While lockdowns drove events virtual, it also accelerated the acceptance of online events. This is important for companies to recognize. While in-person events will likely return as a critical sales and marketing channel for companies, it’s also likely that virtual events will continue to be acceptable and become a key channel as well.
While typical virtual meeting platforms offer a tool that can be implemented to have a single meeting or webinars, those tools fall short of providing an overall platform that encompasses all of the features of a virtual conference. My good friend Jack Klemeyer shared a tool that his coaching company has been utilizing to switch from an annual in-person conference to a virtual one… Hopin.
Hopin: The Virtual Venue For All Your Events
Hopin is a virtual venue with multiple interactive areas that are optimized for connecting and engaging. Attendees can move in and out of rooms just like an in-person event and enjoy the content and connections you’ve created for them.
Hopin is designed to replicate an in-person event experience, only without the barriers of travel, venues, weather, awkward wandering, parking, and so on. With Hopin, businesses, communities, and organizations can reach their global audiences, gather in one place, and make an enormous online event feel small again.
Hopin features include
- Event Schedule – what’s happening, when, and which segment to follow.
- Reception – a welcome page or lobby of your event. Here you can quickly find out what’s happening at the event currently.
- Stage – up to 100,000 attendees can attend your presentations or keynotes. Broadcast live, play pre-recorded content, or stream via RTMP.
- Sessions – up to 20 attendees can be on one screen with hundreds of attendees watching and chatting in unlimited sessions that can run simultaneously. Perfect for roundtables, projects, or group discussions.
- Speakers List – promote who is speaking at the event.
- Networking – automated one-on-one meeting capabilities to enable two attendees, speakers, or vendors to have a video call.
- Chat – event chat, stage chat, session chats, booth chats, meeting chats, backstage chats, and direct messages are all incorporated. Messages from organizers can be pinned and are highlighted for easy identification from the attendees.
- Exhibitor Booths – incorporate sponsor and partner vendor booths where event-goers can walk around to visit the booths that interest them, interact with the vendors, and take action. Each booth at your event can contain live video, branded content, Twitter links, pre-recorded videos, special offers, salespeople on live camera, and customized button CTAs.
- Sponsor logos – clickable logos that bring visitors to your sponsors’ websites.
- Ticket Sales – integrated ticketing and payment processing with a Stripe merchant account.
- Shortened URLs – give attendees one-click entrance into any part of an event on Hopin.
Hopin is an all-in-one event platform optimized for connecting your speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Organizers can achieve the same goals of their offline events by customizing their Hopin events to fit the requirements, whether it’s a 50-person recruiting event, a 500-person all-hands meeting, or a 50,000-person annual conference.
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