Zoom is one of the most popular tools for virtual events and online meetings. Let's take a look at the tools that can make organizing your Zoom events much easier, and at the same time, help you enhance the attendee experience.
There is no doubt that in the era of social distancing and digital communication, Zoom has become one of the most popular tools for organizing virtual events. Nevertheless, Zoom alone does not provide all features you need to organize a successful event, and therefore, you should consider using third-party services that will solve different event's needs. In combination with the right tools, you can make organizing virtual events much easier, and at the same time, enhance the attendee experience.
This article provides a list of 14+ tools you can integrate with different Zoom solutions or use along with Zoom to take your virtual events to the next level. Let's look at them from 4 different event stages - planning the event, marketing and sales, event engagement, and post-event.
Planning an event is not a simple task that happens overnight, on the contrary, it is the most time-consuming part of the event, which is crucial for your event success. It requires thorough preparations, most of the time a year or even more in advance, depending on the size of the event. It is very hard to keep not just yourself, but also all your team members on track and motivated during this first stage. Luckily there are tons of tools and services you can use with Zoom to ease the pains of managing complex tasks and also your teams.
Trello is a project management tool that gives you a clear overview of all the tasks, from the bigger picture to the detail of each task. It works based on the Kanban method, which aims to help you visualize the whole process through different stages of completing a task (e.g. to do > in progress > done). This method keeps you organized and leads to efficiency by improving the motivation of each member of the team.
The integration of Trello with Zoom allows you to manage tasks across those two tools - create new cards, write comments, search for cards, show card details, etc. All through slash commands (/tr) in Zoom chat.
Similar tools to Trello, which you can integrate with Zoom: Asana, Jira, Monday, etc.
Effective communication in a team is key for successful event planning. Slack is a market-leading tool for team communication and collaboration, which allows you to create different channels for each of your fields, teams, topics, etc., so you have everything in one place.
Again, this integration works through slash commands (/zoom), which triggers different actions - start/join a meeting, see the detail of the meeting, or even start a call right in the Slack channel with a single click. You can also very easily share meeting summaries or recordings with your team right after the meeting has ended.
Calendly is a tool that helps you schedule your Zoom meetings with your team. Zoom supports many other scheduling tools besides Calendly, like Google Calendar, Woven Calendar, Sprintful, etc.
Whenever you create a Zoom meeting, Calendly automatically adds an event to your events schedule along with all the meeting information. It also takes care of the reminders, so everyone will be prepared for your meetings.
Zapier is a workflow automation platform that connects two or more apps through Zapps, which consist of a trigger on one app and a trigger action on another app. It provides a list of more than 3 000 apps you can connect with Zoom to extend its functionality and automate your workflow during event planning.
Explore apps that work with Zapier here.
Marketing is playing an important role in monetizing your event. Using an effective and coherent marketing strategy will help you reach a wide audience and boost your ticket sales.
Eventbrite is one of the most popular event management and ticket selling platforms. It is a place where you can create, sell or promote your events. Eventbrite charges a fee for every event that sells tickets. If you are holding your event free, the platform will be free as well!
The integration of Eventbrite with Zoom helps you monetize your online events. It allows you to synchronize your event information, improve attendees' experience by providing an events page, and even sends event reminders to your attendees via automated emails.
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that helps you create, edit and send targeted bulk emails. It has a simple editor and a bunch of pre-designed templates, which will make your emails look professional without giving bigger effort.
Integrate Mailchimp with your Zoom account and share your campaign report in the Zoom chat to keep everyone on track with your email performance. Thanks to the data synchronization, you can easily start or schedule a meeting with your Mailchimp contacts. Email campaigns are also a great way how to reach out to your attendees after your event has ended.
Social media has become part of our everyday lives and we can hardly imagine what the world would look like without them. For event organizers, it means an opportunity to effortlessly reach a wide audience with their campaigns that will spread the word about the upcoming event and support ticket sales.
Hootsuite is a leading social media management platform, which provides tools that help you with your social media marketing - from creating and sharing content, to engagement, advertisement, monitoring competitors, and posts evaluation.
There are many tools available on the market that provide features for social media content management, popular alternatives to Hootsuite are Buffer and Sprout Social.
Canva is a popular graphic design platform that lets you create beautiful visual content that captures your attendee's attention. The wide range of templates (including Zoom backgrounds) and easy editor make creating any design with Canva fast and effortless.
Zoom allows you to use your own images and videos as your background during your streamed sessions. You can take advantage of this feature to promote your event sponsors, brand your streams or display important information right in front of your attendees' eyes.
The struggle is real! Engaging attendees during virtual events is much harder than during events that are hosted in-person. Attendees who physically attend an event, see speakers, and interact with other people at the venue personally, are usually more focused on the event's content. Virtual events, on the other hand, have to compete for attendees' attention all the time, as many outer elements (like digital ads, social media notifications, or even household chores, funny cat's videos on YouTube, or snacks in the cupboard!) are attacking users attention from every corner when they attend events online and comfortably from their homes.
The easiest way to engage attendees is to use an event app. Eventee is an event tool, which does not just help you with attendee engagement, but also with your event management and enhancing the overall event experience. Take advantage of the powerful features, like agenda, live questions&polls, networking, newsfeed, analytics, real-time updates, and much more.
As one of the very few event tool solutions on the market, Eventee provides event organizers with an event homepage, web app, and mobile app for one price. Your attendees can join your event anywhere and still enjoy all Eventee features and the easy-to-use user interface.
The native integration with Zoom allows your attendees to watch your live streams while having all the important information in one place and engage effortlessly via mobile or web app at the same time.
Allowing attendees to contribute to your content is, no doubt, an effective way to help them better connect with your event. Otter.ai is an interactive live transcription tool that creates notes out of your audio (English-only), so your attendees don't have to care about taking notes and fully concentrate on your content. During the live transcription, attendees can highlight, comment, or add photos and contribute to collaborative session notes. This tool is suitable for smaller group sessions, like workshops, educational gatherings, or other similar small event use cases.
Otter.ai can also be used during meetings with your team to create collaborative meeting notes. The convenience of not having to take notes and still be able to get back to each of the tasks, agreements, or other details later, is simply priceless.
Forget about dull presentations - give your online event sessions a bit of spice with Prezi Video. Prezi is a platform for creating attention-grabbing presentations with moving elements and zooming in and out effects. Prezi Video is a Prezi tool for video conferencing. It allows you to share your Prezi presentation right beside you as you stream while you can easily switch the views and navigate through your presentation content.
The mistake that event producers often do, is that they don't care much about the post-event phase, which makes them lose a lot of opportunities they could have used to elevate the overall event experience.
There is one thing you need to always keep in mind - the event experience does not end with the last session of your event!
Hubspot is a CRM platform that can help you build stronger relationships with your attendees. By integrating Hubspot with Zoom, you are able to reach out to your attendees not just before the event but also after your event ends. Whenever attendees register for your event, they will automatically appear in Hubspot as your contacts. With Hubspot you can also track the activity on your event. See when attendees join your event and how long did they stay.
YouTube is the most popular video-sharing platform you can stream your Zoom sessions from. The integration of Zoom with Splain.io lets you connect Zoom and YouTube on a higher level. Splain.io will automatically upload your Zoom recordings to your YouTube account. You can easily re-use your content for different marketing practices from there and start a video marketing campaign right away.
SurveyMonkey is a leading online survey platform. Thanks to available templates and sample survey questions, creating surveys will be just a piece of cake. Surveys are powerful tools that provide you with data and insights. This helps you identify your weaknesses/strengths and improve your future events. Integrate SurveyMonkey with your Zoom chat, so you can easily create, share and manage your surveys from the chat channel.
Zoom allows you to add a post-webinar survey, which will open whenever an attendee leaves the session. Take advantage of this possibility to collect attendees feedback and evaluate your event. You just need to insert the URL of your survey platform into Zoom. This way you can use whatever survey service you prefer, like Google Forms, Survio, or any other platforms.
