4 Strategies for better Event Management and Marketing in 2022
The demand for comprehensive and reliable event management solutions is expected to soar in 2022. This is due to events becoming an integral element in marketing strategies for many businesses.
Live corporate events have proven to be the best platform for both B2B and B2C marketing efforts. In fact, the Corporate Event Trends for 2020 Report revealed that live events make the largest contribution to many corporate entities in terms of achieving their business goals.
More and more organizations are now aware of the advantages of hosting events. It boosts marketing performance and yields desired results, if not better.
This is evident in the projected growth of the event management software market. The industry is currently valued at $5.7 billion. According to a 2019 study by Research and Markets, the said figure will balloon to $11.4 billion by 2024, a staggering 15% growth in just five years.
The strategies listed below come from experts who have extensive experience and skills in event planning and organization. Their inputs are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. But they will help you make a good start on your investment and maximize the full potential of your event management software.
1. Determine And Target Your Audience
Who is your audience? That is a key question you need to ask yourself after you define your goals. But more than just finding out what type of people will find your event appealing, identifying your audience makes it easy for you and your team to communicate with them. Forgoing who your audience should be and concentrating on other things is one of event production mistakes you don’t want to be doing.
You can segment your audience by age, location, occupation, hobbies, and interests. If you want to reach out to a very targeted niche, you can specify your audience. Target them in terms of sexual orientation, race, political affiliation, and so on. By defining the audience you want to attract, you can zero in on places, websites, and social media channels where they might be.
Segmentation allows for your effective targeting. This means you and your events team can create and implement a more personalized approach. Therefore, you can send them communication that contains relevant messages to which they are more inclined to respond and interact. And when they do, you just know how to keep them engaged and interested, and ultimately convince them to become a part of your event.
2. Event Management Is All About Aligning Goals Across Different Teams
It is important that goals are shared and aligned across different teams. Sure, the events team have different functions and tasks as opposed to the people who are assigned with sales and marketing. But having the same goals empowers different teams and individuals to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate their efforts to achieve their desired results.
The absolute alignment of sales and marketing teams motivates her people to work collectively as a unit. It also helps on channeling their energy and expertise in realizing the same goals. Well executed, it makes and delivers exclusive and personalized experiences to a highly curated audience.
Aside from sharing the same goals across different individuals and departments, equally important is to make those goals measurable. Goals that can’t be quantified and gauged will make it hard for teams to comprehend. Make it as easy as possible for them to understand how impactful and successful (or not) their events are. It is essential that you attach relevant KPIs (key performance indicators) to every main objective. So, you and your team can monitor its progress and evaluate its performance.
Equally important is the budgeting aspect. Hosting events can be quite challenging in terms of budgeting as unplanned expenses do occur from time to time. Partnering your event management software with a budgeting software will help you determine viable budgets for every event and keep unplanned costs down to a minimum. You may want to check out a best budgeting software solutions list to go along with your event management platform.
ClickUp is a powerful project management platform with hundreds of features designed to help event teams seamlessly coordinate events, collaborate with clients, manage budgets, and more—all in one place. Its intuitive UI, automation capabilities, and real-time reporting help event planners create clear event timelines and easily delegate responsibilities. Its rich set of features makes ClickUp the perfect event management solution, even on its Free Forever plan.
3. Go Social
Almost every person on the planet is on social media. That’s why you need to integrate your online event management system with popular social media platforms. Those include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. According to 2019 social media statistics by the Global Digital Report, there are 3.484 billion active social media users. Of that number, 3.256 billion consume social media using their mobile devices.
There are many ways you can utilize social media for events management. You can segment your audience and send them targeted messages via their most frequented social media channels. Also, through event apps for mobile, which greatly improves the probability of them responding.
You can create event pages where your followers can go to for updates and developments. As well, provide them with a channel for effortless communication. In most cases, you can embed your online event management website into your social media accounts. Buying Instagram followers can improve the social credibility of your account, which is critical when promoting your event. As well, provide a link so people can easily go and register for your event in a flash.
To further promote your event, you can ask your subscribers to include your event’s hashtag on their comments, tweets, and posts. People feeling any interest in going to your event can easily share your pages, posts, and news with their circle, thus promoting your event to potential attendees.
Identify possible ambassadors
You can determine who among your audience has the widest reach and ask him or her to become an ambassador for your event. Social media listening tools help you collect mentions, posts, comments, and tweets about your events and discover opportunities to further widen your reach and attract more people.
Social media is also a good source of information for post-event evaluation. Posts, comments, and tweets regarding your events are gathered and categorized as positive or negative, providing you insights into actual customer experience and help you find areas for improvement, which will then help you deliver better experiences in future events.
4. Create an Exclusive Community for Attendees
Marketing strategist Stephen Kim tells event planners and organizers to empower attendees to create relationships among themselves. Do it by providing them with a venue where they can come together and discuss things regarding your event way before the actual date. For them, an exclusive community allows them to engage and interact. As attendees know more about each other, they become a close-knit of people. Thus, you form a community who bond over the same interests and expectations. This makes the event more rewarding when it arrives.
For event planners, marketers, and organizers, an exclusive community provides them front-row access to information and actionable insights. You know what they want and what they expect and you consider that information into your overall event management strategy. By delivering tailored experiences the way your participants expect and then more, you make your event a major highlight of their lives. From a business perspective, that’s a huge win.
5. Maximize ROI choosing the right your Event Management Software provider.
Investing in the best event management software is becoming more of a necessity rather than an option for many business corporations. This is one of the biggest event management trends to gain traction when 2022 comes.
But even the best can’t generate handsome results if users don’t utilize the software to its full effect. With the aforementioned expert strategies, you can maximize your event management solution and get the most value out of your investment.
Event management FAQs for virtual and hybrid events
What you need to know about hybrid events
Hybrid events, by definition, are in-person events with a virtual component. This means that the event may occur at a particular venue with speakers presenting from a central location and attendees joining the event from various locations. Hybrid events could also go the other way, with attendees congregating from a specific area while speakers present from multiple locations.
Keep your audience engaged
To host a successful hybrid event, you need to keep your virtual audience and your live audience engaged. This essentially means that you will need to create two different engagement strategies. What might work for your live audience might not work for your virtual audience and vice versa.
In-person audiences are more forgivable. They have the option of networking with other attendees, which tend to be beneficial to their business, and bathroom and coffee break where there may be intermission in-between various activities.
Technology
Thoroughly think about the virtual aspect of your event. There are certain technologies, like the AV (audiovisual) components, that you may need to ensure that your event is being streamed without interruption. In the virtual world, dead air is one of the worst things that your audience may encounter, and for this reason, you want to have a meticulous flow to your virtual program.
How do you deliver hybrid events?
Be strategic
Determine why you are hosting a hybrid event and what the best outcomes are, then work your way back from your ideal results to find the best ways to attain those
Set a budget
Budgets are imperative to the success of any event. It helps guide your decisions regarding what you can spend, and it forecasts your return in terms of profits.
Take a look at our Ultimate Event Budget Guide for Virtual & Hybrid events for a step-by-step guide to building an event budget.
Choose a platform
Over the past few years, hybrid event platforms have become more popular, and as a result, more and more hybrid event platforms have been introduced to the market.
If you’re having trouble choosing a platform, here’s our list of the 10 Best hybrid event platforms to host your events.
Get sponsors and partners
Sponsorships and partnerships have proven imperative to events as they can elevate your hybrid event. The right sponsor or partner can help upgrade your event venue or your marketing budget, increasing your audience capacity and potentially increasing your profit.
For this reason, it is crucial to build a captivating sponsorship proposal for hybrid events.
Find a venue that caters to hybrid events
Not all event venues have the capability to host a hybrid event. The technological aspect of hosting a hybrid event alone may narrow down your choices drastically. For this reason, it is essential to consider your options in your region or intended region.
We’ve created the Top 5 Venue Selection Criteria for Hybrid Events if you don’t know where to start.
Plan your program
Once you have planned your program, you can check the availability of your intended speakers and start to book them well in advance.
Once you secure your speakers, you can start marketing your event.
Market your event
This is one of the most crucial steps to delivering hybrid events. You need to ensure that your intended audience knows about your upcoming event. Take advantage of event marketing for your hybrid event. Event marketing uses experiences and events as a marketing channel to promote a brand, service, or product.
Promote the event through different channels including the press release template. The better your marketing strategy is, the better your results will be.
Take a look at our Event Marketing Guide for event strategy, examples, and ideas.
How do you make a hybrid event successful?
Successful hybrid events depend primarily on what your KPIs are for each event. Remember, event professionals, treat the event’s in-person and virtual components as two separate events. For each event, the KPIs will be different.
Start with your analytics. The benefit of hosting a hybrid event is that you can track the numbers from the start of the marketing funnel until the end of the customer’s journey.
Take a deep dive into measuring event ROI (return-on-investment) for virtual and hybrid events.
How do you prepare for a virtual event?
To prepare for a virtual event, you need to have rehearsals. Rehearsals allow you to iron out the potential kinks in your hybrid event planning.
With a hybrid event rehearsal, you can test your internet connection, equipment, sound, lighting, and other AV components, like streaming.
Rehearsals will give your speakers time to familiarize themselves with the platform and the program, and it is a great place to create rapport among the speakers.
How do you keep virtual events engaging?
With Zoom fatigue on the rise, it is imperative to keep your audience engaged.
Many people forget that webinars and virtual events are different for this exact reason. Webinars usually require the audience to come in and watch, while virtual events require more active participation.
For this reason, it is advised to select a platform that offers multiple engagement channels.
Tools to increase virtual event engagement
- Live polling to get attendees to engage with speakers in real-time
- Big emojis in the virtual lobby chat
- Live studio options to enhance streaming by adding animations, lower thirds, chyrons, and
- Custom and virtual backgrounds
- Surveys for event feedback
- An interactive feed for posts, pictures, videos, likes, and comments
- File sharing and the download of documents
- On-demand content for post-event engagement
- A contact center attendees can dial into for event questions and follow-ups
Want to boost your results? Start using InEvent today!
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