Events are becoming top priority for marketers with the event industry expected to grow at a rate of 20-30% annually. PR events, business seminars, corporate events, online events and online webinars have slowly become the need of all business kinds and technology is changing the way events used to happen in the past.
A report by Harvard Business Review surveyed some of the top players from all over the world to understand how technology is impacting the event industry.
The report points out certain trends and behaviours that have emerged lately with technology disrupting and intervening the event planning and management.
Some key insights are listed below:
Contrary to the usual belief that technology in communication would reduce the popularity of face-to-face events, it is ironic to see how the same technology is helping the event sector boom. When talking to some of the event planners and organisers on the challenges they face, use of technology is one of the critical steps in overcoming some of the biggest challenges, they answered.
From social media to email marketing tools to various all-in-one event marketing tools to wearable tech-sensors, there is a lesser known and relatively newer technology out there in the market that the event organisers and planners must check out.
Like any organisation or firm, the ultimate objective of event companies remains the higher success rate of their events which can be measured by taking into consideration three key metrics – a steady increase in the footfall & participation rate, wide reach or visibility of the events and higher attendee-satisfaction.
Attendee Satisfaction is crucial for any event company to thrive in the existing market and one of the ways event companies pursue this is by issuing certificates of participation or appreciation or digital badges to all the attendees with an aim to instil a sense of achievement and pride in them. However, it is a painstaking task involving a lot of manual effort like creating certificates for each attendee, getting them printed or making pdfs and sending them individually via emails.
“Post event, we were bombarded with calls from our attendees for their participation certificates and this was so much work and usually took a lot of time. There were also times when we had to repeat the entire process from scratch because there were spelling errors, etc; the workload always exacerbated the quality and the anxiety. Things have drastically improved with ValidateMe. It is the best badge creator and online certificate maker, ” says Nikhita, Event Relationship Manager, ScooNews (an education-centric media firm based out in Jaipur).
What is ValidateMe?
A SaaS-based platform to create and issue tamper-proof, portable, instantly-shareable certificates and credentials in bulk. The certificates issued through ValidateMe become marketing tools for the issuing organisation.
Covering All The 3 Key Metrics, How Digital Credentials, Certificates and Badges Have Increased the Success Rate of Event Companies
Metric 1: Increased attendee satisfaction
The software allows creation and bulk issuance of certificates with a few clicks. Attendees can instantly share their certificates on their LinkedIn profile, Facebook feed, etc, and take pride in the fact.
Using the ValidateMe platform, event companies can issue certificates to bulk participants with just a few clicks. They can upload their own template or choose a high quality certificate template from ValidateMe’s qualitatively-populated template library. In case of any spelling error in the certificates, the platform allows retroactive editing. The platform is not just minimising the load and the woes of the issuer but also increasing the attendee satisfaction with quick delivery of certificates. These certificates can be instantly shared by the recipients on multiple social media platforms and are integrated with LinkedIn. Attendees can proudly share their achievements, i.e. their certificates on their LinkedIn profile, facebook feed, twitter, etc, at one click. All these lead to what makes an event successful, i.e. – great attendee experience and higher attendee-satisfaction rate.
Metric 2: Higher reach of the event & increased visibility
With the instant shareability feature, thousands of attendees can share their certificates on social media, which will also include event companies’ logo and referral link leading to higher event reach and great event marketing.
The certificates issued to participants land in participants’ OTP-backed digital wallet auto-created by ValidateMe whenever any document is issued to an individual for the first time. If issued through ValidateMe, people will receive all their documents & credentials in the same wallet no matter who the issuing organisation is. The wallet keeps all the issued certificates and documents in one place and these are saved for life. It’s called the Edulocker. It allows participants to share their certificates to different social media handles, including linkedIn, twitter, Instagram, facebook, etc, at a click. With attendees sharing their certificates on social media and the latter being the best at increasing the visibility, event companies can observe a higher reach and word of mouth.
Note: The certificates would have the organisations’ logo, signature, etc.
Metric 3: Increase in participation rate of the physical and the virtual event
With referral links attached to the attendees certificates, bulk social media sharing will lead to huge traffic on the event companies’ landing pages and consequently, more interested participants. The analytics feature gives some key insights to further formulate the event planners growth strategies.
The final and the most important key metric that really matters in the end in the substantial increase in the footfall of the event. ValidateMe allows its users to share their certificates on social media that has an embedded referral link to the landing page or the website or any other CTA of the event company and not only this, they can also write a few lines about the event, share a successful event message, etc. Event companies have landing pages that talk about all the upcoming events, therefore, a huge number of people will get access to those landing pages through existing attendees bulk social media shares.This enables event companies to get massive traffic back to their landing page, high quality leads and more number of interested participants. This acts as a great marketing tool.
The tracking and social media analytics feature help the event companies know how many recipients opened their certificates, shared it on social media and to be able to identify which platform is bringing the most traffic. It helps them formulate strategies for successful event planning and pushes them to become one of the top event management companies in India.
The ValidateMe platform has APIs that can be integrated into the existing CRMs and solutions of the event companies. It also offers white labelling. This technology is helping small and medium event companies who are looking for solutions and events idea (ideas) on how to promote their events and become a market leader in the sector.
