Break Into Digital Networking Opportunities with ON24 Breakouts

Organizations know high-quality digital experiences can engage and connect at scale. Now, organizations break into digital networking opportunities from any digital experience at any time with ON24 Breakouts.

With ON24 Breakouts, organizations can embed opportunities to engage audiences with attendee-to-attendee chats, 1:1 sales meetings, group networking and more directly from a digital experience.

Let’s explore what this means in detail.

Introducing ON24 Breakouts

We developed ON24 Breakouts to help organizations develop more intimate, human experiences with attendees while they are engaging with a brand.

This means organizations can more easily create one-to-one and group engagements in customized, branded digital events. By doing so, organizations can help marketing and sales accelerate the buying journey, enhance the customer experience and help bring deals to a close.

ON24 Breakouts empowers digital event moderators to organize up to 10 Breakout rooms per event. Moderators can control the rooms’ settings such as room capacity limits, access codes, chat features and room availability during a digital event, or even after it has concluded.

Breakout Into New Digital Networking Opportunities

Marketers should always look for ways to create communities that allow like-minded people to connect with one another and forge relationships. And while digital tools have helped marketers build those connections, face-to-face interactions are still a powerful way to connect.

With ON24 Breakouts, you get the best of both worlds. Attendees can participate in events from the comfort of their home and meet and talk shop with peers.

5 Ways to Create Engaging Digital Networking Opportunities

ON24 Breakouts can be used in a variety of ways, but we’ve identified five ways it can help facilitate networking opportunities and extend your relationship beyond the initial webinar:

• • Group Networking – Group networking empowers you to create a community within your audience so they can connect and discuss topics and trends with peers.

• • Speaker Q&A – You’ve already arranged for subject matter experts and thought leaders to participate in your digital event. A two-way speaker Q&As allow your audience to interact directly with your speakers.

• • 1:1 Sales Meetings – Sometimes prospects are ready to take the next step in the buying journey or learn more information specific to their situation before your event ends. Make it easy and convenient for them to connect with someone from the sales team by offering a Breakout room for them to discuss next steps within your event.

• • Partner/Sponsor Enablement – As marketers, we often work with partners and sponsors to enhance events. Add value to your partners and sponsors when you empower them to connect with new prospects through a digital event.

• • Thought Leadership Roundtables – This is a great way to bring together subject matter experts and key opinion leaders to gather and discuss trends to further the field. Also provides the capability for other participants to audit the discussion as passive viewers and learn from their expertise.

A Breakdown of ON24 Breakouts

Now that you have some ideas on how to facilitate networking in your virtual events, let’s highlight a few Breakouts features so you know what options you have when you choose to use it.

The event moderator has several controls at their disposal when running a webinar that includes Breakout rooms. As the moderator, you can share your screen with the audience, control the availability and attendance of the Breakout rooms, manage audio, video and chat controls.

Breakout rooms can be added to your webinar through your console builder as you’re designing the event. You can create many different types of Breakout rooms depending on what fits your needs.

Each Breakout room can be customized with a number of features:

• • Room Name – To distinguish different rooms from each other.
  • Description – The intended activity of the room so attendees know what to expect.
  • Thumbnail Image – To help identify different rooms and reinforce connections with your product, brand or speaker.
  • Room Capacity – There may be times like one-on-one sales meetings or thought leadership discussions where you want to limit how many people can join a room. This feature can be turned off for other instances like group networking and speaker Q&As where you want as many people to attend as possible.
  • Access Code – A security feature to make sure the right people are gaining access to the room at the right time and no one else.
  • Moderator Enablement – Allows the event host to access the rooms to fix problems and control audio and video features like muting a microphone that’s disrupting the conversation.

• • Moderator Access Code – A security feature to make sure the right person has the ability to make changes to the settings and no one else.
  • Attendees Must Wait Until Moderator Has Joined – This feature requires a moderator to be present in the breakout room before someone else can join. It prevents awkward situations where a prospect might enter a room alone.
  • Show Room During Webinar – Allows the Breakout rooms to be available during a presentation or event — optimal for 1:1 sales meetings with hot leads.
  • Show Room After Webinar Has Ended – Allows the Breakout room to be available after the main webinar presentation so attendees can hang out and network or continue the discussion with the speaker or thought leaders.
  • Enable Chat – Allows participants and moderators to chat with each other within the Breakout room and not through the greater webinar console chat feature.

With all these options for connections, organizations can provide the digital networking opportunities audiences crave.

Dive Into the Details with ON24 Marketing Labs

Interested in learning more about ON24 Breakouts? Check out ON24 Marketing Labs, a new monthly webinar series from ON24, to learn more about how you can take your digital experience to the next level.

The Marketing Labs series focuses on short, easily digestible webinars that give participants a back-end, deep-dive look into the features and functionality of ON24’s webinar solutions.

Throughout the series, various product experts will explain a product’s features, show tutorials for how to set it up and offer tips and tricks for getting more out of your ON24-powered digital experiences.

As the featured topic, we’re sharing five different suggestions on how you can set up and use ON24 Breakouts for virtual networking opportunities in your digital events. Just click the banner below to get started.