your speaker, sponsor, and community information.
Now, you must be thinking, “Wow, if I can get the maximum benefit from these two, my virtual events would be topnotch!”
Well, this is your chance. You can rock your virtual events with Microsoft Teams Live and Speaker Engage. You can have them for FREE!!!
We are conducting a giveaway contest where you can win free Microsoft Teams Live Assistance Services, Speaker Engage subscription plan worth $2000, Airpod Pros worth $250, Amazon gift cards, and many such prizes. All you need to do is, participate in the contest, complete the simple tasks, and win as many points as possible. We guarantee that you will be more excited as we dive deep into the details!
First Prize:
The first prize winner will get free Microsoft Teams Live Assistance Services, and Speaker Engage subscription plan (worth $2000). The winner can host a flawless virtual event seamlessly with ZERO chaos.
Second Prize:
We are giving away a one-time full event set up on Microsoft Teams and white-glove service for Speaker Engage that will make sure your upcoming event is a successful operation.
Third Prize:
The third prize is a pair of AirPods Pro that enhances all of your virtual meetings and events!
Random lucky draw:
Don’t fret if you haven’t won a prize. You still have the chance to win our random lucky draw prize. We’ll randomly select one winner from all participants for an Amazon Gift Card worth USD 25!
Honestly speaking, winning is the simplest part of the contest. You just have to complete some EXTREMELY SIMPLE steps to win the MS Teams Live Assistance Services and Speaker Engage subscription plan. Here is how you can win:
The more entries or actions you perform, the higher your chance of winning our prizes!
You have time till 29 August, 11:59 PM (PDT) to participate in the contest. Make sure you have completed the tasks and scored the maximum points by the time!
The contest offers the same amount of points to everyone for each task. Once you enter the contest by providing your email address, you will be provided with a list of (pretty simple) tasks that you can easily accomplish. Each task is associated with certain points. Complete all of them and collect points.
Since everyone is provided with the same set of tasks, it is likely that all those who complete these tasks will score the same points. In that case, how do you increase your winning rate?
Well, most of these tasks are repeatable. You can accomplish those tasks as many times as you can and score the most points in order to win the contest! Additionally, you can take extra measures like sharing the contest on your social media channels, tagging your friends and peers, repeat tasks on a daily basis, and much more. The more you do, the more you win!
Simple, right? Now, what are you waiting for? Click the link to enter the challenge, follow the steps and guidelines to complete tasks and increase your score, and win. Your virtual event career is about to take a successful turn!
