eBizStart is a yearly event hosted by E3Hubs that serves as a platform for startups, entrepreneurs, business owners, and SMEs to showcase their businesses, products, and services; create business opportunities, particularly cross-border business opportunities and partnerships; learn and gain knowledge together, and expand their business network. Boom Malaysia was one of the event platform solutions powering this event.
The fundamental objective of eBizStart is to be a business facilitator that connects enterprises to markets, relationships, and opportunities, allowing them to expand and expedite their businesses. The objective is to make a difference in people's lives by bringing entrepreneurship into the mainstream.
This aligns with E3Hubs' Big Vision, which is to create 1,000,000 successful growth entrepreneurs by 2030. The flagship platform, BizStart, brings together entrepreneurs, firms, government, academics, trainers, business networks, and influencers in the spirit of entrepreneurship fraternity, cooperation, and collaboration. This year's eBizStart virtual event saw droves of entrepreneurs looking to connect and network due to the Covid-19 Pandemic wreaking havoc on businesses involved with events in Malaysia and countries all over the world. Enterprises, particularly small businesses in Malaysia and those directly affected by the Covid-19 Pandemic, are also impacted, and a circle of support by others going through the same issues is always welcome.
eBizStart 2021 was based on four (4) themes; #entrepreneurssupportentrepreneurs, #digitaltechnologyworld, #businessgrowth, and #futurelandscape.
Parties that can join eBIZSTART include startups that have completed their MVP and are ready to commercialize or scale up and startups that want to penetrate or expand into South East Asian markets. Startups in the tech sector and startups in non-tech sectors are both eligible to join.
The event garnered a huge turn up, with good traction throughout its span and participants actively engaging in the barrage of activities, discussions and initiatives available. Even if you were quite new to virtual events, this platform felt easy to navigate and engaging in terms of structure.
Let’s delve into a short case study of eBIZSTART 2021 to see what the event organizers did right in developing this massive virtual event as well as what the participants thought of the entire project.
As a large virtual event, eBIZSTART 2021 was designed to roughly emulate a traditional or physical expo, but with innovation, flexibility and added convenience added to the mix. Participants comprised mostly visitors and exhibitors, followed by speakers and sponsors who were all free to explore the different components built into the event platform.
The platform itself included a general area, where attendees could network with each other as well as find business directories and listings of all the available exhibitors and channels. There was also a VIP Lounge, a standard area seen in most physical events.
Next, the virtual exhibition space was broken into private rooms, breakout rooms for 1 on 1 discussions, a general chat box for enquiries and a video introduction that contained briefings and explanations related to the event. There was also an appointment scheduling feature that allowed people to set their meetings in advance based on who they wanted to talk to and what they were interested in.
The business channels functioned as a direct link to actual exhibitors and businesses. It was where a good bulk of the action took place, with conferences, business clinics and seminars being held on the regular, as well as workshops and training channels that offered value in the form of educating interested visitors on various topics.
Of course, exhibitor and sponsor channels were situated in this section so that visitors could browse through the many interesting products and services being showcased in the event.
One thing to take away is that familiarity can be a powerful tool for designing virtual events, especially large ones that entail B2B elements. Physical exhibitions are structured a certain way, and most people understand how they work because they have attended them before. In order to make the concept of a virtual event easier to grasp, it’s best to simulate as much of the structure from physical events as possible, since people understand them.
A huge factor to virtual event success is tied to the seamless efficiency that you must achieve in terms of technical expertise. Virtual features can be difficult to pull off, especially if you are lacking quality in regards to the platform and hosting capabilities used.
Fortunately, eBIZSTART 2021 collaborated with strong platform partners to make sure their event went as smoothly as possible. Connectivity was strong, accessing the different sections of the event was easy and streaming was fast enough that attendees could enjoy their experience without much disruption.
Here are a few of the value offerings from eBIZSTART 2021 that attracts participants to join:
Live broadcasts, seminars, workshops, business matching, networking events, and exhibitions were all incorporated into eBizStart 2021, bringing a wealth of interactivity to a virtual events landscape.
With attendees being from all around the globe, the ability to access the event anywhere at any time is now a reality.
With an internet connection as your passport, you can showcase your company and network on a global scale, opening up markets you previously thought were inaccessible due to geographical challenges.
eBizStart 2021 Masterclasses comprises a compilation of Masterclass Workshops produced in collaboration with training partners. All sessions are led by carefully selected trainers who will share their expertise, knowledge, experience, and insights with the entrepreneurs in attendance. Modules are focused on a vast array of skills and topics including leadership, entrepreneurship, digital marketing and branding.
According to an event report, 83% of participants enjoyed the channel live and recording feature. This indicates that people are prone to find events more appealing when they offer more interactivity. Live streaming from exhibitors also scored a 50% from participants, while exhibitor rooms scored 40% on the scale.
70% of the responding participants enjoyed the 24 hour access to the event, since eBIZSTART 2021 allowed visitors to enter at any given time of the day for as long as the event is still running. What's more, the event was free for visitors to enter, which is why 83% of them listed this factor as the reason they liked eBIZSTART 2021. This points to the factor of accessibility being crucial to event success.
56% of participants rated channel content at 17 (from a scale of 0-20)
46% of participants rated the speakers in general at 14 (from a scale of 0-15)
43% of participants rated the event platform in general at 13 (from a scale of 0-15)
43% of participants rated exhibitors in general at 13 (from a scale of 0-15)
46% of participants rated event organization at 14 while 43% rated it at 13 (from a scale of 0-15)
A majority of the responding participants ranked all these factors at the high end of the scoring spectrum, which indicates good satisfaction with how the entire event was run.
Based on the survey, a large majority of the respondents (81.7%) found the event so enjoyable that they already expressed anticipation for eBizStart 2022.
Hopefully this case study can shed some light on the inner workings of a successful virtual event, and can offer you some insight on the various factors involved in organizing productive events for upcoming endeavors.
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Boom is an online event platform offered to anyone or any business, a stage to showcase and sell their products live to event attendees.
Learn more at: https://boom.rocks/
