Editor’s note: This article was first published on Dec 2, 2020. Our Match 360° PRO solution now comes packaged with a Sponsorship module comprising Sponsorship Management (Tier-based segmentation) and Banner Ads (Header and In-Between Content). Click here to read more!

Overview

Throughout the entire year, our team has been keeping a close ear to the ground as well as studying the event engagement data to better understand how hybrid and virtual event formats can thrive successfully. One struggle that most event organisers face today is commercialising a completely new event experience.

The measurement of a Sponsor’s participation ROI at a virtual event is different from at an onsite event. The longer organisers take to bridge this gap and prove ROI in these new event formats, the more Stakeholders get unconvinced about their investments — which would eventually spell doom for our industry.

Having observed these developments across the gradual uptake of virtual (and now hybrid) event formats this year, we have released Match PRO as a premium user account for organisers to be equipped with the necessary ammunition needed to attract Exhibition and Sponsorship revenue dollars.

How It Works

Match PRO has everything that our basic Match users enjoy and love — including: the single sign-on user experience, the full mobile optimised platform view, our smart scheduler that deconflict non-mutual availabilities, the anti-spam chat messenger, not forgetting our proprietary 1-to-1 secure video calls etc.

An upgraded Match PRO account would include added advanced features that would be specifically granted to important Stakeholders only. Such as Exhibitors and Sponsors. I’ll be sharing just two features aimed at giving your VIPs more control on reaping good ROI from their event participation with you.

Virtual Booth

Selling exhibition booth space as well as attracting sponsorship dollars are two of the most common and direct ways that event organisers make money. For live events, this usually takes the form of purchasing physical spaces for participating companies to showcase products, arrange meetings at, as well as to attract walk-in enquiries from live attendee traffic on the show floor.

Match PRO was created to offer similar offerings — enhanced for the digital domain. In both live and hybrid events, our Virtual Booth offering runs complimentary to the physical booth at the show. This enables event attendees to maximise their business engagement across pre, during and (sometimes) post-event.

For fully virtual events, this offering takes center-stage. Organisers monetise packages by allocating a fixed number of “Reps” displayed under each booth depending on the investment sizes. Organisers can also limit the number of business meetings by participation tiers, as well as upgrade these limits on-demand.

Product Showcase

Buying, selling and discovering new products is one of the main reasons why trade shows are widely attended across every industry sector. A physical booth space at a traditional event would typically be filled with products to attract visitor foot traffic. This would be measured by the Exhibitor as participation ROI. For virtual events the ROI measurement is done differently.

Match PRO was built with the intention of giving organisers the ability to empower their Exhibitor customers by granting Virtual Booths and Rep profiles the ability to upload their own Product Media (i.e. image files or a video URL link). Packages are developed by the organiser to limit the number of Product Media uploads (e.g. Gold Exhibitor 10 Product Media Uploads, Silver Exhibitor 5 Product Media Uploads).

This has been a key feature in recent months because enabling Match PRO allows the participating companies to upload their own Product Media, hence fostering greater ownership from the exhibitors to take charge on reaping the maximum ROI from their investment with the event. This has taken a huge load off some event organisers who had been struggling before to collate and edit thousands of product images for their customers each time they put on a virtual trade show.

Speak to Us!

Since releasing Match PRO in mid Oct, we noticed a sharp increase in the number of business meetings arranged across all of our projects globally. Nov 2020 saw the highest number of meeting minutes via our platform — over 1,000,000 virtual meeting minutes — and the numbers continue to increase.

Match PRO provides stakeholders with a clear direction on how to reap participation ROI through the various abilities, especially with Virtual Booth and Product Showcase. It also greatly alleviates the burden that organisers face of having to meet the million on-going requests from stakeholders throughout their participation, by giving customers the ability to engineer their ROI themselves.

What do you think of Match PRO? What other features do you think would be useful to include in our next update? (p.s. Virtual Booth analytics are already in the pipeline). If you like to find out more about Match PRO, simply reach out to us anytime at info@jublia.com or talk to anyone from our team whom you’re already in contact with!