Category Archives: Customer Data Platform

Top 40 Live Chat Benefits You Need to Know

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Arena Live Chat is one of the most powerful live chat platforms on the market. If you’re undecided on whether to try it, you might not know about the benefits.

Top 40 Live Chat Benefits

1) Increase sales

There’s a saying in sales: the confused mind does not buy. When customers have questions or doubts, they are less likely to buy.  With Arena Live Chat on your website, you can make it easy for customers to get answers about potential purchases. By providing quick answers to interested customers, you can earn more sales.

2) Build a community of fans on your website

Customers are probably talking about your brand and products, but those conversations are not happening on your website. Instead, those conversations are probably already happening on social media sites like your company’s Facebook page. When people talk about your brand away from your website, it is tough for you to provide answers and drive conversions.

By adding Arena Live Chat to your website, you can build a thriving community of users in two ways. First, your customers can make friends with each other during group chat sessions. Second, you can provide a welcoming virtual place for customers to come together as a community. If you want to see some solid events, check out how Nubank leveraged Anita’s community engagement for its IPO live event, or how Vans uses Arena Live Chat to aid live DJ music sets in its website.

3) Keep people on your website longer

According to Crazy Egg, the average person only spends 15 seconds on a website before leaving. Yikes! That’s not much time to make a good impression, let alone earn a sale or generate a lead. What if you could encourage users to spend 10 minutes or even an hour on your website happily?

That’s possible when you organize a virtual event with Arena Live Chat. For example, you could invite a social media influencer to present a live stream video session for an hour. During that session, attendees can ask questions through Arena Live Chat. In addition, you will have the opportunity to drive conversions by using the conversion card feature in Arena.

4) Qualify leads for the sales team

Is your sales team too busy with prospects who are not a fit for your products? That’s a problem you can solve by using Arena Live Chat. Invite customers to answer a few simple questions through chat before booking a call with sales.

For example, consider a B2B company that mainly sells to large companies with more than $100 million in revenue. In that case, the sales team shouldn’t spend their time talking to small businesses. You can use Arena Live Chat to qualify leads before they are sent to the sales team.

5) Reduce customer service delays

Forcing customers to wait in long phone queues to get customer service is no longer good enough. In 2020, more than 10% of customers abandoned their calls before being connected to an agent. When a customer gives up on their call, that disappointment hurts your company in two ways. First, you have lost a potential sale today. Second, the frustrated customer may complain to their friends and family.

Offering customer service through Arena Live Chat can help you to minimize customer service delays. For the best results, equip your customer service agents with a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document and other training to help them answer common questions quickly.

6) Create more engaging live events

Offering a live virtual event to your customers is a great way to build loyalty and drive sales. When planning an event, use the virtual events checklist to plan your event properly. At the same time, you also want to allow for some flexibility to adjust your topics based on what your customers are most interested in.

With Arena Live Chat, you can ask poll questions during an event to gather quick feedback. At the end of the event, you could ask attendees to vote on what your next live event should focus on. Acting on this feedback means you can avoid the frustration of offering live events that nobody is interested in attending. Swoogo has already found out that offering Live Chat is a home-run in live events.

7) Boost conversions in live shopping events

Live shopping events are an exciting way to drive increased sales. According to McKinsey, live shopping events may generate between 10-20% of all ecommerce sales by 2026.

During these events, customers are likely to have questions about product size, color, shipping, and much more. To make the most of your live shopping events, provide fast answers through Arena Live Chat.

8) Gain feedback on new product ideas

Are you debating what product to launch next? You could use market research surveys to gather insight on what people might want. That kind of research will yield some valuable insights. However, there is an even better way – get insight directly from customers using Arena Live Chat.

For instance, let’s say that you run a clothing brand and consider offering a line of blankets for winter. Before investing time in manufacturing and marketing, ask your next 100 live chat users if they are interested in a blanket. If the customers are interested, take note of their contact details and follow up with them later if you launch the product.  

9) Improve your chatbots

Adding a chatbot to your website is an excellent way to provide even faster customer service. However, chatbots are only as good as their input. One of the best ways to make your chatbots more effective is to look through your Arena Live Chat transcripts. You’re bound to find new ideas to make your chatbots more effective.

10) Enable flexible remote work

Survey after survey has shown that flexible remote work is popular with employees. According to Forbes, 74% of professional workers expect remote work to become standard in the coming years.

Give your employees the option to provide customer service, event support, and sales through live chat sessions. Giving your employees flexibility about when and where they work can drive productivity and help you retain more trained workers.

11) Add value to your product’s customization options

Many companies offer many different features, options, and customization choices. For example, think of an online jewelry store that lets customers choose different types of metal or engraving. Many customers like the idea of additional choices, but there is a downside. Your customers might get confused about how to use the options.

Use Arena Live Chat as a solution to this problem – let customers ask questions about custom options. With practice, you may even be able to increase the average order value by selling more upgrades.

12) Provide the most up to date information

Supply chain problems, new product launches, and staff turnover are just some of the changes your company might be managing today. With all of these changes, the information on your website might be out of date. For example, you might only be able to offer a few of your products in the extra-large size category.

With Arena Live Chat, you can invite customers to confirm the details of their order before they buy. This is a great way to prevent buyer’s remorse and disappointment.

13) Offer personalized service

Think about the last time you went to an excellent restaurant or hotel. The way staff greeted you and addressed your concerns was probably a big part of the experience. For example, you might have been asked if you were celebrating an occasion. Taking the time to ask a few good questions makes it much easier to offer a memorable customer service experience.

By engaging each customer through Arena Live Chat, you have the opportunity to build a relationship with the customer. Taking the time to listen to their comments and questions means customers are more likely to come back to your company.

14) Improve the quality of your sales training

Hiring and training a new salesperson is one of the best ways to grow a business. Unfortunately, it often takes a lot of trial and error for a junior salesperson to become effective. With the right approach, it’s possible to get sale people working productively quickly. How? Harness the power of live chat.

To improve the quality of your sale training, keep a log of the most common questions that customers ask during your Arena Live Chat sessions. By developing accurate and persuasive answers to those questions, your salespeople can be prepared to answer common concerns and close more sales. 

15) Enhance the post-sales experience

Making a sale today matters, but the long term is even more critical. If you engage customers thoroughly and pay attention to the details, they are more likely to keep buying from you in the future. 

You can enhance the post-sales customer experience with Arena Live Chat. For example, send customers a message inviting them to ask questions when their new product arrives. Nobody likes to look uninformed but accepting an invitation to a live chat session is different.

16) Grow customer service agent productivity

More sales mean more customer service employees, right? Not necessarily! It all depends on how you plan out your customer service program. For example, a company that only offers telephone customer service might hire more staff to keep up with demand.

By offering Arena Live Chat, you can grow customer service productivity without skyrocketing your costs. Why? A customer service person can easily maintain a few chat sessions at the same time. 

17) Encourage employee service specialization

Specialized employees are often able to provide better customer service and close more sales. Yet, encouraging generalist employees to develop a specialty can be difficult. One way to overcome this reluctance is to start small: encourage specialization through chat.

With Arena Live Chat, employees work with different kinds of customers and sales conversations. After a few weeks, they may better understand what kinds of customers and products they find most interesting. In this manner, live chat helps your employees quickly discover their strengths and build expertise.

18) Enhance the quality of your sales coaching

Sales managers have an essential role to play in helping their employees to improve their sales skills. Unfortunately, it is relatively complex for a sales manager to observe their sales reps in action and provide timely feedback. Asking managers to review live chat sessions can help.

When your sales representatives finish a sales chat session, encourage them to send the transcript to their manager for review. By asking an experienced person to review the interaction, it should be easy to find a few ways to improve. For example, the sales manager might encourage their staff to ask more questions early in the chat session to understand customer needs better.

19) Reduce painful interruptions for customers

In today’s digital world, it is difficult to get focused. Once you get down to work, the last thing you want is an unwanted sales call. At the same time, managers know it is essential to make it easy for customers to reach out. 

Adding Arena Live Chat to your website makes it easy for customers to reach out when they have questions. By focusing your effort on people interested in what you have to offer, you can avoid wasting time on disinterested people. 

20) Never lose another sales lead

In benefit 4, you learned that live chat could be an excellent way to qualify sales leads. That is helpful if your business is overwhelmed with prospects. Your situation might be quite different. If you are struggling to meet your revenue goals, you can use live chat to maximize leads instead.

Use Arena Live Chat to engage every website visitor and ask them questions about their needs. In this way, you can make a personalized pitch to every person who comes through your website.

21) Make your website more inviting to customers

Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect visiting a traditional website. It is a passive window shopping experience. You can look at product photos, view videos, and look up order status information. The lack of interaction means customers may become disengaged before finding the right product.

Adding Arena Live Chat to your website makes your website more like a store where employees greet customers as they come in. By making your website more inviting, customers may be more comfortable asking questions. 

22) Discover your customer’s pain points and solve them

Right now, your potential customers have questions, concerns, and worries about doing business with you. They might be worried that your shipping service or return policy isn’t going to work for them. Every business has different customer concerns to face. Ultimately, you can only solve these problems and get more sales if you know those concerns.

You can discover the worries that hold people back from buying by encouraging customers to ask more questions through Arena Live Chat. Once you have those insights, you can update your website to answer those concerns.   

23) Cross-sell related products and accessories

Cross-selling is one of the best ways to increase revenue. Fast food restaurants mastered this technique years ago by offering customers fries, drinks, and other items when they ordered. You can make similar offers to customers once you start a conversation.

For example, let’s say you have an online sports apparel store. A customer might start by asking about running shoes. By offering an Arena Live Chat session on your product page, you can answer questions about shoes and suggest related products (e.g., running shorts and shirts). 

24) Meet customer expectations for interaction

Keeping up with changing customer expectations is essential. For example, most businesses know that they need a modern website and a social media presence today. Today, many customers expect a live chat experience. More than 40% of customers expect live chat on the websites they use, and that number is likely to rise.

To stay competitive with customer demand, install Arena Live Chat on your website. You can get started for free. 

25) Track customer service performance

Do you know if your customer service is performing well? Traditional ways of measuring performance – like measuring how long it takes to answer a phone call – are limited. It is far better to look at the quality of live chat interactions.

Arena Live Chat includes analytics so that you can better understand how well you are answering customer questions over time.

26) Serve international customers

Did you know that more than one-quarter of revenue earned by S&P 500 companies came from outside the US? Your company might have customers around the world! Serving customers in different time zones and languages doesn’t have to be complicated.

Arena Live Chat can run around the clock on your website. For example, you can staff your live chat function with staff in the US and UK to provide customer service in the US and Europe.

27) Reduce product returns

When unhappy customers return products, your profitability is likely to suffer. Unfortunately, product returns are a significant problem for online companies. CNBC reports the returns cost the retail industry over $1 trillion annually. 

To reduce your product return expenses, engage customers in more conversations before they buy. Taking 5 minutes to answer questions before a customer buys pays off right away in higher satisfaction, lower complaints, and fewer returns.

28) Engage B2B or B2C leads

Consumers and corporate customers have different needs. A corporate employee buying laptops might have questions about contracts, support services, and discounts if they order 500 computers. In contrast, a consumer may ask questions like which computer is best for gaming.

If your company sells to multiple markets, use Arena Live Chat to start the conversation. If a customer says they are buying on behalf of a company, you can route the inquiry to the B2B team to address right away.

29) Troubleshoot live shopping

Live shopping events are taking off in popularity for many ecommerce companies. These events blend entertainment and retail into an appealing package. However, many consumers are still learning how to use this technology. When technical problems occur during these events, providing fast support is critical.

In your next live shopping event, use Arena Live Chat as your support platform. If you fail to offer easy-to-access support, customers experiencing technical problems might give up and leave your event.

30) Build trust in your company

Building trust with customers in the online world can be challenging. Customers may be worried about their privacy and security. Others may wonder if your company can deliver. Facing these concerns directly through a conversation is one of the best approaches.

You can use Arena Live Chat to build trust with your potential customers through multiple interactions. Taking the time to answer questions today through live chat means you can make a positive impression.

31) Improve webinars and virtual classes with feedback

Delivering a webinar or virtual class is a powerful way to equip people with new knowledge. Yet, there are downsides to virtual education and training. It is difficult for the teacher to connect with their audience. Without that connection, students may become disengaged.

With the polls feature of Arena Live Chat, you can make your online learning more engaging. For instance, you can follow up on an assignment with a poll and determine which topics students want to cover in a review. In this way, a teacher can quickly adapt a virtual class to suit student needs.

32) Make asking questions embarrassment free

Asking questions is the key to unlocking sales and connecting with customers. However, some people are reluctant to raise their hands and ask a question. Why? Nobody enjoys looking uninformed, especially in front of an audience, like a live virtual event.

Using the direct message (DM) feature of Arena Live Chat solves this problem. Event attendees can ask questions privately without fear of embarrassment by sending a DM to the event host. 

33) Run engaging family-friendly virtual events

Offering a virtual event suitable for the whole family is challenging. For example, a sports broadcaster might want to encourage a broad audience to view online coverage and participate in online coverage. A public virtual event carries a risk – some people might attempt to disrupt the event with profanity or spam comments. Failing to address this kind of disruption quickly can make the event hosts look incompetent.

Arena Live Chat comes with moderation tools that make it simple to stop profanity automatically. In addition, you can quietly remove disruptive users from the live chat event. These features make it much easier to keep your virtual events engaging and family-friendly.

34) Support advanced marketing campaigns

The changing landscape of digital marketing means companies have to change how they engage with customers. Recent changes by Apple and Google are making traditional digital marketing methods less effective.

One solution to these challenges lies in leveraging the Arena customer data platform and live chat together. For instance, you can identify patterns between customer interests (e.g., sports, business, lifestyle) as expressed in website activity and purchases. Understanding these links can help you to create more relevant marketing campaigns.

35) Quickly improve website engagement

In the online world, high engagement is crucial. Low engagement can cause your conversions to fall. There are also signs that Google and other search engines consider user engagement from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. Unfortunately, some ways to increase engagement are brutal, like redesigning an entire website! 

On the other hand, you can install Arena Live Chat on your website in less than 10 minutes. It is one of the fastest ways to make your website more engaging.

36) Improve question & answer (Q&A) sessions

In live shopping events, webinars, and other live events, you might decide to offer a dedicated Q&A session at the end of the event. In larger events with dozens or hundreds of participants, keeping up with the questions is tricky, especially if questions are mixed with other comments in the chat window.

Arena Live Chat makes Q&A sessions easy to manage by organizing all live chat questions in a dedicated Q&A area. Event moderators can then decide which questions to answer.

37) Boost engagement with chat channels

In a conference, participants can go to panels and sessions that specifically relate to their interests. With virtual live events, it can be more challenging to engage each niche interest. Using custom chat channels is one way to solve this engagement challenge.

Arena Live Chat offers dedicated channels for your live chat sessions. For example, you could have one channel for customers, one for technical support, and one for future event suggestions.

38) Keep users engaged with social profiles

Nobody likes to feel like a number in the online world. Unfortunately, some chat tools give users generic usernames and numbers. It doesn’t have to be that way.

When users sign up on Arena Live Chat, they can create custom user profiles with avatars to make them more personal.

39) Avoid live chat reply confusion

With dozens, hundreds, or thousands of live chat participants, it is easy to get confused. One friend might send a question in the chat room to somebody else only to obscure that question by the flood of chat comments.

Arena Live Chat offers reply features so that user replies are kept together with the main message. That’s valuable because user conversations are never lost in the noise as a result.

40) Drive conversions with conversion cards

Organizing a virtual event takes significant time and effort. You might spend hours writing a virtual event script, inviting guest speakers, and promoting the event. Offering interesting content matters, but you also have to watch business results like conversions and purchases. 

Arena Live Chat helps you achieve goals like lead generation and purchases through conversion cards. You can use these cards at several points during your live chat session to draw attention to your offers. By using a few conversion cards at every event, you’ll never have to struggle to prove the ROI of your live chat events.

Get Started Today For Free

Arena Live Chat is simple to install – most customers install it on their websites in less than 10 minutes. Not sure if it is suitable for your company? You can try Arena Live Chat for free.

The 4 Best Gaming Chat Apps

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Gaming chat apps give players the ability to connect with their audiences effectively. Taking the time to find the right tool for your audience and goals makes all the difference. 

Livestream Gaming Is Worth Billions

Livestreaming video gameplay has become big business! Whether you prefer to play Dota, Overwatch, League of Legends, Elden Ring, or other popular games, eSports and game streamers are building significant entertainment businesses and careers today. According to Juniper Research, game streaming and esports are already generating $1 billion in revenue. That’s not all – the industry is forecast to generate billions of dollars – $3.5 billion to be exact – by 2025. 

That explosive growth means more and more players and entertainers will jump into the live streaming market. Those new perspectives and styles mean more options for people to find streamers they like.

There is a dark side to the growth of streaming – audience engagement will become more difficult. As your audience gets even more choices to get their gaming fix, streamers will need to look for new ways to stand out. Inviting special guests, developing new jokes, and playing the latest games will all play a role.

However, you also need to give your audience an appealing way to get involved. That’s where using gaming chat apps is powerful. When your audience has access to a chat room to ask questions, applaud your play and engage with friends, the stream becomes a social experience. That means that your audience is likely to keep returning to your session repeatedly.

5 Ways Gaming Chat Apps Will Grow Your Audience

Adding gaming chat apps to your game streaming brings several powerful benefits. Achieving all of these benefits may take some practice, so don’t worry if it takes you a while to realize all of these gains.

1 Verify streaming quality

Streaming technology has come a long way over the past few years, but it is still far from perfect. With a gaming chat app, you can run a quick soundcheck and instantly determine if your audience can hear and see you. Getting quick technical feedback means solving glitches fast and keeping your audience engaged. Neglecting this factor can drive your audience away.

2 Get more content ideas

As a streamer, you’re on stage! It is up to you to perform and share exciting stories and jokes with your audience. After a while, you might feel some level of creative burnout. Fortunately, your audience is full of ideas! By paying attention to the comments and questions in your chat app, you can get new ideas for future streaming sessions. Maybe your audience wants to see you play a different type of character or solve a problem? Add these audience suggestions to your ‘ideas file,’ and you’ll never struggle to come up with fresh ideas in your streaming sessions.

3 Test product ideas

What if you have a new idea for a product like a mod for a game or merchandise? Before investing significant time and energy into developing the product, use chat apps to get rapid feedback. For example, you could work with an artist to produce a mockup of a product idea and share it with your audience in a stream. If you see many people asking how to buy it, that is an excellent signal to move ahead! 

Likewise, the reverse reaction – a lack of audience interest in a new product idea – is valuable. You’ve just saved yourself from pursuing an idea that may not find traction in the market.

4 Deepen audience loyalty

Building an engaged audience for your streaming career doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, it takes regular engagement – answering questions, interacting with comments, and more. Using gaming chap apps in your live streams lets you interact with the audience as the stream unfolds. That’s a powerful way to make your audience feel valued and eager to keep coming back for more.

5 Increase advertising revenue

By adding chat apps to your streaming, you give your audience a social experience. Not only will they be entertained by your stream, but they will also have the chance to connect with other people. Now that your audience has an easy way to interact with other viewers, they are likely to stay engaged with you for longer periods. Ultimately, this translates into higher advertising revenues.

Now that you know how gaming chat apps can grow your audience and engage

The 4 Best Gaming Chat Apps

These significant platforms give you access to users, text chat features, voice chats, social features, and more to easily connect with channel viewers.

For many streamers, Twitch is a popular choice for streaming. Certainly, Twitch has advantages like a large user base. Yet Twitch is no longer the only or best option for all streamers today.

Arena

  • Chat Type: Text 
  • Key Features: social media integration, profanity filters, embed the app on your website
  • Pricing: the basic version is free! For game streamers with larger audiences, consider one of the paid plans. 
  • Free Trial Available: you can use the free basic plan or sign up for a free trial of one of the higher-end plans

You may not have used Arena yet, but it is one of the most powerful live chat tools on the market. This lightweight chat app is designed to keep large virtual audiences engaged. Arena Live Chat can be installed on your website in a few minutes, so there are no delays. This chat tool also has chat restrictions which means less work for chat administrators.

At this time, Arena does not support voice calls or video chats. However, keeping your audience in a text-only chat window is helpful. When attempting something difficult in League of Legends or other challenging online games, you may prefer to focus on gaming.  

Twitch 

  • Key Features: Twitch has millions of active users, including many hard-core gamers 
  • Pricing: $5 to $25 per month, depending on the plan
  • Free Trial Available: the partner program does not have a free trial app

Twitch has the advantage of a significant gaming community of game enthusiasts – over 2 million active users, according to the Business of Apps. The large audience potential Twitch offers is very appealing to game streamers. However, there are some drawbacks to Twitch. To access the platform’s most powerful capabilities, streamers must fee the company’s Twitch Partner Program requirements, including mandatory training. 

Discord

  • Key Features: Discord offers text chat and voice chat capabilities
  • Pricing: there is a paid version of Discord called Discord Nitro ($99 per year) that offers large file transfer options, custom emojis, and more customization options
  • Free Trial Available: there is a free version of Discord, so you can test the platform

Launching a Discord server has become a popular choice for social gamers due to the platform’s focus on audio means it has excellent sound quality. It is also easy to create a different voice channel for different groups of Discord users. High audio quality communication is the perfect choice for many hard-core gamers who want to focus on their gameplay. The service includes direct messaging (i.e., the ability to send direct messages to other users) and file transfer.

Join a few public servers before taking the time and effort to become a server owner. See how other streamers run their game nights, interact with fans and create a great gaming experience.

Epic Game Store

  • Key Features: among gaming platforms, Epic Game Store stands out because it offers free games and game communication. 
  • Pricing: None
  • Free Trial Available: you can play some games for free on the platform.

Like Twitch, the Epic Game Store has an application-based program for streamers called Support-A-Creator. Essentially, streamers earn a 5% affiliate commission on purchases. There are several requirements to qualify for the Support-A-Creator program, including having at least 1,000 followers on social media platforms and following the service’s terms of service. Beyond this core feature for monetization, the Epic Game Store website sets expectations: “please expect modest results.”

The Epic Game Store approach to streaming is best suited to a few cases, including playing Fortnite and other epic games. Larger entertainment companies may prefer to use a multi-gaming platform not focused on Epic game titles. 

Which Gamer Chat App Is Right For You?

With all of the chat applications on the market, choosing the right app for your needs can take time and experimentation. To simplify the process, ask yourself which of the following categories best suits your needs.

Entry Level

An entry-level gamer chat app like Epic Games is a good choice for someone just getting started. You might have one or two thousand people in your audience and have modest revenue goals. In that case, a more straightforward app makes sense.

Intermediate Level

In the intermediate category, you have more choices for a voice chat service. A Gamer chat app like Discord makes sense. Setting up private servers for each gaming community you serve can help to lift engagement – League of Legends fans might not be interested in Fortnite or DOTA. The lack of a video chat feature may benefit since it can help you focus.

Professional Level

In chat clients, the professional level of chat clients comes down to two options: Arena vs. Twitch. With millions of potential channel viewers, Twitch is a popular choice. Yet, Twitch is not suitable for everyone. For example, your live streaming events might need chat restrictions t0 keep the event family-friendly. Arena’s moderation features like the profanity filter make organizing events for a large community easier. 

Since Arena is installed right on your website, your audience will not suffer through a significant learning curve. 

Arena vs. Twitch: Which Offers The Best Game Chat Experience?

Game chat, whether by voice or text, is an important way to engage your gaming audience. If you’re currently using Twitch, you may want to reconsider your options.

Twitch: Pros and Cons

In the gaming industry, Twitch has become one of the most popular apps with solid video quality and voice quality. Also, Twitch offers a variety of additional features that end users like the option to offer exclusive content. For end users, the platform offers many different channels so you can easily find streams featuring your favorite game.

There are disadvantages to relying exclusively on Twitch however. It is difficult to achieve complete control over the streaming experience. Other channels are just a click a way. That means you may lose users from your game chat.

Arena: The Way To Achieve Complete Control Of Your Gaming Chat App

When you want to make the most of your game time, complete control becomes valuation. You might want a way to sell products or ask users to enter their email address to join your list. With an off the shelf gaming chat app, full administrative control is tough if not impossible.

The solution is to build your our gaming chat app. Fortunately, there is no complicated coding involved. Instead, you simply need to install Arena Live Chat on your website. By using Live Chat on your website, your audience doesn’t have to download anything from an app store. They simply visit your website and start engaging with their friends. It’s a great way to engage community-minded gamers.

From a business standpoint, using Arena Live Chat instead of Twitch opens up new opportunities. For example, you can gather new data on your audience’s preferences with a customer data platform. With that data in hand, it far easier to understand what your audience wants and what they might be willing to buy. The best part? Your audience will get used to associating your website with leisure time rather than viewing you as one channel among many on a platform like Twitch.

How To Create A Custom Gaming Chat App

Adding a custom gaming chat app experience to your website is simple. For the best experience, download our new ebook: Declare Your Independence From Twitch. Arena Live Chat can be installed in minutes. It’s one of the best ways to engage your audience without the distractions of a voice chat application.

4 Reasons the Metaverse matters to marketers and what to do

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The metaverse – the next phase of the Internet – is coming soon. This trend has the potential to transform how you interact with customers and how you market. Before going much further, there is a fundamental question we need to answer: what is the metaverse?

What Is The Metaverse?

In his novel Snow Crash, the term metaverse was initially coined in the 1990s by science fiction author Neal Stephenson. While the word itself has been around for decades, Facebook has recently emphasized it to a much greater degree. In October 2021, Facebook announced that it was changing its name from Facebook to Meta. The change reflects that Facebook has invested substantially in other areas beyond social media, such as investments in virtual reality.

In simple terms, the metaverse is a new way of connecting with other people in immersive online worlds. It will involve several technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mobile devices, and high-end graphics capabilities. Today, most metaverse efforts are primarily focused on video games and entertainment. However, there is also potential to create conferences, trade shows, and shopping experiences in the metaverse.

The Metaverse Impact on Marketing Strategies

As the metaverse becomes more significant, marketers are wondering how it will impact their growth strategies. The impact will vary from company to company depending on how digitally savvy your customers are and your existing technology. Over time, we expect the metaverse to impact marketing in the following ways.

Drive Higher Engagement With Immersive Experiences

The metaverse focuses on creating a digital experience with audio, video, and more. Over time, marketers will be able to create virtual reality experiences for companies. A few early adopters are already creating these kinds of experiences at conferences and events. For example, the CES conference has featured virtual reality experiences since at least 2017.

Brands and marketers who successfully create immersive experiences for their customers have the potential to drive more sales and conversions.

Establish A Presence In Virtual Worlds

The metaverse will feature virtual worlds where users can visit, walk around, fly and build property. In November 2021, Liquid Avatar launched a metaverse environment called “Aftermath Islands,” where users can interact with each other and buy virtual real estate.

To imagine what the coming wave of virtual worlds may look like, it is helpful to consider earlier examples. In 2003, Second Life launched as a virtual world accessible by computer. By 2020, the virtual world had grown to 900,000 users. In Second Life, users can create an avatar to interact with the world. Users can visit companies, libraries, and educational experiences. Second Life is significant because it is not structured as a game. There are no objectives, goals, or quests per se. Instead, the platform emphasizes socializing.

Virtual worlds are significant for marketers and brands because of their scale. Creating a single immersive experience for your company will have some appeal. That said, creating a virtual experience where users can only interact with your company may have limited appeal unless you already have a cult following like Apple.

Many companies may ultimately find it more cost-effective to set up a presence in virtual worlds that already have a presence. For instance, an entertainment company might reach out to Roblox. As of Q2 2021, Roblox has 42 million daily active users. Establishing a presence early in platforms like Roblox and other virtual worlds may give you a first-mover advantage comparable to building a Facebook following in the 2000s.

Earn Revenue By Selling Collectibles

In addition to driving engagement, companies can generate revenue directly through the metaverse. Think of the recent boom in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – a kind of digital collectible.

Billions of dollars are rapidly pouring into these digital goods. NFTs have generated over $2.5 billion in revenue in the first half of 2021, according to Reuters. That activity level is even more striking when you realize that NFTs generated just $13 million in the first half of 2020. The current boom in NFTs is partially driven by low-interest rates and a gold rush mentality. However, there is likely to be ongoing demand for digital collectibles.

The marketing potential for collectibles and NFTS in the metaverse becomes more evident when you combine collectibles with other trends. For example, imagine consumers buying a virtual house, a virtual card made by their favorite athlete, or digital artwork.

Integrating Metaverse and Offline Marketing

Selling NFTs and other digital goods may not be your primary focus. In that case, the metaverse is still relevant to your marketing opportunity. Specifically, you can use the metaverse as another marketing channel to drive users to interact with your business offline or visit your website. For example, you might create a temporary presence in a metaverse world to promote your company at an event.

What To Do Right Now While The Metaverse Matures

While the metaverse presents an exciting opportunity, it will likely take a few more years to become commercially significant. While that technology matures, it is also essential to act on immediate marketing opportunities.

For more than a decade, digital marketers have relied on cookies to power their marketing. The age of tracking user behavior through cookies is coming to an end due to privacy changes implemented by Apple and Google. As those cookies decline in value, it is time to create your customer data platform instead of relying on third-party cookies.   

The Arena customer data platform is your opportunity to understand customer behavior without relying on traditional third-party cookies. With the Arena customer data platform, you can track a customer’s journey by clicking on an online ad, participating in a chat room, and ultimately placing an order. By gathering these marketing data from multiple online platforms, you can better understand your audience’s interests. Ultimately, that means you can design more relevant marketing, live shopping experiences and offers, and drive conversions.

Demand-Side Platform (DSP): What is It and How Does it Work?

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Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) stand as game-changers, setting the stage for strategic ad buying and selling. As an influencer in this space, navigating the intricacies of DSPs becomes not just advisable, but essential.

What is a Demand-Side Platform (DSP)?

A demand-side platform is a way for marketers to find ad space that fits their needs. It is called “demand-side” because marketers need advertising space from hundreds or even thousands of publishers to reach their goals at a fair price. A supply-side tool, on the other hand, is focused on meeting the needs of publishers who sell ad space.

How Does a DSP Work?

A Glimpse into DSP Varieties

While all DSPs aim to serve advertisers with suitable digital properties and high-quality inventories, the nuances that set them apart are crucial. Broadly, DSPs fall into two main categories:

Self-Serve DSPs

Ideal for those wishing to allocate a moderate budget, the self-serve DSP demands mastery over its intricacies. While it may proffer advanced advertising tech to streamline bidding strategies, its navigation necessitates dedicated time and understanding. Typically, revenue generation for this DSP model stems from marking up the advertising prices.

Full-Serve DSPs

Tailored for marketers yearning for premier inventory and insightful reporting tools, full-serve DSPs provide a holistic experience. With the guidance of advertising connoisseurs, they identify the precise audience and offer connections with esteemed publishers. The pricing, while more intricate, incorporates both service fees and costs per ad placement.

Spotlight on Prominent DSPs

A few renowned DSPs currently favored by brands and advertising agencies encompass:

Diversifying DSP subscriptions can be astute, given the differing advertising prospects and pricing models they offer. Leveraging multiple DSPs can not only economize digital marketing campaigns but potentially trim down the cost per click (CPC) by integrating less renowned publishers.

Benefits of Using a DSP

Visualize an intent to captivate affluent working women, aged 30-50, within the U.S. The vast digital landscape can be overwhelming. Yet, a DSP acts as a consolidated marketplace of advertising avenues, enabling effortless placements across varied platforms.

Choosing DSPs can amplify advertising reach, significantly diminishing over-reliance on mammoth entities like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. For perspective, as of 2021, these three giants absorbed 64% of U.S. digital advertising revenue. Yet, the remaining 36% still represents an enormous slice of the advertising pie, challenging to access without DSPs.

Choosing the Right DSP for Your Business

A quintessential DSP facilitates uncomplicated inventory procurement for myriad ads – from videos to search ads and even mobile apps. But what sets an outstanding DSP apart?

  • Ad Creative Diversity: Recognizing the platform’s specialization, whether it’s video-centric or display ad-focused, is pivotal.
  • Analytical Integration: Seamless synergy with preferred analytical tools can obviate manual data transfers, simplifying performance evaluations.
  • Publisher Blacklisting: Maintaining brand sanctity by sidestepping contentious publishers is essential. This feature can preclude any inadvertent placements on controversial sites.
  • Real-time Reports: Instantaneous, precise analytics accessed directly via the DSP interface is indispensable for informed decision-making.
  • Expansive Publisher Network: Continuous publisher engagement and retention reflect a DSP’s expertise.

The Synergy of CDP and DSP

To truly understand why modern marketers increasingly lean on Customer Data Platforms (CDP), place yourself in an advertiser’s shoes. An advertiser’s quintessential challenge is to optimize results within a defined budget. In this quest, granular data becomes their North Star.

A sophisticated CDP, like Arena Personas, augments your advertising strategy. By collecting rich audience data, publishers can cater to diverse advertiser needs, be it age-centric or interest-driven. With improved data quality, direct deals or DSP placements become more profitable and efficient.

Why Arena Stands Out

Embarking on the digital advertising journey without the right tools can be akin to navigating the vast seas without a compass. As you decipher the realm of DSPs, integrating tools like Arena’s live blogs can be the catalyst propelling you towards your marketing aspirations.

To grow your digital advertising revenue, you need to have a CDP. Find out how Arena Personas levels up your CDP and help you gain an edge in today’s marketing landscape.

Engage, experience, and elevate your strategies with Arena. Witness first-hand how seamless integrations and live blogging can redefine your marketing outcomes and help reach those pivotal goals.

Best Way to Make Live Shopping Successful

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The eCommerce industry boom, since the pandemic, has increased sales capabilities in thousands of different ways. Live shopping is now the new galvanizer. So, how can you drive more revenue to your website with live streaming?

A novel concept taken from an older idea – the Shopping Channel – is this live shopping solution.

This easy format mixed in with social media excitement is the current burner, and when you throw in the weight of Tik-Tok influencers or other media stars as hosts to live events, you have a solid winner on your hands.

If you are looking for some live shopping solutions use cases, Alibaba’s live shopping App Tabao just naturally springs from the ground. Dominating the field, at the moment, is the Chinese market. 

But you say to yourself, “Is this just a fad or does live shopping have substance to take the market by storm?” Tabao (mentioned earlier) generated more than 61 billion dollars GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) in 2020, according to TDinsights. This spurred Amazon to invest in livestream shopping big time in 2021.

The secrets to make live shopping successful

According to an emarketer study, live shopping will be a market of 623 billion dollars in 2023. 80% of consumers prefer watching videos about products rather than reading about them. People expect to be entertained today. By next year more than 30% will increase. So, if you are planning to create an ecommerce presence or if you already work with this, you should dive into this amazingly fast growing market.

Just ask yourself this rhetorical question,”How can I use live shopping to generate ecommerce revenue?”

1- Live Events engage audiences

If you haven’t started using live shopping yet, time’s a wasting. Start creating live events and engage people with good content and tools that can provide you with insights, data, audience engagement and customer loyalty. Creating “Lives” is a challenge that you can surmount with some tricks, like good planning and organization . A big tip: you need to listen, ask, interact and just not create ads in a live streaming. The big picture comes when you provide content tailored to your customer and listen to their desires, then making this happen.

2 – Typing… making people generate insights

People love to be mentioned and honored. They like to be wooed and entertained. The pandemic has created a vacuum of boredom that is being filled with live shopping solutions.  

By giving them prizes, they will go crazy. Giving them discount coupons to use in a limited time will increase sales from their desires. 

Using a chat like Arena Live Chat, you can enrich your customer profile with their favorite products that you can get from Arena’s Customer Data Platform (CDP).

How does the audience speak about competitor’s products? Using personas and single sign-on you can read more data about them and make wiser decisions about your marketing mix.

The devil is in the details which is what you need to access your ideal customer from the audience.

Make them enjoy the shopping extravaganza your live event is all about and you’ll have a fan for life.

3 – Live shopping: Live conversion 

Imagine creating a live event on youtube or facebook. There you need to ask people to enter your website and then “shit happens”. Common sense says that it is impossible 100% of our clicks really become visits. People are fickle and have short attention spans in this go-go world. Also do you want to generate revenue or friction? 

Make your website the rising star instead of an external service. Guaranteed that more conversions will happen because people don’t like to change their navigation. On average, people click 22 times until they convert at ecommerce. Hit the nail once to drive sales.  

4 – Data can be creative

Imagine that you can manage an audience and create personalized offers during your live event, look at comments and, better yet, use what people are chatting about to generate creative things as you do on social media. If your audience is talking about other products, how can you use that to your benefit? What do they like the most about that product? What do they dislike? Ask them questions in real-time, make polls, request reviews, and create some fun with that. Understanding your audience will help you choose the optimum strategy.

5 – Answering your audience is intelligent

People with a buying intention normally have some doubts about prices, size, deadlines, colors. If they are buying, they want to know what they are getting for their money. And, they don’t like surprises because key information has been withheld. You can run a Q&A session to narrow their buying intention. By answering people at your live stream, you avoid them “googling” and becoming disengaged. Let’s be honest, if they google your product or categories, how many competitors will they find? So use the moment to answer objections and make deals.

In the end, it is easy to turn your website into a Youtube or Twitch type presence. With that type of venue, you can manage audiences, get to know your customers, enrich their profiles with preferences, and sell directly without needing to run ads to capture the audience again. Don’t let them leave your live event, on your website, with money in their pockets. Use the moment when  you have already acquired that customer in some way because it takes money and time to acquire a customer. Live shopping is bout a shortcut to your clients’ heart and better conversion rates and you can use any white label live shopping software, your live stream, and add Arena Live Chat to generate all those amazing solutions.

6 – Live Chat brings home the bacon

Putting Arena’s Live Chat to work to help you convert your live streaming events into revenue generators is easy. With guest influencers engaging the audience, and having the right format for your “lives” can make the experience become a real-time shopping extravaganza.

Adding that dollop of excitement where the audience can ask questions, get answers, and tell their stories will boost your brand at each successive event. Customers will have better experiences, and if there are other attractive products they may make additional purchases while there. An engaged audience that is having fun will shout this out to their fellow netizens and make referrals because of your outstanding products and services. 

Live environments are exciting because they have that sense of urgency, freshness, and professionalism. With content being continually refreshed, new products being placed on the  carousel, and the host adding to the excitement and fun of the moment, how can you not increase conversions with Live Chat at your event?

Have a Live Chat solution for free

You can magnetize new customers’ attention by giving them exclusivity. Personalized service while having an entertaining live shopping experience. Satisfied customers are repeat customers. Expect the crowd to turn out at your next “Live”.

Arena can give you a Live Chat solution right now with no code hassles.You can have it fully operating within minutes on your platform. Did we say it’s free?! Create! Embed! Ready to go!

The world is your oyster when Live shopping is done right.

5 Online Events Ideas For Internal Meetings

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Most guides to online events focus on engaging customers or growing an audience. Those are worthwhile goals that are well worth pursuing. Focusing all of your online events on external groups carries a risk: your employees may become disengaged and withdraw their best contribution.

The High Cost of Low Engagement

There is plenty of research on the value of encouraging high employee engagement. In brief, high employee engagement means staff brings enthusiasm, new ideas, and creativity to their work. On the other hand, low engagement means employees are focused on doing the bare minimum to get by. 

In the past, employee engagement discussions focused on motivation and productivity. There are new dimensions to employee engagement given our experience over the last few years – well-being. According to new Gallup research, only 24% of employees feel that their employees care about their overall wellbeing. 

Feeling cared for has significant benefits for organizations. Employees who feel their employers care about their wellbeing are 69% less likely to be searching for a new job. Further, these employees are 71% less likely to experience significant burnout. 

Driving high employee engagement and well-being requires multiple strategies, including events. If your organization has a hybrid or remote workforce, you need online events ideas for internal meetings.

Online Events Ideas for Internal Meetings For Growth

These online event concepts are powerful tools to inspire your employees to pursue challenging goals.

1. Virtual Annual Sales Meeting

Annual sales meetings are a proven way to engage your salesforce. These events typically involve a compelling keynote speaker, presentations from executives, and insights to help salespeople succeed, rather than flying in employees from multiple locations.

To make your event memorable, use these tips:

Feature An Exciting Guest Speaker.

The right guest speaker can fill your sales reps with inspiration and tactics. For example, you might invite Jeb Blount to speak to your team about prospecting, negotiation, or other sales skills.

Offer Customer Data Insights.

Your most successful sales reps probably understand your customers deeply. What 

about the rest of your sales team, especially the new hires? They may not know your customer base as well. To give your sales team a leg up, equip them with insight from your customer data platform.

With the Arena customer data platform in place, you can identify critical patterns in customer behavior. For example, you might find that industrial customers typically read two ebooks before they join a sales call. In that case, you can suggest your salespeople adjust their efforts to reach out to the right prospects.

2. Giving Company Awards In An Online Event

Recognition is one of the most enduring human motivations. Paying your employees well is just the start of recognition. You can also make employees feel appreciated by giving them awards. A company awards event can work well online.

To maximize engagement in your awards events, you can use a few techniques.

Offer Prizes.

A plaque or trophy is significant, but offering a prize can make the award even more memorable. For example, you might offer a gift card to the best restaurant or hotel in town so your winner can have a memorable night out.

Be Specific When Giving Awards.

The public praise you receive upon receiving an award makes the experience much sweeter. Ask your event moderator to prepare a short speech of 30-60 seconds describing some of the award winner’s specific achievements (e.g., completing a complex IT project on time or exceeding sales quota)

3. New Leadership Online Event

The arrival of a new CEO means change. Employees will want to know about the new leader’s personality, goals, and background. Meet these expectations effectively by organizing an online event.

With this type of online event, strike a balance between the leader making a presentation and allowing plenty of time for employee questions. It is best to use Arena Live Chat to manage the question and answer session in a larger event. Arena includes content moderation capabilities so that you can avoid off-topic questions.

Online Events Ideas for Internal Meetings for Well Being

The above online events ideas are powerful to stimulate ambition and productivity. However, that type of event is not appropriate for every context. If your employees have been burning the midnight oil to meet a challenging deadline, your staff may have other needs. It’s more than possible that employee well-being has suffered. 

4. Diversity and Inclusion Virtual Event

When employees feel mistreated or discriminated against, they are less likely to thrive. Planning an annual online event related to your diversity and inclusion goals can make a big difference. 

There are different ways to structure this type of event. You might highlight specific inclusion efforts, such as efforts to promote women and people of color into management positions. Alternatively, you might share a progress update regarding your organization’s diversity goals.

Data and metrics are not enough to make this type of event successful. It’s also powerful to feature stories from your employees and leaders. For example, invite employees to share stories about facing discrimination and overcoming those challenges.

Advancing diversity and inclusion goals, especially when new to your organization, can provoke questions and controversy in some cases. Give your team members the chance to ask questions and seek clarification using Arena Live Chat.

5. Stress Management Online Event 

An online event focused on healthy stress management techniques can go a long way to helping employees feel better. Assuming you plan for a 60-minute online event, there is a limit to how much you can cover. 

Therefore, you might want to organize a quarterly event series covering different topics. This quarter, you might cover breathing exercises and meditation. Next quarter, you might focus on practical ways to set boundaries at work (e.g., start time, end time, and no weekend email). 

Bring Your Internal Meeting Event Idea To Life

There are all kinds of ways you can use online events ideas to inspire your workforce. You can introduce new leaders, give out awards and help employees improve their well-being.

An idea is not enough to create transformational results. You need specific techniques to plan your event’s content and technology so that everything runs smoothly. Download your copy of Arena’s live events ebook to learn how to plan and execute an engaging event in less than a week.

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Arena raises Series A to Create Business Engagement Platform

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What a ride it was last year! Since our launch of the Arena no-code chat messaging and data platform, more than 25,000 businesses in 150 countries have started using Arena to connect buyers with sellers, marketplaces, virtual event attendees, students with professors, social communities and streamers.

Arena.im Series A investors

Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13.6M Series A led by Murat Bicer and CRV, joined by Craft Ventures, to bring customer conversations and data into the hands of every consumer enterprise. Arena turns any website or app into a community to increase engagement, transaction, and actionable first-party data.

Also, we have the privilege to have incredible partners in the round: Artisanal Ventures, Vela partners, Incubate Fund and Primeset.

I couldn’t be more excited to work with our incredible investors, operators, founders and some of the world’s top minds in growth, product and marketing.

David Sacks (Founder. Yammer, Paypal, Craft)
Des Traynor (Founder. Intercom)
Olivier Pomel (Founder. Datadog)
Amit Agarwal (CPO. Datadog)
Andrew Boni (Founder. Iterable)
Jeff Samuels (COO. Iterable)
Andrew Peterson (Founder. Signal Sciences)
Elena Verna (Growth. Miro, Reforge, Netlify, SurveyMonkey)
Guillaume “G” Cabane (Growth. Segment, Drift, G2)
Andy Price (Founder. Artisanal Talent/Ventures)
Gary Benerofe (CEO. ex-mediaspa, Overdose)
Jeff Weiser (CMO. ex-Shopify, Shutterstock)
Michael Cassidy (Founder. Apollo Fusion, Xfire, GoogleX)
Babak Hamadani & Primeset (Execs. Twilio, Twitter, Box)
Romero Rodrigues (Founder. Buscape)

We’re fortunate to be adopted by incredible companies like Vans, Avon, Fox, Vimeo, Figma, Asana, Adobe, Meta, Microsoft, Globo, Rogers Media, and Samsung.

Product engagement as the ultimate weapon of growth

Online brands and consumer companies keep looking for ways to move beyond social media and third-party cookies as a way of gaining more direct insights into their users and customers. Arena is leading the movement with its no-code communication platform. It uses engagement data gathered from conversations and combines that with AI to better understand who might want to buy what among our users’ customers.

We built a scalable and easy-to-install chat solution that focuses on building communities and increasing transactions such as live shopping, subscriptions, and donations. It all comes with our customer data platform that converts into first-party data and deeply understands customer behavior using AI.

We’re leading the product-led growth movement and helping companies to integrate conversation and shopping experiences into their products helping to transform the future of ecommerce, streaming, education, and online communities.

We’re in the perfect storm 

The funding comes at a key moment in the world of martech. Due to privacy and conflicts between Facebook and Apple, many companies have shifted their data sourcing activity from third-party to first-party data. With the end of the cookie era, brands and consumer enterprises will focus on building social products and gathering their own customer data rather than relying on the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons of this world to provide the information.

How we became successful: No-code and PLG approach

Arena is an entirely product-led growth company for our first 24,000 customers; spending $0 on marketing and only growing from the viral nature of network effects. By all measures, we are the fastest growing chat messaging for consumer enterprises – and can attribute most of this to the product and its virality component.

I really believe that product engagement is the ultimate weapon to grow. Now we’re helping every website to build conversations and understand their customers with just one line of code.

It takes only 2 minutes to deploy Arena to any website or mobile app, and it’s a fraction of the price offered by Twilio, Segment or Adobe. It comes with a chat messaging platform integrated with a robust CDP, all-in-one.

Because of the nature of the product and the problem that we’re solving, Arena is perfect for SMBs, mid-market and large enterprises. Our annual contracts vary from $2K to 400K ACV, both producing the same value proposition:

  • 64% increase on engagement
  • 5x more first party data
  • 18% boost on conversion and transactions

Our customers absolute love our product, with a 76 NPS.

Arena is building a market leading Customer Engagement Platform

We believed that creating a social and highly engaging product would empower communities and enable transactions such as e-commerce, subscriptions, and donations/gifts. 

Ultimately, it would translate into customer data as Arena deploys AI to understand behavior and build intent-based experiences at scale.

Get started with Arena

We couldn’t do this without our amazing team or our customers. Our mission at Arena is clear: we want to be the conversation platform of the web.

Arena is free to get started with and doesn’t require a credit card! Check out the product at arena.im.

Come work with us

Arena is hiring across the board for Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Product! More information can be found on our careers page.

8 Online Event Ideas for News and Media Publishers

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Online events for publishers and media outlets are a growing way to engage audiences. Run these events effectively, and you can keep your website audiences engaged longer, grow loyalty, and increase ad revenue.

Online Event Ideas for News and Media Publishers

1) Panel Discussions are Great for Audience Engagement 

  • Who Is It For: people interested in the latest insights in a rapidly changing topic
  • What You Need For This Event: a small group of exciting speakers to share insights.

Industry panels are a well-established concept that many publishers and event organizers have run for years. The key to making them successful is to offer a unique experience. The unique experience can be crafted in several ways: access (i.e. the chance for Q&A with CEOs, executives, journalists), networking (i.e. a small event limited to few people) or new insights. 

Note that industry panels go by various names, including summits and forums. For example, the Atlantic has held health-themed events like People v. Cancer and the Education Summit. You don’t have to limit the event to health content. Bloomberg is offering a Technology Summit in June 2022 that will have virtual and in-person options.

2) Executive Focused Event Branded by News and Media Publishers

  • Who Is It For: executives with a common focus like marketing or finance
  • What You Need For This Event: emphasize exclusivity and quality

That’s one reason why it can be hard to keep growing as an executive. Your direct reports may not always feel comfortable bringing new ideas. Conversely, sharing your leadership difficulties with the CEO or Board is not the right forum. Giving executives a place to connect and learn from direct peers is a smart idea. 

For the best results, we suggest filtering attendees for quality. You might offer free admission but advise attendees that you will verify if the event is appropriate to them before handing out tickets. The CMO Club, organized by Salesforce, has featured guest speakers from General Mills, Instagram, and Virtualware.

3) Hobby / Passion Themed Events bring Audience Engagement

  • Who Is It For: attendees passionate about interest and looking to share their interest
  • What You Need For This Event: a guest speaker with deep knowledge of the field is critical.

Connecting with like-minded people who share your passion for history, wine, literature, gaming, and other subjects is exciting. You may already have a lineup of potential speakers – editors, staff, and contributors with specialized expertise as a publisher. Decanter, a wine magazine publisher, has offered virtual events with two ticket options: a ticket with a shipment of wine (£195 or $324 US) and a ticket to the virtual event online only (£10 or $17 US).

As the Decanter example shows, passion and hobby-themed events can be structured in various ways. You can make your event more exclusive by offering to ship a unique item to the audience. This could be as simple as a copy of the guest speaker’s book or as rare as autographed memorabilia.

4) Viewing Party is Also a Good Event Idea

  • Who Is It For: participants with a shared interest in video or TV shows
  • What You Need For This Event: offering prizes or exclusive guests are one way to make a viewing party more appealing

It can be tough to find people who share your taste in today’s world of countless streaming services. Publishers can meet this need by organizing a viewing party. For example, Nerdist organized a virtual watch party for the classic movie “The Princess Bride” in 2020. You can use Arena to run your viewing party – just like Gizmoplex did with a classic movie recently.

5) Offer Early Access To Subscribers Will Grow Your Audience 

  • Who Is It For: publishers with well-known award lists and coverage that people look forward to 
  • What You Need For This Event: A significant audience passionate about a specific topic

For many years, the New York Times Book Review has published lists for the year’s best books. Recently, the publisher created an exclusive virtual event based on their list. The New York Times described a 2021 online event in the following terms:

How do editors of The New York Times Book Review choose the annual 10 Best Books list? Which fiction and nonfiction works made the cut, and why? This year, Times subscribers were the first to find out. On the morning of Nov. 30, before the list was published, The Book Review announced this year’s 10 Best Books list in a virtual event just for subscribers.

6) Organize An Event With Focused Demographic

  • Who Is It For: publishers looking to connect with a specific segment of their audience 
  • What You Need For This Event: A compelling virtual event concept that applies to the target demographic

Many publishers and news organizations have large audiences. Attempting to appeal to everyone in a virtual event is difficult, if not impossible. Instead, consider developing an event focused on a specific audience. Forbes organized the “Forbes 50 over 50” event to celebrate people who have achieved success later in life. Publishers can also apply this concept to other demographics like recent college graduates, women, and others.

7) Host A Multi-Part Virtual Event Series

  • Who Is It For: publishers with an audience passionate about reading
  • What You Need For This Event: A high profile author with a new book coming out

New books by well-known authors have a proven track record of attracting fans. The traditional approach to this type of event is to invite the author to read from their book and invite questions from the audience. That’s not the only way.

History Extra, a history magazine in the United Kingdom, recently offered a five-part virtual lecture series called “The Aftermath of World War II, with Keith Lowe.” Attendees can pay to register for a single event or pay to attend all of the lectures. In addition to the event itself,

8) Plan A Week-Long Event

  • Who Is It For: publishers with experience running more extended events. 
  • What You Need For This Event: a significant number of guest speakers.

Some publishers have a track record of organizing multi-day events. The organization has scheduled Future Healthcare Week Asia. This event is a hybrid format – attendees can participate in-person or online. The Economist event features dozens of speakers to fill a multi-day schedule.

Leverage First-Party Data with CDP 

Collecting data about what your audience likes with Arena customer data platform is vital. With a CDP in place, you’ll know which of your content sparks the highest engagement across all of your assets – articles, videos and events. Unlike surveys, Arena CDP is seamless and doesn’t require time from your users. Click here to start your Arena free trial.

Make More Out of Every Online Event

The online event examples above illustrate the wide range of possibilities publishers can offer. 

Whether you feature your journalists, invite external guests or take different approaches, excellent event content is the foundation of a successful event. 

As you offer more events, you’ll see the importance of interaction. Your audience wants the ability to ask questions and connect with others. Use Arena Live Chat – it takes less than 10 minutes to install – to transform your online event into a community experience.

The Top 7 Trends in Digital Marketing in 2022

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Knowing the top trends in digital marketing in 2022 is critical to hitting your goals. New opportunities are vitally important, whether you are looking to increase audience growth, engagement, leads, or conversions.

Achieving early success on newer marketing platforms often leads to big wins. In the early days of Facebook, it was easy to get significant amounts of organic traffic. In paid advertising, clicks from Google were almost shockingly inexpensive in the 2000s. To give yourself the best chance of winning this year, review these marketing trends and determine which impacts your goals.

The Top 7 Trends in Digital Marketing in 2022

1) TikTok Is Here To Stay

Since 2020, TikTok has exploded in popularity to more than 1 billion monthly active users as of September 2021. Those numbers put the platform in the same league as Facebook (2.9 billion monthly active users) and YouTube (2.3 billion monthly active users). Some digital marketing experts dismissed TikTok for a while because of the platform’s limited features and youthful demographics.

TikTok is changing, and major brands are achieving big wins. For example, e.l.f cosmetics has achieved over 1 billion views through their #EyesLipsFace campaign. The first step is to create an account for your brand and start to follow a few accounts.

2) YouTube Advertising Is Booming

YouTube, one of the most popular video-sharing sites globally, is getting better and better for advertisers. The video site earned tens of billions in revenue in 2021, far ahead of other social networks.

There are multiple ways to execute YouTube’s growth. You can use the platform’s extensive menu of advertising options, including skippable and non-skipped videos. Also, you can work directly with Youtubers to sponsor videos. 

3) Seize Early Adopter Advantage In The Metaverse  

In the fall of 2021, many digital marketers became excited about the potential of metaverse when Facebook embraced the concept by renaming itself. Since that time, some of the enthusiasm has faded away. 

For digital marketers with a long-term view, investing heavily in the metaverse this year can pay off for years. In contrast to social media platforms, metaverse technologies are relatively immature. The easiest way to get started is by adding a metaverse element to your online events. 

For those not yet convinced about the value of the metaverse, consider a few numbers. In 2021, Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) invested $10 billion into metaverse efforts, according to the New York Times. There are also more than 300 active metaverse startups working on the technology. Spend some time in metaverse games and virtual reality this year to familiarize yourself with the technology and its potential. 

4) Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Over the past few years, NFTs have boomed in popularity reaching $21 billion in 2021. An industry forecast recently estimated that the global NFT market will grow to more than $80 billion by 2016. A significant amount of recent NFT activity is driven by low-interest rates and speculation. While NFT growth may slow as the hype cools down, the category presents a major opportunity for digital marketing,

By creating and issuing NFTS, brands have the opportunity to create new excitement. For example, Fortune created a NFT based on a magazine cover in 2021. Instead of spending heavily on traditional swag for conferences, it might just be the time to create NFTs to promote your online events.

5) First and zero party data

If you’ve been following recent moves by Apple and Google, you already know that traditional Internet marketing cookies are declining in value. The end of the marketing cookie means that marketers need to find new ways to understand their audiences. The old way of running retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Google are not going to produce the same results any longer.

The solution is to focus on first part and zero party data. First party data is data you collect directly from your audience. To collect that data, you need to give customers a reason to keep visiting your website like offering exciting content and online events is the first step to growing your audience. Once you have your audience on your website, you need a way to systematically understand them. That’s where using a customer data platform can make a vital difference. With Arena CDP, you can easily determine which content, online events and actions customers take on the road to making a purchase.

Once you have your foundation of first party data, you can start to gather more zero party data. The classic example of zero party data is a customer purchase intent like color or size of a product they are most interested in buying.

6) Live Shopping

Live Shopping remains a growing marketing opportunity for retailers and ecommerce brands. From a base of $21 billion in 2021, this opportunity is slated to grow to $35 billion by 2024 according to Statista.

The current approach to live shopping carries risks however. Today, the most popular platforms for live shopping events are YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon Live. Relying exclusively on these platforms means your audience might get easily distracted by other content and notifications. Further, your ability to gather additional data for your customer data platform from third party websites is limited.

We forecast that more and more brands will shift their attention to creating their own live shopping events on their own sites. To ride this trend, use Arena Live Chat to power your live shopping event. 

7) Diversity and inclusion initiatives

Digital marketers are increasingly expected to respond quickly to our society’s social justice, diversity and inclusion expectations. According to Deloitte research, 35% of buyers in the 18-25 year old audience often notice representative advertising at the time of purchase. The research found a similar pattern in travel, household equipment and banking industries. 

However, don’t underestimate your customers – they can see through shallow efforts at inclusivity. Token efforts to fulfill diversity may even backfire and undermine your marketing objectives.

Instead, your goal must be to authentically embrace diversity in your marketing efforts. At a minimum, review your use of images and videos. Next, look at your reviews, testimonials and customer stories. It’s entirely possible that your brand has a significant blindspot like failing to include women.

The Marketing Channel To Invest In This Year

Live digital events are cost effective and convenient for your audience. At the same time, many marketers are still learning how to design and launch successful online events. To help you succeed in the online event world, check out free report on 2022 Virtual Events Trends.

SXSW 2022: Closing weekend impressions

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After 10 days with an agenda of promising technology outtakes and a variety of online events to watch, SXSW came to an end and left us excited with how technology is merging with the real world. Aside all the issues with online transmission, from the sound volume being too low, to unavailable chat for online viewers: it was, as usual, a massive opportunity to learn and understand what is happening in the world of technology.

With a final weekend full of exciting music attractions, such as first timer participant country singer and superstar, Dolly Parton, who partnered with FOX Entertainment’s Blockchain Creative Labs (BCL) to launch her first NFT experience “Dollyverse”, unarguably, the main topic of the conversations was around NFTs and the Metaverse. So let’s jump into the highlights of the weekend.

One Year Later: How NFTs Are Changing The World

Vladislav Finzburg (Blockparty), came back to SXSW 2022 a year later after talking about the initial stages of NFTs, bringing along updates, mostly with the mainstream adoption. He brought interesting topics of the gap between digital and physical NFTs and how the rise of NFTs, pointing out how brands and companies jumped full into the NFTs world – with innovative creation and an increased number of online transactions- even though it’s still circling around a niched group of people.

Bridging into the Metaverse: 5 Top Considerations for Brands

Metaverse was also a major topic of discussion, and in this session, Sebastien Borget, the co-founder and COO of The Sandbox, shared his insights about emerging best practices and top considerations for brands as they bridge over to  the metaverse. 

Brands such as Adidas and Warner Music are already making massive entries into the Metaverse. One topic that got our attention was, “How should brands protect themselves in the Metaverse?”. Data Privacy has been a huge topic of discussion over the past few years. We recently mentioned a couple of ways that data can be protected in the Metaverse in our blog.

It Starts on TikTok: Discovering Your Audience

The most downloaded app in 2021 was the main topic of this session with Carey Sheridan, US Head of Music and Content at Tiktok and Sadie Jean, whose first-ever song “WYD Now?” has become a certified sensation on the app, all because of the power of the #OpenVerseChallenge — a viral format that invites creators to duet with her during an instrumental opening of her song. A great example of why the community-driven video platform is impacting the music industry.

Next Gen Tech & The Live Entertainment Revolution

The fusion of the physical and virtual worlds in the entertainment world has brought so many opportunities to artists helping them understand their fans, and to fans living an elevated and personalized experience with concerts. For instance, Live Chat and Customer Data Platforms have been good examples of technologies that can be used  to create a Live Stream event. 

Conclusion

This edition of SXSW showed us that the future is here and we are already living in it. NFTs and Metaverse are already being worked into new technologies, and companies and specialists are very up front with innovative solutions and technology around various themes, like events, medicine, sports, entertainment and currency. And during these past 10 days, it  showed us nothing less than a brilliant technological future for us. 

It also was great to see it balanced with super sessions and themes about social justice & equity. Even though those who’re experiencing South by Southwest are somehow already connected with all the technology available, we have to see outside our own bubbles. A lot was said about what can be done to present opportunities and help bring the advantages that the technology has to where people have less access, and I believe this has to be the main topic of discussion for the next couple of years. We hope to see more conversations around access and inclusion in next year’s event. Are you already excited about SXSW 2023?

Check out our coverage for the first weekend and for all the other events that happened during the week.