Top 7 Technology Tools for your Virtual Events

According to the CEO of 6Connex, Ruben Castano, the virtual event business grew by 1000% in just a few months. Transitioning to virtual events would have been a difficult choice for most companies if the pandemic had not caused any chaos. It would have otherwise been a gradual transition without the Covid 19 crisis. Now people are fleeing to host and attend virtual events for a variety of reasons. When social distancing is the key point to be kept in mind, virtual events reduce health concerns, reduce pollution, eliminate all travel costs as you sit at the comfort of your homes participating in the events. 

According to Markletic, 87% of marketers consider the opportunities generated by virtual events as a success factor. Thus, the event industry is busy hosting virtual and hybrid events, and people are quickly accommodating to the advancements in virtual workflow environments.

Also, your virtual event budgets will typically vary from a regular in-person event. While virtual events spend almost 75% of the budget on technology and the remaining 25% on other factors like staffing and speakers, this ratio is vice versa for in-person events. When considering virtual events, more than half of your budget is only spent on technology and tools. 

38% of marketers say they run into technical problems when hosting virtual events. The success of every virtual event lies in sorting all these technical issues. When you spend the most budget on technology, you need to know what tools are best for your virtual events. Here is a guide on 7 must-have technology tools for virtual events.

Build a dedicated event website when hosting an online event. It increases the value of your event and creates a sense of realness to the virtual events in the digital atmosphere. You can build the brand and fill in potential attendees for the particular event you host, keeping everyone on the same page. Your attendees may miss watching their emails or social media tabs. So try building a website. Build a website with minimal coding to ensure the website is complete within minutes. You can use Elementor which includes full access to the design features you require. 

When and Where: Your website will give people an idea of where and when to attend your event. You can also show the importance of your event and tell them why they should attend your event. Clearly describe what people get when participating in your event.

On a Page: When there are numerous social media channels, an event website keeps everyone on the same page. A few miss to open their emails or review their notifications. Instead, the website page would remain their common page. 

Complete branding: Clear branding stays in the heart of the people. They create an impact, and the event itself can be the primary brand. But in many cases, the prominent branding will either be the company or the organization hosting the virtual program. 

Event title: Choose a title that kindles your audience to participate in the event. Make it simple such that the topic clarifies the event topic or goal. It is also better to conceive a hashtag and highlight it in the right place on the website.

Call to action and Registration: Have ample call to action for your guests or visitors and let them become registered attendees. Let the CTA be prominent to encourage clicks. With the CTA, include photos that you feel are the essence of your event and soothe people’s expectations with the images you show.

Testimonials: If you have presented a series of events, add testimonials from happy attendees. Include all your cheerful post-event surveys and feedback. You can also have them on your social media pages.

At long last, some virtual event management platforms have risen above the competition and are beginning to gain serious attention in the world of events. These platforms have distinct advantages in the event management industry, and it can be hard to choose one that fits your needs. There are a number of challenges that come with hosting virtual events, but as long as you know what they are and how to overcome them, you’ll find hosting virtual events much easier.

Often, when you’re looking for an event management platform for a virtual or hybrid event, you’ll be presented with platforms that offer integrated collaboration tools, sophisticated event templates, and even whiteboard-based office space. The reason is that when people are involved in a virtual or hybrid event, they might be on the other side of the world. In those instances, it’s critical they interact with you and other people in a synchronous manner, as they need to be able to see you and your team.

Setting up virtual events requires some planning and patience on the part of the event organizer, who has to be flexible and ready to improvise on the fly. The main challenge is that everyone needs to be on the same page: your clients have expectations about being physically present, and you need to honor those expectations when you’re online. Your team has to understand why things have to go on without you being physically present.

Some successful virtual events have used everything from real-time video conferencing to augmented reality to augment in ways that allow everyone to be present.

Registering people to a virtual event is the most crucial part. You need to remove all hindrances and make your tickets readily available for online ticketing. Attendees ending up in a virtual event always expect the registering process to be smooth, flawless, minimal time consuming, transparent, and secure (their information and payment details). Otherwise, the attendees would fail to join the virtual event for the other hardship in the registering platform. Thus they need to end up with a platform where your people need not work too hard to purchase tickets.

The event organizers will always want to know if they have reached the exact target audience by collecting essential data that can help you realign your marketing strategies and improve your event offerings. The ticketing and registration platform allows event organizers to start collecting revenue immediately, and this amount can be used to organize the event more effectively.

The flexibility of an event being live or recorded makes it convenient for users, but then comes the question of how the event is being captured. Modern-day technology allows any layman to capture anything of their desire. To keep holding the attendees to the final minute of the event, it is not only essential for the event to be lively and interactive, but the audio and video quality is equally important. So dedicating your efforts to the quality of audio and video of the event is the best way to make it pleasing to the attendees enabling them to watch it without any break. An event with a good streaming quality requires the following essential hardware equipment to capture it.

• Professional camera (for some users, even a mobile camera suffices the need)
• Camera holders or tripods
• Moving rails (where an event has moving elements to be captured)
• Lighting (artificial or natural)
• Instead of going with a risky resource management process for capturing the event, some event organizers hire a professional video capturing team to bring out the event in the best possible way.

Also, let us discuss the quality of the audio/ video of the attendees. Nothing is as disgusting as horrible audio and video feed. Most of them may not be audio/video experts but remember that we do not have to be. For a virtual event, take responsibility to ensure that each presenter has access to a basic digital video camera and some lighting. You can take a step ahead by running a trial with each participant to ensure that their camera, lighting, and audio clarity are good enough. Rent equipment if any of these elements are lacking and send it to the participant during the event. Also, noise-canceling apps can be used to eliminate all background noises allowing people to communicate efficiently.

One aspect that is the essence of live event organizing technology is Wi-Fi. And remember, the worst of all is to have a bad or weak Wi-Fi connection. The attendees in that virtual event will stay no longer when the event starts to break due to weak Wi-Fi. 

When the presenter or speaker is remote, ensuring his WI-Fi reliability for the event to run smoothly is also crucial. A secured, fast and reliable Wi-Fi at the event commanding centre is of utmost importance for virtual events.

The online events conducted can be live-streamed entirely or in part. You need a platform to get the virtual events telecasted. There are several online streaming platforms, and you need to choose the best one according to your needs. 

Some organizers need a full-time, completely flexible, and modifiable streaming software tool that tailors to their specific use. But not everyone would need a full-scale streaming software tool; instead, they end up using various social media handles to reach the target audience in a cost effective way.

For a proper live-streaming event, you need to gather your attendees to the live-streaming application. 

Various live-streaming platforms include

• Facebook Live
• Periscope
• YouTube Live
• Twitch
• Streamlabs OBS
• Switchboard Live

How do you get the maximum registrations?

If you cannot attract a considerable number of audiences, then the virtual event is a failure. Never let that happen. Let us build a robust, solid event marketing and promoting strategy.  Choose a virtual event platform that can manage all your marketing and hosting needs. The event marketing software should offer you email campaigns, paid ads, and social media posts. Ensure to track email open rates, send reminders and run A/B tests. 

Apart from these features, as already mentioned, the software should help you design a branded website exclusively for the event, integrate it with social media platforms, offer email templates, and referral incentives. There are a number of virtual event hosting platforms available in the market that suits all your needs. To mention a few, Accelevents, vFairs, Zoom, GoToWebminar, and Eventcube. Dive into these platforms, and measure the size of your event to analyze which one fits your needs.

Without captions for your event, all these above tools are obsolete. There is a steady increase in the number of audiences attending an online event, and they are expecting a virtually refreshing experience. To satisfy them, the event should be engaging; to make your event engaging, it needs to be accessible, especially to the hard-of-hearing audience, ESL speakers, and people who consider language as a barrier to skipping the event.

At CaptioningStar, we offer premium quality captions which is the utmost requirement of a live event or a pre-recorded session. We guarantee to employ certified linguistics to offer translations. We also seamlessly integrate with all the widely used event management and live-streaming platforms to deliver you the finest captions with over 99%accuracy.  Captions for live events sync with the audio with a 2-5 seconds time delay. Absolute sync is assured for pre-recorded videos. Contact us immediately to host your virtual events successfully.