Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the first ever eventplanner partner and developer conference. We’re very happy you could join us today. But we’re also sad. Sad to be standing in front of an empty theatre. We would have loved to welcome you all in person. I’m quietly confident that that will soon be possible. But for now, we hope you are healthy and safe.
Bit by bit, the light at the end of these challenging times grows brighter. And with it, the hope of organising and experiencing live events again; our profession that we miss so much! When we do, eventplanner will be there to help our industry rebuild.
And that is what today is all about: to give you an update on our efforts to prepare our industry to thrive again, together. To showcase the tools and other innovations we have been building that will help you grow your business once again. Because here at eventplanner.net, we feel a deep responsibility towards our creative industry. And as a creative industry, I’m sure we’ll find a way to get through this.
People are crying out for the chance to gather together, to celebrate, to enjoy and simply to live life. Which is why it’s so inspiring to see how many of you are adapting to those needs: whether it be moving to virtual events, setting up vaccination centres or offering help to those in need.
We want to do the same here at eventplanner.net. And in that respect, we have a big announcement to make! To help event venues and suppliers get back on their feet, we will be making our technology available free of charge during the rebuilding of the events industry. To be more specific we’re offering a completely free upgrade of your business page to premium for the next six months. Which means you’ll have access to our large audience and all the tools to help you find new business. You’ll be able to post updates, cases and new initiatives and share them with our community. Because communication is now more important than ever. Of course, you’ll be free to downgrade back at any time. With no charge, and no hard feelings. Just add a reminder to your calendar before your subscription is renewed.
How do you get started? Use the voucher code 'REBUILD' when creating or upgrading your business page. To our loyal advertisers who already have a premium business page on our platform, we have reached out in a different way. Over the past few months, we've added a bunch of extra credits to your account which you can use, for example, to boost your posts.
Now, let’s take a look at what we’ve been doing at eventplanner.net over the past few months.
Instead of slowing down we’ve more than doubled our efforts to invest in our platform and community. Because in so doing, we believe we can make a difference. First of all, we have developed a brand-new eventplanner app. And here to tell you all about it is Stijn, our lead engineer who was responsible for building the app. Like you, Stijn has called in from his home office, since we are currently all working remotely.
Hi Kevin, thanks for inviting me. I’m happy to share some insights about the eventplanner app. The app is available for iOS and Android devices. Central to the app are the updates and posts that event businesses like yours share. In order to spread inspiration, ideas and stories. You can personalize your newsfeed by following, liking, and responding to posts. In short, the eventplanner.net app is the community for event planners in your pocket. On top of that, the app naturally offers super-fast access to the smartest search engine in the world for event venues and suppliers, including real reviews. You’ll also find a wealth of learning resources via the app such as editors articles, eventplanner.tv episodes and podcasts. With tips and advice on how to organise even better events with even more impact.
Thanks a lot for that, Stijn.
I should add the app is completely free and can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play.
It’s been three years since the last major update to our design. High time that we rolled out a new one. Especially given how quickly eventplanner.net has evolved during that time. And so, here to talk about the major makeover we’ve undertaken is our lead designer, Ethan.
Thanks, Kevin! I’m super excited to introduce our new design. As you know, our platform currently showcases more than 10,000 event companies and venues from around the world - a figure that continues to grow exponentially - as well as thousands of articles, posts, and videos... All of which can be a bit overwhelming for new visitors. Which is why we focused on feedback from user research to simplify the interface and help visitors find the content they need, faster. It’s a major makeover that will open up new ways for people to interact with our community. We’ve been adding so many new features to the platform over the past few years. So we decided to rethink every customer journey from scratch. To make the website as easy as possible to use, for both new and experienced users. You can already get a taste for our new UX design on the eventplanner.net homepage and article pages. Other pages will follow over the course of the next couple of months.
Thank you, Ethan! Great job! The new design is a huge leap forward in terms of user experience. Helping our members get even more exposure for their venues and services.
But it’s not just our technology that’s improving. We’ve also been investing in new inspiring content on eventplanner.net. With in-depth articles that focus, for example, on helping event planners cope with the pandemic by moving their events online.
Meet Veerle, one of our senior editors at eventplanner who has been instrumental in expanding our catalogue.
Thank you, Kevin. Well, as you know, ever since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve been crafting how-to articles on all kinds of things related to virtual event planning, including easy-to-use summaries of all the virtual event platforms that are out there. We also share inspiring and informative articles on, for example, how to organise safe events, rethink the promotion of your event and many other topics. At the same time, the eventplanner.tv team has been working on TV episodes and podcasts full of valuable insights and interviews with leading experts around the world. We’ve made all this content available for free on our website and in the eventplanner app. Thank you, Kevin. And back to you.
Thanks a lot, Veerle. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out some of those articles, videos and podcasts. And to help you find them all - and above all, to help our visitors find you! - we’ve just completed a major update to our search engine, the beating heart of our platform.
Our database is consulted over 250,000 times a month by event planners looking for the best venues and suppliers for their events. Making our search engine smarter and faster has always been one of our top priorities. This time we have comprehensively revised our 'region' search. To make it even easier to find event venues and suppliers near you or at the location of your event.
Helping our visitors find your event venue or business faster has a direct impact on growing your business. And it's now even easier to optimise your content and improve your ranking in order to attract more eyeballs via our search engine. By gathering reviews, attracting followers, publishing posts, using our widgets and keeping your business page up-to-date, you not only make your page more attractive for our community but also earn extra ranking points in the process.
So be sure to start using all the features our business pages have to offer and get ready for the new era in events.
Next up are posts. We've added the possibility to post content on our platform in 2019 and gave it a central role in our app. We love the way you use this feature to get in touch with our community. Seeing stunning event photos and stories in our feeds each day is truly inspiring. Publishing posts is super easy. Just log in to our platform and go to our homepage or your business page. With just a few clicks you can share your marvellous pictures and stories directly in the newsfeed of our users.
Every business page on our platform has the possibility to share a limited number of posts. Our premium members get unlimited access to this very powerful marketing channel. By inviting people to follow your page we make sure your customers see your stories on top of their newsfeed. In addition, our editing team selects the most inspiring posts each week to be included in our newsletter. So make sure you include some inspiring pictures to your post, to increase your chances of being selected!
New this year is the possibility to boost your posts. Sometimes you want to give your posts just that extra push and we’re happy to facilitate, starting from as little as 5 euros. Remember, we’ve added free credits to all our loyal advertisers’ accounts in order to try out this feature for free! And of course, you can find advanced analytics immediately below every post, so you can easily compare their organic and sponsored reach and engagement.
We’re also inviting developers to build upon our post sharing infrastructure by offering a wide range of API’s to publish or embed posts. Especially if you’re building social media publishing tools, feel free to get in touch. We would love our partners to be able to publish their posts with their favourite social media management tools.
Speaking of analytics. We have also built a completely new analytics engine powering a brand new KPI dashboard for our partners. It provides you with valuable insights into the performance of your business page based on big data and artificial intelligence. We collect data on all visitor interactions with your business page via a new state-of-the-art data warehouse. This allows us to process gigantic amounts of data while still guaranteeing the complete privacy of our users. All these data streams provide valuable insights, which we share with you, our members. And you get those insights into the reach and engagement of your posts in real-time, along with the number of likes, clicks, reviews and even widget views of your business page. You will also learn which keywords our visitors use to find your page, how the categories in which you are listed rank and which regions visitors come from.
All of this is just the beginning of a new wave of innovation. In the coming months and years, we will be adding more and more insights and functionalities into the KPI dashboard.
A new feature to help event planners scout venues safely and efficiently. We’ve also introduced 360° photography to our platform. Klaas will explain how it all works.
Thanks, Kevin. To make it easier for organisers to get a good impression of the venue even before they visit it, we are offering fully virtual site visits that use interactive 360-degree photography. By literally looking around, you can immediately imagine how your event would fit into that specific venue. The 360-degree photos are created by professional photographers, of course, and are then added to the venue’s business page. So when users find your page, and they do that via our brand-new search engine, they get all the details they need about your venue including photos, videos, reviews, posts and, of course, the new virtual tours. We find it important to help our users find the perfect location for their event or wedding quickly, efficiently and safely.
Thank you, Klaas!
And if you are interested in adding a virtual tour to your event venue page, just reach out!
One of the objectives of all these new features is to boost interaction on our platform and therefore visibility for you and your business. And one of the most effective forms of interaction is customer reviews.
Reviews have changed the way we book event venues and other event suppliers, just as they have with restaurants and hotels. But being able to collect real reviews is a hassle since many review platforms, including big ones like Google and Facebook, simply don’t have failsafes to make sure only your real customers are able to review your business.
That is why we have invested a lot of time and energy into developing a safe review platform. And with success! The good news is that Google even recognises our review platform, so eventplanner reviews will appear in Google search results as well.
Real reviews from real customers can give a huge boost to your online reputation and help your business kickstart when the event industry re-opens. At the risk of repeating ourselves, reviews really do make a difference and help businesses find new leads. But who better to explain the value of reviews than our partners themselves?
Hi, my name is Rutger Bremer and I'm the co-founder of Momice. And Momice is event-software for business events. I started working together with eventplanner to build my reputation for events. We asked all our clients to leave a review on the eventplanner review page. And that really helps us in the reputation. We got awarded for the eventplanner certificate of excellence, a few times. And those reviews really help potential clients to determine what to choose for. If they choose for Momice. So, I would really recommend to use this review widget of eventplanner. It really helps you in your reputation and your sales for your event services. Keep it up, Kevin, you're doing a great job. Bye.
Thanks for inviting us, Kevin. And: hi, all. I am Robin, project manager of event agency To The Point Events. And I have to be honest. Before we started using the eventplanner review platform, we weren't big believers in reviews for our industry. But working with it totally changed our minds. Reading the amazing reviews of our customers makes us proud and does help attract new ones. In the meantime, we even won the eventplanner certificate of excellence. We can only recommend other event businesses to do the same. And just start asking your customers for reviews on eventplanner.net.
You can even embed our review widget in your own website. To give your own visitors extra reasons to choose your company. All you have to do is copy-paste html code into your website. You’ll find the code by logging in to your eventplanner account. And if you want to take things a step further, you can even integrate full review capabilities into your own website by integrating our review API. You can find detailed instructions on how to implement the API at eventplanner.net/developers
Hi all, Antoine, developer at Coma and reputation partner of Beat the Barn. On request of Beat the Barn, we've implemented the eventplanner review API into their website. First of all: it went really smooth. The API is straight-forward and very easy to implement. In just half-a-day we were set. The major reason for Beat the Barn to choose for the eventplanner internet review system is the fact that it guarantees real reviews. Having them implemented to the Beat the Barn website has a significant impact on the conversion of the website. Visitors reading great reviews, which are confirmed by a trusted review platform, are nudged one step closer to choosing for the Beat the Barn teambuilding activities.
Also in the context of reviews, we’re currently reaching out to developers to expand our platform even further, by creating new and powerful applications. So stay tuned for future updates!
Of course, the end goal of all our efforts at eventplanner.net is to get more bookings for you, our valued members. A few years ago we launched our unique booking engine which makes it possible for organisers to get a fully tailored quote for their event instantly and even book an event venue, caterer or DJ in a few clicks.
Today we’re making the software completely free for all premium business pages. We will even waive the training costs. Just another way in which we are helping to rebuild the industry. Feel free to reach out to your eventplanner customer success manager to get this feature activated for you.
One more thing! Over the next few weeks, eventplanner.net will roll-out in several new regions in three new languages. Besides English and Dutch, we’ll be adding French, German and Spanish. With even more languages in the pipeline towards making eventplanner.net the global reference. By adding new markets and languages, we're also adding new avenues to grow your own business. Since many international companies will also find their way to your business page when organising events in your country. The good news is that we will make your business page available in all supported languages on all our websites at no additional cost whatsoever. All your posts and content will be automatically translated into all languages of our platform. And if you don’t like the automatic translation, you're also free to change it manually.
The vast majority of these new features are available today. And the best way to discover them is to start exploring our newly designed online and mobile platforms.
As well as helping you grow your business, our mission, at eventplanner, is to inspire you! I sincerely hope we’ve succeeded in doing that today.
Thank you all for joining us. Stay safe and take care of yourselves and your loved ones.
