Whether you’re planning a corporate meeting, a large convention, an intimate affair, or even an outdoor festival, event planners have a lot on their plate! To make things a little easier, we’ve put together five best practices that can help any planner start off on the right foot.
1. Set Event Marketing Goals
99% of the time, you’ll know the ultimate goal of the event, whether it’s to demo new products, inspire or train a team, or raise money. Your goal, then, should be to determine the best way to market it to attract attendees (if there is no pre-set invite list) and capture their attention. After all, you don’t want to wind up like Liz Elfman. She shared the following horror story with Eventbrite: “I took on organizing an event with two large corporations. The subject matter was really interesting—cyber security and hacking. But, the event had a wordy, vague title that would put anyone to sleep … in the end, 18 people showed up [in a space reserved for 200]. It was my own personal nightmare sitting there watching these presentations in a sea of empty chairs. Since then, I’ve realized quality content and a great event aren’t enough to drive people to attend. How are people supposed to know it’s great before they show up?! Now I always put as much effort into the marketing, messaging and communication as the logistics so the organizers get the audience they deserve.”
Today, 92% of American adults have a cell phone, and 81% of Americans have a social media profile on one of the popular sites. So, event planners will want to focus most of their attention on digital marketing.
With that in mind, who is the audience? You’ll want to consider age, occupation, and interests and hobbies. For very targeted or niche events, you may also need to consider gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, or political affiliation as this can help you zero in on the right website and social sites to advertise with. And when it comes to social, remember different audiences gravitate toward different sites. For example, millennials and Gen Z are more active on Instagram, whereas Gen X and Boomers on more likely to be found on Facebook.
2. Use Project Management Tools
Whether it’s an event for 500 or 50,000, event planning requires an extreme amount of organizational and time-management skills. Sure, you may have a staff working with you or have an external expert on-hand in a number of critical areas (venue support, event production, catering, etc), but no event planner should be without a robust project management tool (and no, Evite and the like don’t count; those are primarily for small, private affairs).
Proper event management software allows you to accomplish an array of things with little effort, including the creation of:
- An event landing page with built-in payment processing, analytics, and support.
- An event planning checklist, enabling you to organize and prioritize tasks as they are accomplished.
- An event app, enabling management and tracking of sales with real-time reporting from any device.
We recently highlighted some great event management software, check out our story The 8 Best Event Management Software Tools.
3. Think Outside the Box and Get Experiential
A little ingenuity goes a long way when it comes to attendee engagement. Let’s face it, the events and meetings of yesterday were usually pretty dull affairs. All you needed was four walls, rows of chairs, a stage, a pipe and drape backdrop, and voila! You were ready for your event. While this approach was no doubt much easier to execute, it likely turned off a lot of people. Today, event planners have much more unique and exciting experiential methods of engaging attendees, including:
- LED and Social Media Walls. Get attendees absorbing content visually. These can be shaped, curved, and scaled to match any event aesthetic or venue.
- 3D Projection Mapping. Forget the flat screen, project onto irregular-shaped surfaces for wow the audience.
- Virtual and Augmented Reality. Let people “experience” a product with VR, or use AR to augment the real world with computer-generated images.
We recently highlighted these and other great ways to make your next event experiential. Check out our story How to Make Your Next Event Experiential.
4. Have an Attendee-First Mentality
Pleasing your client is important, but ultimately, they want you to please their guests! So, event planners need to have an attendee-first mentality from beginning to end, engaging before, during, and after the event.
Pre-Event Engagement
- Promote on social media to build excitement, and check out companies such as Everwall which will collect posts related to your event and can post directly to your site.
- Send countdown emails as the event approaches with new information in each, such as agenda updates, new speakers, etc.
At-Event Engagement
- Social media walls. Keep your social media campaign going with social media walls displayed on video screens or projected onto walls.
- Instagram stations. A dedicated photo-taking space gets attendees involved and gets your event promoted for free on the social site.
- Table teams. Get people to open up by turning tables into teams and occasionally pitting them against one another; friendly competition is always great for building camaraderie.
- Crowd polling. People love to voice their opinion, so use polling apps, devices, and plugins to conduct live polls during presentations.
- Networking events. Networking can intimidate some attendees, so prepare some ice-breaker activities to bring them out of their shell beforehand.
Post-Event Engagement
- Email guests a thank you message and direct them to a website where they can access presentation decks, view photos, purchase event swag, leave feedback, and take a survey
5. Use Quality Audio and Visual Equipment
No matter the type or size of the event, quality audio and visual are critical to engage visually and communicate effectively. Your needs may vary, but for most events you’ll want one or all of the following items:
- Microphones (wireless, lavalier, catchbox throwable mic, podium, push-to-talk)
- Projectors
- Speakers (small or large format)
- Digital audio mixers
- Lighting (gobos, uplighting, projection lighting, spotlights, intelligent lighting)
- Video recording and live streaming
- Screens and monitors for digital signage
While the venue may offer these services, the equipment may be of low quality or even damaged from usage at previous events. In addition, it may be complicated to operate, and last-minute snafus are known to happen especially if you depend on their staff who may be poorly skilled.
So, when it comes to AV, bringing in an expert event production company is a necessity. That’s where we come in. We’re an event production company boasting a comprehensive understanding of the latest technologies, and with a diverse set of rental options to accommodate audiences both large and small, indoors and outdoors. We provide state-of-the-art equipment, and will even operate it during your event so you have one less thing to worry about. Want to learn more? Contact us today!
