How to Determine the Best Hybrid Event Platform for Your Company
- by GlobalMeet Blog Team
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In the evolving landscape of corporate events, hybrid event platforms have become essential tools for organizations seeking to engage both in-person and virtual attendees at one event. But how do you determine what the right platform is for you? Selecting the best hybrid event platform for your company means evaluating several critical factors to ensure the platform aligns with your business objectives and technical requirements. This guide will walk you through the key considerations and features to look for when determining the best hybrid event platform for your needs.
Integration with Existing CRM, Marketing Tools, and Sales Tools
A pivotal feature of any effective hybrid event platform is its ability to seamlessly integrate with your company’s existing CRM, marketing tools, and sales tools. Integration is crucial because it allows for the streamlined collection and analysis of attendee data, enhancing both the pre-event and post-event experience.
- CRM Integration: Your platform should sync with your customer relationship management (CRM) system to track interactions, gather insights, and personalize attendee experiences. For instance, if an attendee registers for a session, this information should be captured in your CRM, allowing your sales team to follow up with tailored outreach.
- Marketing Tools: Integration with marketing tools such as email marketing software, social media platforms, and analytics tools ensures cohesive marketing campaigns throughout the planning phases of your event and beyond. This integration enables automated workflows, such as sending personalized emails based on attendee behavior or generating social media posts that highlight key event moments.
- Sales Tools: For a comprehensive approach, the hybrid event platform should also integrate with your sales tools. This connection helps in identifying high-potential leads based on engagement levels and interaction data collected during the event, facilitating a smoother transition from lead generation to conversion.
Collaboration with Onsite A/V Teams or Provision of Expert A/V Services
The success of a hybrid event hinges on the quality of the audiovisual (A/V) experience provided to both in-person and virtual attendees. Therefore, it is imperative to choose a platform that can either partner effectively with your existing onsite A/V team or provide access to expert A/V services.
- Onsite A/V Team Collaboration: If you already have an onsite A/V team, the best hybrid event platform should be able to work seamlessly with them. This includes compatibility with their equipment and processes, as well as providing support for the integration of live-streaming technologies.
- Expert A/V Services: If you lack an onsite A/V team, look for a platform that offers access to professional A/V services. These experts can help with everything from setting up high-quality live streams to ensuring that all technical aspects of the event run smoothly. Platforms offering this service typically provide end-to-end support, including pre-event planning, live-event management, and post-event debriefs.
Scalability and Security for Supporting Both Virtual and Onsite Attendees
Scalability and security are paramount when selecting a hybrid event platform, particularly as the number of attendees can vary significantly between events. The platform must be capable of scaling to accommodate both small and large audiences without compromising on performance or security.
- Scalability: The best hybrid event systems are designed to handle a fluctuating number of participants, offering features such as dynamic bandwidth allocation and the ability to support multiple concurrent sessions. They should also provide tools to manage and monitor attendee engagement in real-time, ensuring a smooth experience for everyone involved.
- Security: Given the sensitive nature of the data collected during events, robust security measures are non-negotiable. The platform should comply with industry standards and regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, offering features like end-to-end encryption, secure login, and data protection protocols. Additionally, it should have provisions for monitoring and mitigating security threats in real-time to protect against data breaches.
Additional Features to Consider
While the above factors are critical, several additional features can enhance the value of any hybrid event platform:
- User-Friendly Interface: A platform with an intuitive and user-friendly interface ensures that both organizers and attendees can navigate the event effortlessly. Look for features like customizable event pages, drag-and-drop functionality for session planning, and easy-to-use attendee interfaces.
- Engagement Tools: To keep both virtual and onsite attendees engaged, the platform should offer interactive tools such as live Q&A sessions, polls, breakout rooms, and networking lounges. Gamification features can also enhance engagement by encouraging participation through rewards and leaderboards.
- Analytics and Reporting: Comprehensive analytics and reporting tools are essential for measuring the success of your event. The platform should provide detailed reports on attendee behavior, engagement levels, session popularity, and overall event performance. These insights can inform future event planning and marketing strategies.
- Support and Training: Robust customer support and training resources are invaluable, particularly if your team is new to hybrid events and hybrid event systems. Look for platforms that offer 24/7 support, extensive documentation, and training sessions to help your team maximize the platform’s capabilities.
Conclusion
Selecting the best hybrid event platform for your company requires careful consideration of various factors, including integration capabilities, collaboration with A/V teams, scalability, and security. By ensuring the platform aligns with your existing tools and processes, provides top-notch audiovisual support, and can scale securely, you’ll be well-equipped to deliver engaging and successful hybrid events.
Additionally, prioritizing user-friendly interfaces, engagement tools, comprehensive analytics, and strong support will further enhance the overall event experience, driving value for your organization and your attendees. As hybrid events continue to grow in popularity, investing in the right platform is crucial for staying competitive and meeting the evolving expectations of your audience.
Crafting a Successful 2024 Sales Kickoff: Tips and Tricks
- by GlobalMeet Blog Team
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It’s that time of year again, where businesses gear up for their 2024 sales kickoffs. The annual sales kickoff event is a cornerstone for any company, offering a unique blend of celebration and strategic planning. It’s an opportunity to applaud the wins of the past year while brainstorming a roadmap for the year ahead. This pivotal event aligns teams, recognizes achievements, and sets the stage for a successful year. In today’s virtual landscape, sales kickoffs may look a bit different, but with robust webcasting technology, you can seamlessly transition into the new year, regardless of the format.
What is a Sales Kickoff?
So, what goes into a sales kickoff? The typical agenda includes a mix of:
- Team-building activities
- Leadership presentations
- Product updates
- A recap of the previous year
- Training sessions
- Employee celebrations
- Goal announcements for the new year
These elements boil down to three key components when planning your event. Let’s dive into the essential aspects of hosting a successful SKO.
Education
Your sales leadership team should offer focused, relevant, and engaging educational content. This could involve product training sessions, updates on the competitive landscape, or insights into new frameworks and resources.
Inspiration
Sharing internal success stories can be a powerful motivator. Highlight tales of underperforming reps who exceeded their sales goals or the journey of a Sales VP who climbed from an SDR role. Inspirational moments can also come from the CEO’s keynote, outlining the company’s future direction.
Celebration
Recognizing top performers, the most improved, best attitude, and outstanding team players sets the tone for the year. Consider offering incentives or bonuses to inspire your sales reps to aim high.
Three Tips for a Memorable 2024 Sales Kickoff
1. Empower with Upcoming Strategies
Stay ahead of the competition by unveiling new strategies and tactics. Interactive webcasts allow reps to engage actively, ask questions, participate in surveys, and stay at the forefront of industry trends.
2. Foster Participation
Instead of one-way presentations, encourage participation through role-playing, scripted scenarios, or live practice sessions. Get reps involved beforehand, ensuring a seamless transition between speakers using tools like GlobalMeet.
3. Sustain the Momentum
Don’t let the SKO be a one-time event. Provide sales enablement materials, reinforce strategies in weekly and monthly meetings, and utilize SKO recordings for new hire training and ongoing reminders of key strategies.
Elevate Your Sales Kickoff with GlobalMeet
For your annual sales kickoff, GlobalMeet offers top-of-the-line webcasting technology, coupled with audience engagement tools to maximize participation. Should you require additional support, our managed services team has a wealth of experience in executing global events and stands ready to assist. Schedule a demo today to discover more about how we can elevate your 2024 SKO.
Exploring the Advantages of Embracing Virtual and Hybrid Events
- by GlobalMeet Blog Team
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What is a Webcast?
In a remarkable turn of events, the year 2020 witnessed an abrupt shift as every scheduled in-person event swiftly transitioned into the virtual world. Fast-forward two years, and the landscape has evolved to the point where virtual and hybrid events have become the new standard. The advantages of virtual events offer an array of compelling benefits for businesses, including cost savings, greater time efficiencies, and unparalleled flexibility for both staff and clients. The concept of hybrid events, combining in-person elements with virtual sessions, further amplifies these advantages. When meticulously evaluating the potential, larger-scale enterprises might find themselves enthusiastic about embarking on a journey towards virtual and hybrid event integration.
Traditionally, hybrid events consisted of live gatherings supplemented with online components. Such occasions spanned shareholder meetings, team-building exercises, keynote addresses, conferences, and executive speeches, all live-streamed to diverse locations. However, contemporary hybrid events have evolved to seamlessly engage attendees, yielding a multitude of benefits that organizations can harness through the adoption of these innovative strategies.
Three Key Advantages of Shifting to Virtual and Hybrid Events:
1. Enhanced Flexibility
Conventional in-person events often impose limitations concerning travel logistics, budget constraints, the equilibrium of employees’ work-life dynamics, operational arrangements, and safety considerations. Many of these challenges can be effectively addressed by embracing a virtual or hybrid approach. This approach proves especially advantageous for employees with family commitments, as it eradicates the need for travel while also saving businesses substantial expenses related to travel costs and reduced productivity due to absences. Moreover, the draining mental and emotional toll associated with frequent travel is significantly mitigated.
2. Sustained Engagement
Unlike traditional one-off in-person gatherings, virtual and hybrid events offer a distinctive advantage by facilitating pre-event engagement and post-event interaction. Virtual event platforms provide opportunities for participants to engage through audience chat, polling and surveys and immersive breakout sessions using a preferred meeting application. This environment promotes networking and connections that extend beyond the event itself.
3. Cost Efficiency
Organizing and participating in physical events can be financially burdensome, encompassing expenses ranging from catering and venue setup fees to booth rentals and ancillary costs. Virtual events, on the other hand, introduce substantial cost savings across the board. Organizations can allocate their budgets to content creation and presentation, free from the concerns of auxiliary costs associated with traditional in-person events.
Strategic Alignment of Virtual and Hybrid Events with Enterprise Objectives
As the global landscape continues to shift towards decentralization, businesses are recognizing that the advantages of virtual events, including cost savings, sustained engagement, and enhanced flexibility, position them as the preferred solution for large-scale gatherings. Technological advancements have harmoniously facilitated this paradigm shift. Solutions like GlobalMeet incorporate interactive features such as polling, Q&A sessions, and audience chat that foster genuine participant engagement in virtual and hybrid events.
To envision and orchestrate your next virtual or hybrid event, we invite you to experience firsthand how this innovative approach can elevate your business endeavors to new heights. Contact our sales team today to learn more.
Strategic Corporate Communications with Webcasts
- by GlobalMeet Blog Team
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Whether you’re hosting a sales and marketing town hall, an executive briefing, investor relation events, or an annual insurance and benefits update, corporate communications is critical in building strong relationships with diverse audiences. However, traditional corporate communication can often feel impersonal and cold and leaves much to be desired. Modern audiences and companies want to create a warm, personal connection with customers and partners, and webcasts are one of the best ways to do that.
Here are a few ways to create more strategic, personalized corporate communications with webcasting technology:
1. Use Dynamic, Engaging Video
One-dimensional technology like emailing or chatting can create misunderstandings due to the lack of body language, tone of voice, inflection, and other verbal communication signals. It can also feel cold and impersonal. GlobalMeet Webcast powers crystal-clear, high-definition audio and video webcasting technology and makes it easy to dynamically switch speaking layouts. As a result, attendees won’t get bored with the same screen over and over again, and their attention can be drawn to a specific message.
2. Maintain a Reliable Connection
Nothing is worse than getting all of your employees and contractors prepped for a meeting or town hall only to have the broadcast fail on you. Attendees will quickly lose interest, even if it’s just a few seconds of delay or lag. Instead, use a reliable webcasting platform that is “always on” and is known for its stability.
3. Ensure Your Webcasting Platform Is User-Friendly
Easily share slides and videos, quickly take audience polls, and answer attendees’ chat questions so they feel listened to and more engaged. A user-friendly webcasting platform encourages teams to share more and reduces the significant amount of friction that people experience when they hop on video.
4. Analyze Robust Data
Data tells the story of how successful your live webcast was. Integrated analytical data and reporting eliminate the guesswork and transparently show you what portions can be optimized for a better response from the audience. You can also analyze on-demand recordings and gather analytics on how those attendees watched and engaged with the presentation. This helps you optimize the time, date, and format of future webcasts to meet the needs of employees better.
Why GlobalMeet Webcast for Corporate Communications?
GlobalMeet Webcast is the solution of choice for many of the Fortune 500 around the globe. Powerful webcasting technology helps your business meet its organizational goals and addresses many of the communication pain points when it comes to communicating with a vast, diverse workforce. Learn more today.
How to Create More Accessible Virtual Events in 2023
- by GlobalMeet Blog Team
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While virtual events are more accessible than in-person events, organizations must embrace accessibility, equity, and inclusivity when it comes to building strategies for 2023 and beyond. Over 2 billion people globally live with some sort of disability, and a significant number of these are audio or visual impairments. Two hundred seventeen million people worldwide have moderate to severe vision impairment, and over 1.5 billion people live with hearing loss. As so many people struggle to interact with virtual events without an added layer of accessibility, creating an inclusive, welcoming environment during an event is key.
The Rise of Accessibility in Virtual Events
While many strides have been made to make technology, websites, and online events more accessible, there are still ways to enhance the experience. Physically, virtual events already add extra accessibility as they don’t require travel, walking across a large conference hall, climbing stairs, or other movements that might be more difficult for some people. A recent study also showed that online events gather a more diverse audience. People can tune in on their own schedules from home and immerse themselves in content the way they prefer.
3 Best Practices for Accessible Virtual Events
As organizations continue to reimagine accessibility in virtual events, here are a few best practices. Encourage your audience to provide feedback as well on what could make your events easier to watch and absorb.
1. Embrace Captioning and Live Translations
With 91% of viewers watching videos without sound, captioning boosts engagement, increases comprehension, and extends viewing times. Without captions, research shows that when people can’t understand or hear a speaker, they quickly tune out, leaving your event less effective and hurting your business revenue. Verizon Media research also showed that people are 80% more likely to watch your video if you have captions. GlobalMeet Webcast offers captioning and live human event interpretation in multiple languages to make your event inclusive across global audiences.
2. Give Attendees a Heads-Up on What to Expect
Make sure the agenda is prepped and available ahead of time, so your attendees can know what to expect. This allows them to make any necessary accommodations before the event starts, and cognitively, our brains are constantly working hard to figure out what’s coming next.
Some key items to include:
- Start and finish times.
- Speaker bios and session descriptions.
- Any social interaction that will be encouraged, like break out rooms or participating in the chat or polls.
3. Survey Your Audience Beforehand to Understand Their Needs
Confused about where to start on making your virtual event more accessible? Just ask your audience! A quick pre-event survey that asks for their viewing preferences, preferred language, and any other accommodations makes people feel comfortable and heard ahead of time. Avoid spending tons of time guessing what your audience needs, only to find out after the event they wanted something totally different.
Use GlobalMeet Webcast for More Accessible Virtual Events
GlobalMeet Webcast builds an inclusive culture that breaks down language barriers, fosters team building, and improves accessibility and inclusivity. Make your events welcoming to all audiences across the world with an innovative webcasting platform that scales as you do. Contact us today to learn more.
