For the majority event marketers, the great crash course in virtual events is now behind us – and for many, virtual events are now a permanent part of our marketing strategies. But as we explore new ways to design virtual and hybrid event experiences that capture the benefits of fully in-person events, the addition of new virtual technologies to support these multi-dimensional events can be less than ideal.
It can be complicated to pull together all the necessary digital technology for a successful hybrid or virtual event. Finding a solution that also supports the in-person and virtual event experience and helps drive audience interaction often means adding third-party vendor to your martech stack.
To simplify the process and enhance audience engagement, Certain has launched Touchpoint Stream – a truly interactive virtual and hybrid event platform that offers event professionals a flexible and central platform to host events, while offering attendees a single, intuitive solution to access virtual content and connect with fellow attendees, speakers, and exhibitors. And for us marketers, Stream captures all the rich attendee engagement data shared throughout your event to create deeper attendee experiences with ease.
3 Ways to Elevate Virtual and Hybrid Event Management with Touchpoint Stream
When it comes to virtual and hybrid events, audience engagement tools and techniques are essential for enhancing the attendee experience – while also providing you with the opportunity to gather real-time metrics. Touchpoint Stream provides event marketers with a full suite of interactivities to ensure virtual audiences have a memorable experience that delivers high quality engagement data. Here are just a few of the ways that Touchpoint Stream can help you elevate your hybrid and virtual events:
1. Simplify and Centralize Your Event From Start-to-Finish
With Touchpoint Stream, event marketers and professionals can manage every aspect of their next virtual or hybrid event from a single platform, reducing dependence on multiple digital technologies while also unifying points of data collection (more on this to come).
Stream eliminates the need for a separate event live-streaming provider by providing native live and on-demand streaming directly from the platform. Event hosts can easily design a fully-branded event website, agenda, session and speaker catalogs all within the same platform as their streaming, engagement and exhibitor portals.
2. Enhance Attendee Interactivity
When hosting a virtual or hybrid event, it’s important to ensure that remote attendees receive the same level of value from the experience that they would if they were attending in person. EventMB’s 2021 Event Tech Innovation Report notes that the biggest challenge for planners in virtual events is how to keep attendees engaged.
With Touchpoint Streams various engagement features, including discussion boards, photo and activity feeds, surveys, polls, specialized breakout rooms, and more, your audience can choose any number of ways to interact with your event. For example:
Attendee-to-Attendee Engagement
- Connect your virtual and in-person audiences through discussion boards. Set topics in advance of your event to get the conversation going; encourage attendees to join discussion boards based on lunch-and-learn or roundtable groups, networking topics, etc.
- Drive conversations, photo and video sharing through an activity feed or social wall, where people can posts photos of their virtual setup, onsite scenery, etc.
- Set up a badge game to drive activity; for each photo posted, comment left, question asked, attendees get a badge that is tallied in Touchpoint and displayed on a leaderboard. Incentivize attendees with perks for the highest scorers and watch the engagement skyrocket!
Attendee-to-Speaker Engagement
- Encourage speakers to pose questions in the discussion board for attendees to respond to in advance of your event. This will help them gain valuable insights to help inform their presentations, and allow for a little buzz-building leading up to their session.
- Stream’s virtual streaming option allows your audience to engage in a live Q&A with speakers directly from the session screen.
- Surveys and live polling give your presenters a chance to ask any number of questions from the audience and gain real-time feedback.
Attendee-to-Exhibitor Engagement
- In addition to discussion boards, activity feeds and social walls, your event sponsors and exhibitors can connect with attendees through their own designated virtual booth, where details on their company, contacts, live demos and content can be accessed with a single click.
- Onsite attendees can easily locate exhibitors with our interactive floor map, where sponsors can scan badges through Touchpoint to capture leads from booth visits.
3. Act on Real-Time Insights
Events represent a significant marketing expense; with that in mind, it’s crucial that every event marketer to have an event data strategy—this will allow you to show exactly where funds are spent and prove event ROI. While static data has value, real-time data is more actionable; you and your team can capture in-the-moment metrics that allow you to proactively address attendee pain points or increase support for activities that help you meet your KPIs.
Using Touchpoint Stream, you can capture a wealth of valuable insights to demonstrate the value of your event, including:
- Session attendance, join and drop times – Find out which sessions and speakers are drawing a crowd, see what’s working and what’s not, down to the minute!
- Survey and live polling responses – Get direct feedback from your audience on your event, content, and more with custom polls and surveys.
- Discussion board, activity feeds, Q&A and comments – See what topics are trending amongst your audience, what questions they’re looking to answer, what content they’re responding to or downloading, and much more.
Turn Your Virtual Event into 365 Content
Keep the momentum of your live event going by turning it into 365 content that your audience can tap into all year-round. With Stream, your event livestreams immediately convert into on-demand content that your event guests can access anywhere, anytime.
Virtual is going to continue to play a major role in connecting audiences, sharing up-to-date information, and broadening your brand’s reach. It’s time to invest in a virtual event solution that cuts out the middle-man and unites audiences through meaningful interaction.
Contact us today to see a demo of Touchpoint Stream and learn more about how to turn your virtual and hybrid events into a truly interactive and memorable experience!
Written by Marcela Ricci, Sr. Marketing Manager at Certain