Category

Business Strategy

Dec 11
1

Taking Back Control of Buyer’s Journey Through Personalization

By | Best Practices, Business Strategy, Communication, Marketing

Introduction

Online events have proven successful with many corporate B2B marketers and have become a key component of successful lead generating programs.

The present generation of online events (virtual events) allow producers to take attendees through some of the same experiences as attending a physical event. The virtual event platforms facilitate design of venues using two dimensional graphical reproductions of physical conference and trade show imagery. They use physical event terminology for web pages like conference centers, exhibit halls, and networking lounges. They also support booths and offer extensive line up of live and on demand programming, collateral, professional networking, social media feeds, gaming and many other engagement options.

In this blog post, we’ll review how personalization is key to furthering the nurturing process and engaging attendees with content aimed at their specific interests or issues and where personalization and next generation online events meet.

Time Commitment vs. Scope of Programming

There are several key differences between physical and online events.  One key difference is how attendees allocate time to each. An attendee will commit a day or more to physical events. This makes sense as people typically travel to attend a physical event, making a large financial and time investment. They are also there with an event related calendar that often includes free time to explore unknown elements via chance encounters and discoveries.

For online events, average attendees make shorter time commitments than the entirety of the full conference. Attendees are also more susceptible to interruptions while at work. Online attendees usually plan their time around attending specific talks. Once in the event, attending those talks are the highest priority. In between sessions, the attendees might browse through the rest of the programming, download resources, visit partners/sponsors, or mark items of interest to return to later. Now, it’s not to say that great and highly relevant content online can’t draw and keep an audience engaged for hours long as demonstrated by recurring online events that run for multiple days. However, the organizer must ensure the event delivers highest value not only to those who stay for the entirety of the conference, but also those who can commit a smaller window of time.

This difference in time allocation is one reason quick-bite webinars have enjoyed significant popularity as the online marketing tool of choice. By keeping a webinar duration to an hour or less, the programming fits within what an attendee is able to more easily commit during their busy workday. Thus, webinars are great hooks to bring an attendee in. Where webinars fall short is lack of breadth of programming and limited engagement options, which substantially limits their value as lead nurturing and lead qualification tool.


What’s Next: Personalized Online Events

The next generation of online events will combine the best of these two worlds, limited attendee time and broad programming, through personalization. Once in the event, the attendee will automatically be assigned a relevant account manager for inquiries, receive personalized recommendations on the most relevant not-to-be missed sessions, white papers and collateral, and when available, recommendations on key partners, partner resources and partner contacts for follow up. These recommendations will be machine generated, taking into account attendee profile, demographic and predictive models of what has worked best in the past for ‘alike’ attendees. The personalization will give attendees an immediate sense of relevance and will establish the event organizer as a trusted partner, aiming to educate and help attendees learn the most about their topics of interest as efficiently as possible. The better served the customer, the longer she’ll stay and engage, leading to further nurturing and improved qualification data.

Summary

Today marketers are starting to adopt personalization strategies in their various marketing programs using account-based marketing (ABM), artificial intelligence-based recommendation engines, predictive purchasing models and email drip campaigns. The next generation of online events will utilize variations of these personalization strategies inside an online event, substantially accelerating lead nurturing and guiding attendees through their buying journey, all in a fraction of time it would otherwise take outside the event.

At Engagez (www.engagez.com), we strive to offer the best capabilities for hosting the most effective live, simulive (simulated live) and on-demand online events. We are investing heavily in personalization and believe it is a crucial enabler for wider adoption of online events by marketers as the tool of choice for demand generation and guiding customers through their purchasing journey.

Aug 10
0
virtual conference platform

Virtual Conference Platforms Can Work in Tandem With Physical Conferences: Here’s How

By | Best Practices, Business Strategy, Communication, Marketing, Virtual Events

Conferences are an important tool for modern professionals, allowing hundreds in a field to come together and work on issues ranging from professional standards to the latest technological or scientific developments.

But now, the conference industry is undergoing a major revolution. New virtual conference platforms and online event software are offering conference organizers new ways to innovate and address existing problems. In fact, the industry is slated to grow from $14 billion to $18 billion in value by 2023.

In this guide, we will look at how virtual conference platforms can help supplement physical conferences to create the best events possible.

    1. Expand your reach
      One of the best ways to use virtual conference software is to expand your reach. While professional conferences might draw in thousands of visitors, for every attendee, there is someone at home who either could not afford the trip or could not get time off of work. By digitizing elements of your conference on a virtual conference platform, you are able to provide information and opportunity to those not physically able to attend.

 

    1. Digitize the Conference Experience
      With a virtual trade show, you can digitize the traditional conference or trade show experience in a variety of ways. First, a virtual conference platform can provide lucrative new sponsorship opportunities, which can help fund your efforts. Second, the best event software makes networking and lead capture far simpler for everyone involved, enhancing one of the most important aspects of these events. Finally, rather than making announcements over a loudspeaker, you can use notifications to update attendees at any time, whether they’re visiting in person or online.

 

  1. Feature Bonus Material
    It can be hard to make your conference schedule work for everyone all the time. The better rooms and better time slots will have to go to the most popular lectures and talks. But with virtual conferences, you are never at a loss for space, nor are you bound by the constraints of your speakers’ schedules. Using your virtual conference platform to show supplemental material that you didn’t have time and space for will allow your attendees to get more information before, during, and after the event.

Organizing and growing a successful conference can be difficult. One way that you can cost-effectively expand the education and engagement of your attendees is by taking advantage of online event platforms. This tool allows you to create a virtual component to your event and make your life easier at the same time.

Graphic reference https://www.marketresearchmedia.com/?p=421.
Jul 10
0

Maybe Everyone Will Offer Simultaneous Live Audio Streaming for Now Just Engagez

By | Best Practices, Business Strategy, Virtual Events, Webcasts & Webinars

We believe there is another channel or audience segment that is not being served well by events. This segment is comprised of people who cannot attend a physical event and would like to, but also cannot sit and watch a live video stream either. The thought came to us when we were attending a remote video event but had to go to an appointment and could not watch in the car. We realized that we would have continued attending the event had they only offered an audio stream which we could listen to on the way. We know its not as good as a video, but it would have been better than nothing.

This concept was reinforced after we’d noticed people in our office with a video stream up on one browser, with another “work” browswer opened. They were listening, but couldn’t watch. “Why would I sit and watch someone talk unless I needed to see slides or something? I just want to hear what they are saying,” was the answer we got when asked.

In fact, I often do that as well with YouTube videos that are explaining something that I don’t need or want to watch-just listen.

Since we are unaware of any platform that provides this, we feel it is a unique idea. It may take a while to catch on but with the popularity of podcasting in general, we think it is worth pioneering.

Currently we offer audio-only (lower bandwidth and less strain on the user’s data plan) with the notion that people might start to listen to events more on their mobile devices–while they are traveling, at work or busy doing something else where video isn’t an option.

Jul 10
0

Ideas on How to Monetize Your Digital Events

By | Best Practices, Business Strategy, Monetize

Some organizations look to generate direct revenue from their online event programs although most are actually seeking to achieve other, indirect benefits. This post is for those that want to generate revenue.

Like most roads, the road to monetization often leads back to content. Whether it is an overall event sponsorship you are selling, a content specific sponsorship, or access to specific content, the primary reason people attend an online program is to gain new knowledge.

Let’s start with the low hanging fruit; content people need and will pay money to access. As an example, one of the most successful virtual events is Social Media Summit. They consistently sell tickets to attend their annual event online and sell a lot! At $495 (at least last I checked that was the price) they have had events that have been attended by around 2,000 people. They have great content, a hot subject and lots of people to sell to.

There are associations that routinely make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling virtual-only registrations to their events at the full price of an in-person registration. People are willing to pay if the content is really important to them and may be willing to pay full price for the convenience of not having to leave their office or practice.

The key is to have content that people are willing and able to pay for (that by the way, is a good rule to have no matter what content you are sharing). That’s where your work comes in… finding out what that is and then putting a plan together to create/capture it AND THEN MARKETING. Don’t neglect to explore marketing partnerships either! The beauty of this type of digital product is that the cost doesn’t go up based on the use so you can be very aggressive with partner commissions.

Overall event sponsorship will vary depending on the type of event, the audience, the potential sponsors and the options in the technology you are using. Giving your sponsors the opportunity to have their content featured in a session or multiple sessions is usually a big benefit. Sponsoring individual session content may have appeal as well. Here you can offer a graphic or video message at either the beginning (of the event? Session?) or end or both. Some technology allows you to brand the player on which the remote audience is watching the stream/recording, or brand the live stream image itself with lower thirds or other options.

If you happen to be producing a hybrid event (in-person audience as well as online) you might consider setting up a studio at the event that’s used to interview your sponsor’s subject matter experts, attendees and speakers. The content would be streamed to the remote audience when there’s nothing to stream from the event onsite (i.e. during breaks). There are many ways to monetize with sponsorships of the studio, during the live event and also during any rebroadcast.

Advertising benefits are also a significant way to sell sponsorships. These can also be sold as standalone services if you have a large enough audience. You can include banner ads on the streaming player, pop up ads, and video ads played between programs. Some virtual event technologies will accommodate push messages and ads to the remote audience within event-related emails sent to attendees and potential attendees before, during and after the event.

We’ll come back to the subject of monetization again in the near future with a more exhaustive look.