An event management platform is software that runs a company's conferences, launches and webinars from start to finish: the registration, finding a venue, the app that attendees use at the event, and measuring who came and what they did. A webinar is a seminar or talk held online, which people watch live on a screen. Many platforms run in-person, online and hybrid events, where some people attend in person and others watch online.
It starts with registration. The company builds a registration page on the platform and sends the link to its customers. The invitations usually go out from B2B marketing automation software, which sends planned emails to business buyers. Each person who registers gets a ticket with a QR code. For an in-person event, the platform can also help find the venue, from a database of hotels and conference centres, with their halls, prices and dates.
On the day, the attendee app shows the agenda, the speakers and a map of the halls. Staff at the door scan each QR code, and a badge prints. At each session, a quick scan records who attended. At the stalls, the exhibitors scan the badges of visitors who want to be contacted. For a webinar, the platform streams the talk, and it records who joined, for how long, and which questions they asked.
Take, for example, a software company in Hyderabad that sells accounting software to small businesses. It holds a one-day customer conference for 1,200 people, and streams the main talks to another 3,000 people online. The platform shows the company that 1,050 of the 1,200 registered people came. It shows that 640 people attended the session on GST filing, and that 85 visitors asked to be called about a new product. Each attendee's record then goes to the company's customer relationship management (CRM) software, so the sales team can follow up. After the webinar, some platforms use an AI model to cut the recording into short clips and articles, to post later.
Why does the measuring matter? A conference can cost lakhs of rupees. The marketing team must show that it led to sales. With the attendance records in the CRM, it can show which deals began at the event. Working out which activity led to a sale is called marketing attribution.
The largest platforms also book the attendees' hotels and flights, through a corporate travel platform. Public events, such as concerts, are different: they sell tickets to the public through an online ticketing platform. An event platform runs a company's own events, for invited guests and customers. A meeting of ten colleagues needs neither; it runs on video conferencing software.