Posted on February 16, 2023
Virtual and in-person events need a wholly contrastive setup, and you should be aware of this as an event planner. But before you can begin setting things up, such as public address booking or venue contacts drawing, it is recommended to figure out how you will acquire the outcome from an inter-person event. How can you track the engagement or metrics of the attendee? In large part, thanks to COVID-19, dozens of in-person events involve digital components, generally in the form of event platforms. You might think that you do not require a digital platform for an in-person event, but it’s not a horrible idea. The planners for events are making events platforms their go-to for the following reasons.
What is an event platform?
An interactive and flexible software solution that offers organizers of the events with tools that are customizable to build along with hosting virtual conferences, meetings, along other event types is in line with an event platform.
Reasons To Make Use of Platforms
1. Maximize Attendance
Hosting an in-person event limits you to local attendees and attendees willing to pay for airfare and hotel, which confines your attendance. The platforms of events for the in-person event allow the invitation for world attendees. You only require audio, a decent camera, and an event platform to carry your in-person event into the online realm. There are zero bounds virtually to how many attendees remotely can join in. This means you will encounter a severe ticket sales boost. Provide a significant discount for online tickets to motivate a high rate of signups.
2. Richer Data Collection
You may underestimate the need for an event platform for in-person events, but they permit you to collect richer data on the attendee’s experience. With these events, you worry not about business card collection or messing around with registration forms. Event platform metrics collect contact information, engagement, and demographics in a single intuitive dashboard. From that point, it becomes easy as data plugging into your marketing system or sales to begin nurturing the lead.
3. Ticket Simplifying
In a single platform, event platforms related to in-person events shall track all your tickets and registrations. The need for separate ticket use differs from what is already in your event platform. In addition, the attendees can access a scannable QR code or an application for an in-person event. This makes it ease the process of checking the folks at the entrance.
4. Network Simplifying
No need for anyone to fumble in their pockets or bags for a business card. Make use of an event platform for in-person networking along with the whole affair simplifying. The attendees can exchange information by simply discovering each other in the application and saving their contact information. Everything here is digital and in haste to allow your attendee to keep the focus on face-to-face connections rather than information exchange.
5. Your Environmental Impact Reduction
You can minimize your carbon footprint if you try to increase eco-friendliness by taking advantage of the platform of your digital event. The platform maximizes the attendees’ number you can accommodate at an event with zero need for larger space booking. This translates to less generation of trash and minimal carbon, which is a win for eco-friendly event planning.
6. Enjoy Better Reporting And Metrics
It isn’t straightforward to discover who attended, registered, and what they conceived about your event if you have zero digital platforms backing up your in-person event. But into the mix, if you employ the platform, you can begin recognizing the QR code check-ins, comments, Q&As, session attendance, and a lot more. For in-person events, attendees can give positive feedback about loving the event if you ask them in person.
However, they might need to be more truthful 100 percent. Having a digital platform, you can count beyond what is known as white lies and see your engagement metrics in black and white. You will acquire an honest opinion about the overall event’s success and people’s enjoyment, along with what you should keep off next time. Having the data with you will keep you informed and will assist you in enhancing your next event. Therefore when in doubt, ensure to depend on events platforms for in-person meetings and conferences to figure out what you can improve next time.
Unforeseen catastrophes can mess up in-person events, from weather inclement to an outbreak of COVID-19. Having an event platform is a good idea for in-person events in case the need for taking your event online arises at the last minute.
8. Engagement Boosting
Many people’s habit is to be bolder online compared to when in person. Some attendees may not quickly leave comments or engage in Q&A individually. Luckily, the event platform for in-person events permits people’s engagement. Thus you acquire meeting in plenty from your content.
9. Score More Leads
With zero digital platforms, the generation of leads is a hectic process. Venues for events in person gives you the power to collect the emails of the attendee, data, entries, and more. Typically, these metrics to track on paper would be a nightmare, but digital platforms make it easier to follow up with leads even after the events. It is possible to segment your information or use lead scoring to determine what sales outreach would work best.
10. Integrate With Existing Other Own Solutions
With zero digital platforms, the generation of leads is a hectic process. Venues for events in person gives you the power to collect the emails of the attendee, data, entries, and more. Typically, these metrics to track on paper would be a nightmare, but digital platforms make it easier to follow up with leads even after the events. Segment your information or use lead scoring to determine the best sales outreach.
11. Easy Management Of Your Schedule
Do you have multiple ongoing sessions or workshops at once? Make sure to give attendees a clean paper schedule. In lieu, in your event platform, you can plug everything in. Attendees can customize their program in an event platform for in-person conferences. You can include downloadable goodies in the event application for every session, such as the PDF freebies and the presenter’s slides.
12. Provide Them With More Sponsorship Perks
The event’s sponsors would like to experience as much return as possible on their investments. It takes your effort to boost the value of your event along with the future in the platform of your event that can make the sponsor’s pot tasty. Provide levels of sponsorship that will allow the brands to keep advertising in your even application with freebies, deals, banners, promotional emails, and more.
Benefits of Event Platforms
Here are some of the key benefits you receive when you utilize a purpose-created event management program.
1. Time-Saving
When your tasks and duties are centralized into a single platform of events saves valuable time for your team, you along with your attendees. Your event entirely happens within the event software instead of consuming much time toggling between email marketing, registration applications along with conferencing tools. In addition, since you require zero vetting multiple solutions for every event phase, you save even more time.
2. Management Of Events Is Easy
The entire event is not difficult to manage as a result of the dedicated event platform. From attendee communication before and after the event to sessions conducting happens all in a single place. Your online team of event management entirely can utilize the platform to track engagement, collaborate, conduct outreach, and all the other small jobs that go into your event. This put you on the safer side as you don’t have to buy multiple solutions of end-point that only handle tasks, as well keep every person on the same page.
3. Cost Reduction
Revenue tracking and event budget managing vs expenses without software can be a tricky task. To increase the ROI of your event, making use of a central platform can assist you in tracking every single dollar in and out. Compare expenditures with registration and for the sake of influencing your ROI as you go, visually track your spending.
4. Automate Your Event
The planners of the events wear dozens of hats and always take the whole event team professionals to manage any event of any size. Therefore, when your task is automated, it minimizes your team’s demand without sacrificing your event outcome. For instance, sending automatic emails to confirm registration along with announcements leading up to the event. All the data registration can be done automatically and uploaded into CRM, minimizing the entry time of the data and the errors potentiality in the data. Making your event’s staff time free by using automation gives your team more time to concentrate on functionality and creativity instead of mundane tasks that never add value to the event.
5. Shows Professionalism on another Level
The image presented throughout your event to your events matters a lot. Every single minute they interact with your event sessions, messages, or branding, they are creating opinions about your expertise. Here, you are where your best foot should be put forward and the best thing to do using professional event software. Utilizing a dedicated event platform indicates that you are invested in the total event experience. This constructs a predictable, consistent experience for your event management team and attendee. In addition, it permits your human staff to give even better touchpoints with attendees as they don’t have to consume much time managing heavy details behind the scenes.
6. Analyze And Enhance
Speaking of enhancement, the software used for event planning assists you to decide where you can make changes to your events based on data but not hunches. It analyses the behaviors of the audience and as well engages the metrics at scale in real-time. By so doing, you can proceed with value-adding to future events in ways that really concern your audience.
7. Maximize Engagement
The engagement of the audience matters, during, before, and after your event. The software used in dedicated event planning includes management tools for the audience and is for every phase of your event. It sends emails automatically and immediately to attendees upon registration and continues to have them excited leading up to the event. During your conference or meeting, make use of interactive tools to have questions collected, shout-outs, or poll answers. From real-time asking questions to workshops participating, an audience that is engaged is more likely to go away with something from your event. After ending the event, the software managing your event can keep the conversation ongoing. You can now customize your outreach and increase the responses by analyzing after tracking the engagement of your attendee. In addition, seeing how your audience engaged during, before, or even after your event, as an added bonus, will help you update or enhance and build the next event you might be planning.
Conclusion
The platforms of events help the brands to have more data collection, improve the experience of the attendee, and as well from a single event generates more leads. If you have invested already in the event platform, it is an add-on that is easy and that will beef up your next event value. Bring together all your moving parts such as accounting, HR, Registration, and marketing under the same umbrella. This ease the task of delegating the jobs to your team along with outsourcing specific parts of your event to other vendors and enhancing your productivity throughout the process of planning. The technology makes many events much easier to manage and more streamlined.
The author Rithesh Raghavan is the Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency in India. Having a rich experience of 15+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.