Whether you’re in HR, Marketing or Sales, there are several ways you can leverage virtual events within your organization to drive business success. By going with an all-in-one streaming product, rather than trying to combine multiple audio, video, and web content applications to host a broadcast, organizers can enjoy the flexibility of using a single solution for many event types and purposes.

Virtual events allow presenters and attendees to connect in any public or private forum. Here are a few of the main ways we’re seeing customers using our BlueJeans Events platform to help scale their business:

Marketing Webinars (External)
For the purposes of product launches, thought leadership, and customer advocacy, these types of virtual events allow organizations to connect with business prospects. Often one hour or less in length, marketing webinars generate interest in a product, service, or industry topic. Typically, presentations involve two or more on-camera speakers and a slide show with content regarding their field of knowledge or product-specific information. There are opportunities to engage audience members though chat, Q&A, and polling — all valuable tools for subject clarification and lead nurturing.

Virtual Conferences & Trade Shows (External)
Also intended to capture the interest of customers and prospects, these online exhibitions showcase multiple product and service offerings from an assortment of industry-specific brands. In some instances, a single entity will host user conferences or “summit” aimed at educating their customers and partners on best practices. These can include multiple keynote speakers, workshops, and training sessions. Live video streaming allows these trade shows to display physical and software-based demonstrations with interaction between audience members and brand representatives.

Graduation Commencement (External)
Given the travel challenges and physical limitations for some, hosting virtual graduation commencements is a great alternative. Universities and high schools opt for a live video stream to connect the graduating class with friends and family across the world. For large institutions, there are typically two types of commencements: Entire university versus individual college departments. Leading virtual events solutions support up to 150 camera feeds and 50,000 attendees in a single broadcast. For example, multiple on-camera presenters can include: The university president, valedictorians, famous alumni, emeritus members, donors, advocates, and celebrity guests. Graduating students can also appear on camera as presenters and get demoted to an attendee as moderators control the roll call. This method is recommended for smaller college departments rather than large all-university addresses.

All-Hands and Town Halls (Internal)
As the number of dispersed office locations as well as remote employees increase, there’s demand for more inclusive and engaging all-hands meetings that allow participants to interact with executive teams. Virtual events for all-hands, also known as town halls, allow corporate leaders to effectively communicate strategic vision, deliver business updates, celebrate milestones, and respond to real-time questions from employees. This level of top-down transparency is critical for business culture and solidarity by bringing the entire workforce into the same digital ‘auditorium.’ Using live video Q&A with attendee the ‘raise hand’ feature, chat, and multi-presenter video streams aligns organizations and reduces logistical limitation of in-person events.

Virtual Learning (Internal)
Online education has become a staple of academic institutions across the world as students are given the option to take classes virtually. Additionally, virtual events have grown in popularity with business enterprises that need to train large groups of knowledge workers. Sales enablement is one example of internal video streaming that’s used to impart product knowledge to customer-facing teams. Whether deploying virtual events for students and instructors, or to bring internal participants up to speed on a given subject, using a scalable, interactive video platform conveniently connects users from anywhere. The best vendors in this market offer an ‘engagement index’ that calculates attendee attentiveness based on duration and participation. Once an event ends, organizers get these attendee scores in a summary email so they can determine their influence and modify the presentation in the future to optimize content delivery.

To learn more about hosting virtual events, check out our Complete Guide to Virtual Events and download your free trial of BlueJeans Events today!