Choosing an event tech partner saves your agency time, money, and stress when it comes to planning successful virtual and hybrid events for your clients.
As virtual and hybrid events become the norm, investing in event tech is an increasingly savvy move for the profit-minded agency. Existing software platforms that enable all the technical needs of your event, from registration to execution, are an easy way to take full advantage of this virtual moment in time without having to hire for new skills or divert from your own tech stack.
Partnering long-term can even ensure that an investment in event tech becomes an added source of revenue. Read on to discover the capabilities of using a dedicated event software for agencies, and the benefits of a long-term partnership.
Plus, find out how leading agencies are planning for the future of events and future-proofing their business.
What a Good Event Platform Provides
Every event agency and organizer wants to provide the best possible experience for their audience, and the platform you choose can make all the difference. The question on Bizzabo’s Enterprise Agency Sales Director Ryan O’Connell’s mind is: “How do you create content that’s going to engage people and convince them to spend their time with you when we sit in front of the screen more than ever?”
First, the platform should be content-driven, since—as we already know—content is king and queen. As was shared at Bizzabo’s (Almost) HYBRID event by several speakers, delivering relevant and engaging content to your participants makes it all the more likely they will engage and interact with your event. Any platform you choose to partner with should be able to not only stream your content, but host content, like recorded videos that attendees can consume in multiple ways.
Because event organizers find engagement to be one of the top challenges in hosting a virtual or hybrid event, the platform you choose to power it should have easy engagement opportunities built in. Tools like virtual polls or the capacity to support live Q&A are just a few of the ways your event can evolve past a simple webinar format.
Finally, since most event marketers are still struggling to drive value for sponsors, your platform should include purpose-built tools, like a sponsor management portal where sponsors are able to view and analyze return on event (ROE).
The Benefits of a Dedicated Events Platform
Once you find a platform that provides everything you need to run a successful virtual or hybrid event, there are even more benefits to sticking with that platform for all of your agency’s needs. Most importantly, it saves you a lot of time and energy. “Having everything in one place as opposed to multiple point solutions makes it a nice experience from the organizer side,” says Ryan. “And for example, with Bizzabo, if your agency or clients use Brightcove, YouTube, Vimeo, or another platform for streaming, we can work with you. We have the flexibility to fit into your tech stack.”
Cross-Event Analytics
If you produce multiple events - which many of us do - a dedicated platform can work well for you in terms of providing information to prove ROE to your clients. “You can see trends and measure the impact of one event over the other,” says Ryan. Having all the data in one place also allows you to easily visualize those trends.
Easily Rip and Replace
The central hub approach also saves you time by allowing you to template your work and replace design elements, text, and agenda components. “It’s your homebase,” says Ryan. “You’ll build out all your templates so you can clone them for the next project and easily customize.”
Engagement Opportunities
Recreating the fun experiences shared at in-person events is a notable challenge but a dedicated platform can provide account-based marketing insights to help you achieve those moments virtually. “You can see everything in our backend and then tailor the attendee journey based on our insights,” says Ryan. “So if they signed up for a ‘cocktail hour’ talk, we can send them a cocktail kit to their home.”
How You Profit From Investing in Event Tech
Partnering with an event tech platform has the potential to greatly reduce your agency's workload. It can also become a revenue stream for your company, “Business models have changed over the past year and the future of events is still to be determined,” says Ryan. “Investing in event tech is helpful to your model because we’re the ones making the investment in the product resources, and then making them available to your agency.”
Efficiency
It has been anticipated that budgets will continue tightening for all event organizers in 2021. By partnering with an event tech platform, you will help your agency optimize your production resources as efficiently as possible. “You’re using one solution versus having to purchase and learn many different tools,” says Ryan. “We’re enabling the resources you do have to be set up for success.”
Cost Savings
Purchasing a license for a platform is helpful to a one-off organizer for all the reasons listed above, but when applied to an agency the cost reduces with every use. “We’ve constructed a cost effective and frictionless licensing model specifically for our agency partners,” says Ryan. “And since many agencies are platform agnostic, we assign all of our agency customers a Bizzabo business partner resource to help flush out requirements, determine alignment with our platform vs. an alternative, and ultimately to help our agency customers win more business.”
Operational Savings
With a dedicated platform taking care of many of the new requirements to host a successful virtual or hybrid event, you don’t need to worry about weighing your team down with new requests. You also don’t have to hire additional talent to field issues that come up. Picking a partner, rather than a solution provider, creates that kind of relationship. “By picking a vendor that’s partnership-minded, agencies know that unnecessary work is not going to fall to their team,” says Ryan. “We like to think we’re an extension of their team, and therefore we provide them with the time and resources to support client events on the platform.”
Partnering Is Future-Proofing
Because the industry is still full of shifts and uncertainties, the ultimate benefit of investing in and partnering with a dedicated event tech platform is simply that you don’t need to navigate it alone.
“We have a team of people who, on a daily basis, think about what hybrid events will look like in the future, and build out products to support their findings” says Ryan. “We’ve learned to be flexible for the future so you don’t have to, because we’re invested in your success.”
As a recap, here are the key reasons your agency should invest in an event tech partner:
- A homebase for all your event needs
- Time-saving ability to create templates
- Increased engagement opportunities
- Cross-event analytics
- Increased efficiency for your team
- Cost savings per event
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