The Virtual Events Boom | With Expert Jim Sharpe

Would you say, would you say there's any certain locations where you're seeing most of these virtual events happening in 2021, or even live events? And then So you mentioned some kind of future opportunities for improvements. Do you see that being the frontier of kind of innovation in this space being those hybrid events, or is there anything else that we can expect to see?

Yeah, so that's a great question on locations. So the places that you'd expect, Florida, Nevada, the type of economies that rely most on events and trade shows and also happen to have good weather, which is probably why many of the trade shows go there, is those are opening up first. And those are the ones that have the space and the ability to do so safely. The largest budgets are there. So we're seeing it occur first in these warm weather locations that are traditionally big areas for trade shows. So that's the first place it's opening, but you are hearing far more rumblings actually in the last couple of weeks of people starting to open their live event programs back up. So we're excited for that. So that's fantastic. In terms of innovation within this arena, we see a few areas of innovation. The first is on the virtual front, which is that the problem with virtual events today, and I think we all agree when we attend them, is that they can be pretty flat. It's difficult to engage with the content. And what event planners are struggling with is how do we keep our attendees engaged? We may have 5 times as many people at the event, but how do we keep them interested in what's going on? And so what they're doing is they're adapting their formats to make them punchier, shorter, short-form, more engaging and interactive through gamification and other things with the attendees. So there's a big engagement piece there. Another piece is that of networking. I think you also agree that one of the best parts about events is the ability to serendipitously or directly engage with people and do business. And that's been lost for the most part with virtual events. And so our new platform that we released has a lot of the innovation that we're looking forward to in networking You know, for example, our platform has a recommendation engine. So when you sign up for an event, it asks you a couple of questions about your interests and then recommends a series of attendees that you should meet with, right? So it recommends who to engage with, which is great. So you could be walking around a virtual show floor, so to speak, and you know who's to your left and who's to your right that you should talk to. We also have other technologies such as video chat, breakout rooms, other things that allow groups of people, either one-on-one or in small gatherings to get together virtually. So that's a big area of innovation right now that everybody's focusing on. And then there's this whole element, Akeel, around ease of use, which is that coming out of this pandemic, we're gonna have probably reduced team sizes at a lot of these companies. So you're gonna have to do more with less.

Right.

And just because you have a complex event doesn't mean your software needs to be complex. And therefore what we're all working on is arranging technology that makes it easy to use. And that's a big rallying cry for my team right now is all around the ease of use of all the technology that we create. So we think those are areas of innovation. And the last one is that of monetization, which is how do you make money at these events if your goal is to make money?

Right.

And there's a big movement toward creating exhibitor booths that allow exhibitors virtually to engage with attendees and then greater sponsorship opportunities. So I don't know if you've been to a virtual event where the happy hour is sponsored by somebody or you see banner ads at the virtual event, but that's part of a continued innovation going on to provide more sponsorship and ROI opportunities at these events.

So ease of use, monetization, and being able to kind of— another point of that is also kind of the safety part, right? When you're thinking about live events where you have handshakes, business cards being traded, and there's probably that little bit of hesitation from from people to come back. Is there any piece on that technology front that you guys are implementing to help people feel safe coming back and make sure they have that experience, get the engagement for both attendees and exhibitors?

Yes, great question. So on the technology side, I think one thing we all agree with is that the technology, the best technology is technology that you barely know is there. And this is something we've been focusing on as we think about the return to live events. And I did mention the case study with Informa, where we were at that pop-up magic show in February. And with that technology, the first thing we were trying to solve for was seamless check-in at the event. So the ability to go to the event, you don't have to wait in line anymore. You showed a QR code that you had on your mobile device that we created that allowed you to enter the event. without having any issues, right? So that's, that's the first advantage that creates safety and social distancing. The other impact of that is it allows you session control, so you can control who's in the room, uh, how many people are in the room, and make sure that everything's being kept in a safe manner. Uh, and that's another technology that we're developing. And then with that, the great benefit of this kind of badgeless check-in type technology is it allows you to exchange information with other attendees very seamlessly, right? So as opposed to a paper business card or other collateral, you can, you can use your mobile device to, to scan with somebody else and immediately exchange valuable information about one another. So we think that these, these badges are easy to use. In our experience, they are preferred by most people on the show floor, and we think it represents a huge area of innovation for safety. One other thing to keep in mind about safety is that you also need a backup plan, and that's part of the virtual experience as well. Let's imagine for a minute that you're throwing an event in Orlando next month and then something happens related to health or otherwise, and you need to have a backup plan for all that work you put into your show. Therefore, it's also important for people to have, if they're not doing a hybrid component, to have a plan about what they would do virtually in a pinch to make sure that event occurs. I think that's another key consideration when it comes to safety.

Makes sense. You've got the seamless check-in, you've got the meetings or business cards going through the app. I guess now you just need those virtual handshakes and we're set, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then also you have AI, which is gonna be, you know, helping to manage some of the session control and then facial recognition. So we saw some big shows a year ago use facial recognition. Of course, there's security concerns there, so you need to make sure you have a secure platform, but we do expect that that will be an increasingly utilized way to welcome attendees at these events. So we're excited for all the technology innovation that's underway, and we have a couple of the largest partners in the world that we're working with directly on this. And so we have had a front row seat to much of the concerns that are underway with safety.

Super cool. I'm excited to see it as well, what kind of how it plays out. In terms of, you know, 'cause a lot of our listeners are SaaS founders or marketers, right? They're looking to maybe, or they're considering events, that was part of their marketing budget, going to events, maybe hosting an event. Would you say hosting a virtual or hybrid event is for every business? Because I know you work with a lot of enterprise clients, or how can you say a SaaS company start hosting a virtual event? Why should they consider organizing one?

Yes, so I do think it depends on what your goals are. I think we all agree that nothing beats the value of a face-to-face event, so we would say that The greatest way to get your constituents together is that way. But increasingly, we're gonna be leveraging virtual. I do think there are a number of reasons why your listeners would wanna consider getting an event or events on the calendar. I think the benefit of virtual is that you can reach a large part of your audience at once. You can do so on a budget that you couldn't before. And now with the capabilities that we've been describing, you can make it a far more enriching experience. So I think that the ability to monetize the event is important depending on what the goals of the organization are. We've talked about that. I think the way to make these events successful if you're an organization is first you need to have a platform that can handle what you're looking to do. So you need to have an understanding of how many people, how many event days, how many speakers, the type of interactivity you're going to have, and the features you need. So that's the first goal. The second is making sure you put together an agenda that makes sense for whatever your goals are. So you have to have the right interactivity of speakers, keynotes, gamification. You know, at our global kickoff, Akeel, a month ago, we had celebrity cameos. So every once in a while we would break in with a celebrity that was talking to us for a couple of minutes, and that was a great way to keep people engaged. Um, you have contests, you have polls, so you just need to have an interactive type of, um, way of connecting all of your attendees. And then, you know, the other part is the networking side too, which we described, is that when your attendees come to the show, they want to meet other people, and you need to make sure that you have networking tools that will benefit them overall. So we do recommend it, of course. We think that based on the fact that 1 out of every 5 marketing dollars goes toward events, which means it's a big business, it's, you know, it's a— some say it's a trillion-dollar market overall if you include all the different ways people are getting together, but We think it makes a lot of sense to engage in virtual and live event formats and just have it be a part of your marketing stack, especially given how noisy and crowded a lot of these marketing channels are these days. I mean, online marketing, pay-per-click, and all of that. For you to really engage leads that you want to engage with, we feel like the event is a great way to capture that.

Okay. So if I'm thinking of it from a marketer's perspective or founder, I've got a budget for leading events. And obviously at the end of the day, I'm gonna invest all this money into it. I have to think about ROI, just like you as a CEO, you think about all your investments. What, you know, tickets are being one way of kind of monetizing events, and you mentioned some other ways. Can you talk about what are some other ways to monetize or prove that ROI, or what are some clever ways that you've seen ROI has been proven at these virtual events so far?

Yes, so there's what's been done, there's sort of what's underway, and then there's a bit of a futuristic view of that as well. So you mentioned tickets, and obviously registrations is the old way to make money. But envision a world now where you could have 5,000 people at your live event and 500,000 people at your virtual event. That creates whole new opportunities for revenue from attendees. So that's the first side, is just global reach. And we've seen benefits of getting more attendees to an event because it's virtual. So there's that. The second way to monetize is through sponsorships. So that, there are a few ways to do that. One is by setting up virtual booths. So You can have sponsors that are paying real money in a virtual format at the show, and attendees are finding ways to video chat and engage with content from that virtual sponsor the way that they would at a live trade show or event. That's one way. The other is just pure sponsorship opportunities to monetize is that you're now providing access to banners, sponsored activities, this poll is sponsored by so-and-so, surveys that are running throughout the show. These are all things you can monetize for, uh, the large part of the market that is sponsorship revenue. Um, and then with that also, I think if you're engaging an all-in-one platform like an Eventree, you have access to very rich data that you can leverage in the future. So you know who went to that event, You know what they paid attention to, you know how much time they spent in that particular session. That data is stuff that you can leverage as a marketer in the future toward generating greater outcomes for your attendees. So we think that that's another big area of it. Now, the last frontier is content libraries, and this is where we're starting to look to the future a bit. You know, we envision a world of Netflix-type engagement with the content of events. So what you have today is kind of static content libraries, which is a virtual event allows you to access the content of that event during the event. You go back to your hotel room, for example, you can log into an event that took place that day. Great. What we're also seeing now, and something that we have in place, is we have a sort of instant enriched content library that is accessible for years after the event takes place. So now you have all this content at the touch of a button, What we're also envisioning in the future is that we start to aggregate all that content, turn it into a marketplace, or at least an area where people can consume that content, and then that may bring all sorts of new monetization capabilities in the future if you think about just the value of all these video platforms. The great thing about events is that the attendees are focusing generally on a very specific set of topics that therefore will have a very specific and interested set of, uh, users in the future that would like to consume it. So we're thinking about how we create that last area of the monetization, which is making the most of the content going forward.