Event Management Platform
Get startedEvents have become a critical marketing and sales channel that organizations invest into brand their products/services, improve PR and most importantly, position their product in front of the right audience to generate a buzz. In short, events are a great platform to pique your audience's interests and lay the founding stone for your marketing campaign and provide engaging real-time experiences for attendees.
As we head towards a digital-first culture and experience a lot of pivoting in sales and marketing strategies, events are gaining momentum as one of the top methods for reaching audiences.
Whether it is an in-person event that requires planning, booths, keynote speakers, or a virtual event that saves logistics but banks on networking, event management software can help you centralize your efforts and streamline the event lifecycle so that your team derives the best returns on investments.
Whether you are organizing B2B or B2C events, event management software lets you stay in control of the process from the start, right until the end of it. In most cases, it is still doing more of the groundwork to measure the event's success even after it gets over.
- What Is A Virtual Event Platform?
- How is a virtual event platform different from video conferencing tools?
- Why do we need virtual event platforms?
- Benefits of using a virtual event platform to host events
- Industry use cases of a virtual event platform
What kind of events require such tools ?
From the most common B2B or direct B2C, internal or external, event management apps make it easy to coordinate, collaborate, and offer proper channels for smoother handoffs for professional event planners. Some of the events include:
Conferences & Conventions
Community Events
Product Launches
A promotional event that lets teams launch a new product or service to the market.
Webinars
An online event that lets industry leaders and renowned experts offer their expertise to a group of participants online.
Annual meetings & Roundtables
What is Event Management Software ?
Virtual Events are more of break out entities aimed at creating a disruption. It also involves meticulous planning, focused teamwork that come together to deliver a transformative experience that can be built easily and effectively.
Any event software's primary function is to help event organizers manage all the activities involved in planning, executing, and hosting the event without any hassles, all in one platform.
To break it down, event management software is an end-to-end solution to
Your event management software should provide you with the ability to craft a fantastic experience for the attendees over performance metrics. In the case of virtual events, it should help marketers and sales representatives reach potential customers effortlessly through social media and other channels.
How does Event Management Software help?
From the most common B2B or direct B2C, internal or external, event management apps make it easy to coordinate, collaborate, and offer proper channels for smoother handoffs. Some of the events include:
Event Lifecycle Management
An effective platform should be able to streamline all the processes involved in your event's lifecycle. From finalizing the speakers and partners, booths, and venue, the platform's dashboard should have everything you need, from the progress of all personnel involved to the action items that require your attention.
Event management software should also help you plan and schedule important events, zero in on the path that participants should take to confirm their attendance, set active reminders on overdue tasks, and much more.
In short, the app should be your online event organizer that does all the administrative work so that you can focus on pulling off a spectacular event.
Marketing & Promotions
The end goal of any event is to simplify information exchange and improve networking. An event management software helps you match what your participants are looking for with the ideal solution.
While your marketing and promotions offered a teaser of what was to come, this is the stage where your participants' needs are met.
Your event management software must give you the right tools to help engage with your audience in a personalized manner. This will help you boost interest while also gathering enough leads that get fed into the next stage of your sales process.
Performance Insights and Analytics
Events, online or in-person, involve a lot of budgeting and spending. So how do you know if all that planning, resources, and efforts were fruitful?
Your event management software shouldn't stop when your event is over; it should identify if your strategies were successful and offer insights into things that didn't deliver.
By using live polls and surveys, get feedback from your participants. Find out what they liked and how they felt about your sessions. Automate the feedback process to extract what attendees felt, gather a collective consensus, and figure out elements of the event that should be carried over and your improvement areas.
But isn't an online video conferencing tool enough?
Online video conferencing apps have made it easy for many people to take their business online, connect with a global consumer base, and offer their services. But these tools were created to help teams communicate better, reduce the bridge while working from different corners of the world.
Tools like Zoom and Google Meet offer ways to schedule sessions, host online video meetings, and webinars, remind participants and, in some cases, deliver an interactive experience.
These tools must be integrated with more third-party apps to manage every aspect of a virtual event from start to finish for extended functionalities. But these require information split up and processed in different tools.
For example, you may have to use one tool for registration, one for campaigns and promotion, one for hosting, and another for post-event surveys. Relying on such tools may bring in more complexities when you scale to a broader audience and require heavy investment.
Automate your event, end to end
Where your online web conferencing solutions cannot go, EVM can. Automate different aspects of planning and coordination with event management software so that your team focuses more on organizing critical elements of the event and delivering a transformative experience to your attendees.
Event Website
To host an event, you need to have an exclusive website that lists out what your event is all about, an insight into the powerful-line up of speakers, and other information visitors can access with a quick web search.
Apart from enhancing credibility, your event website also doubles up as important collateral for your marketing and promotion efforts. An event website management software should help you create and deploy your event website, focusing on your branding.
For virtual sessions, your online software for event management must offer personalization to both organizers and sponsors to add their branding to create an enriching and interactive experience while they engage with their leads.
Event Registration
With the website off the checklist, the focus is to extract the best out of your marketing and promotion efforts. By adding provisions for visitors to register within the event website, you can turn up your website's footfall. Your event management platform should be able to profile registrations and, with simple tracking, it lets you see which stage of the registration they're on.
This lets you track the re-onboarding and follow up on members who are experiencing any issues while completing the registration process.
Event registration can also make it easier for participants to choose the sessions they'd like to attend, express interests in different booths they'd like to engage with, and opt-in for event-based communication from you.
Video Hosting / Live Broadcasting
Whether your event is in-person or completely virtual, enabling web check-ins and attending the event live is a bonus. It helps your event get a global reach; it takes your event to participants at their comfort.
Your event management software should be able to help speakers and coordinators host live or from a remote location and stream the video on your event website. This lets you monetize your event to your digital audience and penetrate a segment of high caliber leads digitally.
These recorded assets can also be emailed to registered attendees who missed out on the session and can be hosted on your YouTube channels for further marketing and outreach strategies.
Value-driven Engagements
One of the most-sought features an event planning software should offer is the importance of value-driven networking and engagements.
By the time you are ready to kick-start your events, you have everything you need to know about your participants on your app. With actionable insights and accurate forecasting, map your attendees to the right session, and empower highly productive networking.
Ensure that your teams get high-quality leads to engage and interact with. An effective platform must help organizers comprehend the participants' intent and give them the extra edge in the form of breakout rooms and engagement forums to establish a better rapport, one that ends up mutually benefiting both sales teams and the participants.
Personaliized Experience
In a mobile-first world, little things can create a beneficial impact. Your event management platform must be able to automate everything that's required to streamline an on-site check-in.
For the virtual meetings, upcoming session alerts, booth information can be sent as an automatic reminder to keep participants hooked and help them leverage the best out of your event.
By taking a completely digital route, you eliminate unnecessary paperwork and make it easier for your teams to analyze attendees' behavior and engagement patterns without any hassles.
Factors to consider while choosing an Event Management Software
Choosing an event management tool is all about understanding the nitty-gritty elements. You need to ensure that you have the best line up that's ready to help you plan, host, and sign off in a truly impactful way.
While event management platforms can't be tailor-made to fit the tee perfectly, let's look at some of the most critical factors.
Cloud-Based Platform
Your event management app collects lead information, pre-recorded sessions, and other sensitive information that are vulnerable to data breaches and misuse.
With adequate user logins and access control, an event management system must ensure authorized logins and ensure that only the right members can access confidential information.
With standard encryption in place, empower attendees to log in securely and attend the event.
Adaptable & Customizable
Apart from account set up, your event management platform should offer customization to fit your event requirements best.
Events vary based on the industry you are from and the goal you are trying to achieve. This could be simple elements like adding your branding to your virtual rooms, making it easy for you to include custom elements into your event website, and more.
The platform should be intuitive enough that your team members can invest less time to get familiar with the system and allocate more time to the task at hand. Ensure that the event scheduling software gives you the power to specify event settings so your participants can derive more value from it.
Look out for a proactive event management platform that doesn't stop with collecting lead information and profiling them.
Your event management software should give your account managers and sales reps a direct path to the right leads by connecting the right dots. By doing this, you save time and effort and reach leads much faster and avoid interacting with attendees who are not your target persona.
Integrations
While an event management platform should satisfy your core event needs, it shouldn't hesitate by offering integrations with popular CRMs and email automation tools that bring in more value to your efforts. By breaking the barrier, planning events, reaching out to leads, turning them into participants, can help you increase conversions with tools and apps that your business relies on.
Premium on-demand Customer Support
While a robust lineup of features can help you elevate the event experience, a good team of support specialists is vital for reaping the maximum benefit out of your virtual event management platform. This is especially important for enterprise event management software and managing larger events with more attendees.
A platform with a good support team can help you set up the app around your business goals, lets you discover unconventional ways to achieve a requirement, and will have your back should you run into any glitches in the middle of an event.
Final Thoughts
As we tread to an age where the dynamics of marketing and lead generation is evolving, virtual events offer consumers a straightforward approach to interact with products and the people of a company. That being said, the goal is not just the audience turning up at the right time and viewing the live video feed; it is about elevating the experience both for your teams and your attendees.
An effective and conference management software software should cater to the basic needs of planning and executing your events online. It should step in as the armor your team can count on while they are on the field, finding the right lead to interact with, and offering them updated information to create a personalized experience.
While online platforms can do all this and much more, choosing the right platform for your event management needs can be similar to treading into uncharted territories.
Goldcast is your one-stop solution that helps you pull off events and ensure they are impactful.
Get started with a truly digital platform for your offline and online events. Eliminate administrative tasks, paperwork trails, and centralize all your information in one powerful platform.
With breakout rooms and CRM integrations, make the groundwork easy for your sales and outreach team and craft an exceptional experience that leverages the best out of the opportunities your events can generate, turning it into a high revenue-generating channel.
