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It’s officially conference season, and after a few years of canceled seminars and completely virtual events, the return of the in-person conference is finally here. Conferences are the perfect place to learn about new industry trends, gain connections, and generate sales leads, so it’s essential to know how to prepare.
When you’re hosting a conference, one of the most impactful ways to prepare is to set up your team with digital business cards.
Why use digital business cards instead of paper cards at conferences?
Everything is going digital, from currency to digital signatures to business cards. The move towards a more digital world is making everyday tasks easier, more cost-effective, and more eco-friendly.
HiHello is one of the pioneering digital business card platforms and is the top-rated digital business card app for individuals and teams. HiHello’s cards are fully customizable, include a robust feature set, and can aid in lead generation, making them a huge marketing asset for any event.
Still weary about going digital? Here is why digital business cards are the best choice for your business at conferences and beyond.
1. You can create, update, and use digital cards instantly—no shipping required.
Sometimes business cards are an afterthought in the days leading up to an event. Instead of creating and ordering last-minute paper cards for your team or C-suite (and paying the hefty price of overnight shipping), digital cards allow you to make, edit, and share cards almost immediately. Edits to cards are updated in real-time, so any last-minute typos or information changes will reflect instantly on your team’s cards.
Card edits are live as well—when someone from your team exchanges business cards with another HiHello user, any edited information will automatically update in the receiver’s contact list.
2. You can create specific cards for different use cases.
A problem with paper business cards is they are one-size-fits-all, but how you represent your brand changes based on the audience. You curate your marketing materials to each audience and medium, and your team’s business cards should be too. With digital business cards, you can easily create and manage a card for every situation. Have a card for events, sales leads, employee prospects, C-suite, and more. With a digital business card subscription, you can create multiple business cards, so your team can represent the best of your brand, perfectly curated with whom they are interacting.
3. Digital business cards can increase lead generation by 14x.
HiHello found that people are 14 times more likely to follow up when they receive a digital business card. That’s no surprise—with fewer than 20% of paper business cards making it into a contact list and less than 3% leading to an actual sale, generating sales leads with traditional paper business cards is an uphill battle. However, when your team networks with digital business cards, your company's contact information is integrated right prospective lead’s workflow, eliminating any friction.
Not only will you be able to gain more leads, but you’ll be able to better organize and manage them too. HiHello Business and HiHello Enterprise come equipped with a corporate address book with direct integrations with Google Contacts, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Salesforce, HubSpot, and support for third-party integrations through Zapier.
4. You can monitor your team’s connections and gain real-time insight into your card analytics.
It’s nearly impossible to measure attribution and ROI using paper cards. HiHello offers built-in app analytics and is the only digital business card platform with native Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics integrations, giving you insight into how people use and interact with your team’s business cards.
5. Digital cards contribute to a more sustainable future.
Making choices to reduce our impact on the world is at the top of mind for consumers and businesses. By switching to digital business cards, your brand is doing its part to protect the environment from deforestation, decrease your organization's carbon footprint, and reduce water consumption. Look below to see how HiHello users have helped over the last year. (Curious to see what your company’s sustainability savings could be? Contact our sales team.)
Hosting an event? Here’s how to set up HiHello for your team.
You’re hosting an event and want to set up your team with digital business cards. That’s great, but what comes next? While you can make HiHello cards on the go, we recommend setting them up at least a couple of weeks before your big event.
Here’s what you need to do to get your team conference-ready with digital business cards.
1. Sign up for HiHello Business or Enterprise
HiHello has two plans for teams: HiHello Business and HiHello Enterprise.
HiHello Business is an excellent tool for small-to-medium-sized businesses looking to attract new customers, conduct seamless follow-ups, and represent their brand across all channels.
HiHello Enterprise is designed for medium-to-large organizations and is the only digital business card platform of its kind specifically for enterprises. With SOC 2 Type II compliance, single sign-on integrations, active directory integrations, onboarding assistance, and more, HiHello Enterprise is the most robust and secure digital business card platform on the market.
Not sure which plan is right for you? Contact HiHello’s sales team, and they’ll help find the perfect solution for your team.
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2. Think about the information you want on your cards
Gone are the days of fitting all your information onto a 2x3.5 inch piece of paper. With digital business cards, you’ll have room for as much information as you’d like.
Once you have a HiHello Business or HiHello Enterprise account, it’s time to start thinking about what information you want to include on your team’s cards, in addition to basic contact information. A few options include:
- Profile video
- Pronouns
- Embedded YouTube or Vimeo videos
- Calendar links
- PDFs
- … and more.
You can see a complete list of fields in this Ultimate Guide to Digital Business Cards.
3. Create and distribute cards to your entire team
HiHello automates your entire business card process, from creation to distribution. Your administrators can create and manage your entire team’s digital business cards. After making templates, admins can create cards, invite users, manage editing and sharing access, and more.
Instead of manually creating cards for each employee, admins have the option to accelerate the card creation and distribution process:
1. Create a template
HiHello Business and HiHello Enterprise admins can create card templates to help expedite the card creation process. Create a single, universal template and then customize the specifics for each employee (or give each employee edit access, and they can add in their contact information themselves).
2. Sync with Active Directory
HiHello Enterprise admins also have the option of syncing their account with Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory), allowing them to create cards in bulk for each group.
3. Upload a spreadsheet
HiHello Enterprise admins can bulk upload a spreadsheet with employee information. HiHello’s Customer Success Team will work with you to ensure your spreadsheet is filled out correctly to ensure seamless card creation.
4. Share with anyone, anywhere, anytime
Now that your cards are in your team’s hands, it’s time to start sharing. How you share your digital business card isn’t limited to just one medium. Share your business cards with virtual backgrounds for online events or with a QR code, link, text, email, iMessage, Apple Watch, Apple Wallet, widgets, or NFC for in-person events.
Here are guides you can distribute to your team on how they can share their cards:
- How To Send a Digital Business Card
- How To Create an NFC Card
- How To Exchange Digital Business Cards
- How To Share Your Business Card with an Apple Watch
- How To Add Your Digital Business Card to Apple Wallet
- How To Add the HiHello Widget on Android
- How To Add the HiHello Widget on iOS
- How To Send a Business Card with iMessage
How to use HiHello post-conference
The conference is over, but it’s not time to sit back and relax. The first few days post-conference are crucial. Conversations are still fresh, and the excitement is still high, which means now is the time to reflect on the past few hours or days and take action.
1. Look at the leads generated
When your team shares HiHello, contacts made will automatically be added to your corporate address book or your company CRM. Integrate HiHello with Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Contacts, Microsoft Exchange, or a third-party CRM through Zapier to manage all the new leads your team generates.
The best time to follow up with leads is in the first few days after an event. With digital business cards, your team can quickly track the most important contacts using tags and add personal details in contact notes to create a more personalized outreach.
2. Dig into the data
Use HiHello’s built-in card analytics, or measure your team’s reach with HiHello’s Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager. You can find how many people viewed your team’s cards and how many of those people saved their cards. Use this data to help determine the ROI of the event. Did your team generate enough new leads? Did you get an introduction to a great new vendor?
3. Measure sustainability impact
Every digital business card shared is one paper business card saved. By using digital business cards, your team is helping to fuel the positive environmental impact of less paper produced, water consumed, carbon released, and waste created. To determine the impact your team has on the environment post-event, contact your CSM, and they can help you determine your environmental savings.
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Main photo by Headway on Unsplash
