The best part of being an event planner can also be the worst. The variety, excitement and increasing responsibility of your job is what you love, but it also can keep you up at night.

It’s very likely that these 5 event planning challenges have led to a few sleepless nights – but read on and learn how to master some of your most difficult event marketing obstacles. 

What if no one shows up? All the event planning you do is for nothing without an audience, so how about a few things to to boost attendance?

Feeling the pressure to provide increasingly sophisticated events for lower budgets? Most event planners are in the same boat, so what if you could do more with less?

Event marketers are often expected to be designer, team lead, marketer, sales and finance experts. Ready to avoid a sure-fire way to overwhelm?

You’ve probably got a bucket load of lead generation, web design, project planning, social media, and team collaboration tools as part of your worklife. How about coordinating them easily all in one place using event planning software?

Wondering how much pipeline was actually created from your last event? Others in your organization likely are too. Here’s how to measure some of that impact.

Event professionals can have it all. Get some balance (and sleep) back in your life by embracing and mastering these event planning challenges.    

Attendease is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for corporate event managers and teams. A modern, feature-rich event management software that enables the management of an entire range of events of all types and sizes.

Event marketers are inevitably stretched for time, with never-ending To-Do lists and limited resources. Under these intense conditions, it’s no surprise that issues arise. Unfortunately, in the running of a successful event, there’s little margin for error. Attendees have high ROI expectations and low tolerance of problems that compromise their experience.

Thankfully, an event automation platform can save the day. Even if you’re a team of one, you can pull off a sophisticated, streamlined event that wows your attendees—all without breaking a sweat. With an event automation platform, you can delegate most of your routine event tasks to the platform and focus instead on functions that contribute to attendee experience, lead generation, and ROI.

The goal of an event automation platform is to simplify the event management process by delegating and automating as many tasks as possible. Automation eliminates time-consuming and error-prone manual processes and ensures a professional event that comes off without a hitch.

Here are some examples of how an event automation platform can help you avoid common event management pitfalls:

If you’d like to see how the Attendease event automation platform can optimize your event registration process—and ensure happy attendees—check out www.eventupplanner.com for a demo.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we examined how to produce an event that is perfectly crafted to fit the needs of your buyer personas, also known as your event attendees. In the second part, we’ll show you how to best serve your overall business marketing strategy using this event planning approach.

Creating an event template that is consistent with your brand priorities

Regardless of how many and what type of event personas you are catering to, you must make sure that your content ultimately tracks back to your event objectives. Partnerships with sponsors, types of exhibitors and the nature of your presenters must all be in keeping with your overall business philosophy and support your position within the marketplace, yet effectively appeal to your target audience and the suggested event sessions, to ensure all the details are aligned.

You should start by thinking about your brand and what it stands for, then build out an event that displays your industry expertise and thought leadership, by offering an assortment of useful take-aways to your attendees.

One of the best examples of this is techsytalk LIVE, the NYC based event tech conference that’s a must for every event planner’s tech conference calendar, offering a broad selection of tech solutions and industry updates. While the conference producers, Liz King Events are not tech vendors, they lead by example, integrating a ton of event tech into their own high end planning services. The conference demonstrates this. It also supports and promotes many people in the event tech industry while reinforcing the strength of LKE’s event planning acumen.

Creating an event budget, by segment, allocating resources in keeping with attendance

Once you understand who your marketing personas are and what sorts of offerings make sense for each of them, you can properly allocate event budgets and resources to support each segment. For example, your conference may be attended by a mix of technical buyers, executives, IT professionals and folks from the business unit. Understanding in detail what each of these groups wants and needs will guide the streams of content you offer each of them, and help you develop separate tracks accordingly, in proportion to the size of the groups. This, in turn, will dictate the types of room set-ups and technical requirements for each track, as well as the corresponding budget allocations to make the whole thing fly.

Developing an event toolkit to cover the technical needs of each of your events

Whether you are planning conferences, user groups, road shows, product launches, trainings, seminars, webinars, sales kickoffs or leadership meetings,  you’ll want to make sure that you have the appropriate event technology and tools to execute on every level. In the best case scenario, your tools will have comprehensive enough capabilities to work for you across a whole suite of events, throughout your entire season. Integrated event platforms such as Attendease offer the ability to be used across multiple segments for a repeatable event process.

Download our Marketing Personas E-Book to learn more about understanding your attendees and creating messaging & content to meet their information needs.

As any experienced event planner or event marketer knows, you must understand the attendees you would like to have at your event, and how you will give them what they want. In other words, you have to be absolutely clear about your buyer personas. Once you understand your different attendees and their needs, you can create the perfect journey through your event for all of them.

How to Find the Best Attendees in the World

First things first. Who are the people to whom all your event marketing efforts are directed? Once you are clear about this, you’ll be well on the way to determining what types of offerings your event must provide, as well as technical requirements, amenities, and entertainment. Understanding your natural audience gives you the resources you need to create the perfect show for them.

You’ll need to be clear about the demographics of your prospective event attendees. This means basic information like age, gender, occupation, lifestyle preferences and geographic location. But you’ll need to dig even deeper. What types of publications do they read, what sort of leisure time activities do they enjoy, what kind of music, food and movies do they like, what kind of clothes do they wear? These all go to giving you a better idea of where you can find them online, and what type of content will generate the most positive response from them.

Defining relevant content and topics of interest to your personas

Event attendees are busy people. If they are going to attend your conference or symposium, then they are expecting valuable and impactful take-aways. Resources for event planners need to encompass the latest industry trends and topics, valuable tools that will enhance their productivity and cutting edge ideas that help to expand their thinking. As an additional benefit, if your target marketing is on point and you identify your personas properly, you will create an opportunity for dynamic networking exchanges between like minded individuals, likely to produce fruitful new business relationships.

Giving your attendees the sessions they really want

At any given event, you will most likely be hosting a variety of different personas, including exhibitors, presenters and attendees who occupy many levels on the decision making chain. You’ll want to make sure that session management reflects the needs and priorities of all of them. Depending on the event set-up, you may want to develop separate tracks of presented content, such as breakout sessions, where people can choose which track they find the most compelling to attend. For example, offering tech panels for the developers and back end programmers in your crowd, top level industry trend data for marketing, sales and branding for executives, and plenty of best practice information for planning and policy professionals.

For more information on how to custom tailor an event for your attendees that meets your business objectives, check out Part 2 of this series!

Download our Marketing Personas E-Book to learn more about understanding your attendees and creating messaging & content to meet their information needs.

One of the best innovations in event tech over the last few years is the advent of event apps as an extension of many event technology platforms. Their mobility and flexibility have made the jobs of both event marketers and event planners much easier. One of the great advantages of event apps is their ability to offer us distinct analytics to help us refine our efforts as we produce our current events and plan more strategically for future events.

Here are the top 7 insights that event app analytics are capable of giving us:

1) How Well You’ve Marketed and Promoted Your App

By monitoring the number of users who’ve downloaded your event app and are actively using it, you’ll know if you did a good job getting the word out. Depending on how many impressions your pages are getting, and how many clicks you receive on each page, you’ll have a sense of how much viewers are actually using it. This reflects on how well you promoted your event app as an all purpose event navigation tool.

2) Attendee Insights

You’ll get a good sense of attendee behavior when you examine which pages they are accessing the most. You’ll get to understand their interests based on which speakers and sponsors catch their attention. You can also learn more about your attendees based on when they use your event app, how often, and for how long – invaluable insights for event planners who are looking ahead to next year…

3) How Attendees Are Participating in Your Event

These are some of the best attendee insights to come out of your mobile event app – the analytics that show which sessions they attended, which Q&A’s they participated in, how they responded to surveys and polls, the notes they took, and how they socialized aspects of the event. You’ll get a ton of information about how attendees interact with all the dimensions of your event, giving you clear signs of what elements are most popular and which can use some improvement.

4) Sponsorship and Advertising ROI

Your event app can provide you with real nuts and bolts information that will help you give important feedback to your sponsors and advertisers. If you can demonstrate with clarity how many sets of eyes are on their ads, how many people are reading their profiles and clicking on their sales and marketing collateral, you’ll be making a case for their continued support for future events. Event marketers take note, you can really benefit from this type of info as you plan future sponsorship campaigns.

5) Real Time Data

By examining who is registering ahead of time for what sessions, what attendees are saying on social media, and how they are connecting with other attendees, you’ll be in a better position to meet their needs. For example, perhaps certain sessions have been overlooked and need a little in the moment advertising, or others may be more popular than expected and require additional seating or other amenities. Your event app can supply you with data that will help you make changes on the fly, to improve the overall experience for your attendees – essential intel for any event planner.

6) Networking Quality

As part of today’s integrated platforms, mobile event apps often have a matchmaking capability that begins well before the actual event. Your attendees will be connecting with one another in anticipation of in-person meetings at the event. You’ll be able to gauge how many people are exchanging contact info, socializing and sharing other types of info such as notes, pictures and other documents. As good networking is a high priority for most event participants, it will help you customize their experience to support the development of these kinds of relationships.

7) Troubleshooting

How much did your attendees access their event app to obtain information and guidance? What kinds of information did they need? Directions or other travel assistance? Did they require some kind of support or report any specific problems? This kind of insight is invaluable in helping you determine how well you’ve implemented your event technology platform in service of a positive user experience for all of your event attendees. 

When planning an event, everything flows from knowing your audience, also known as your buyer personas. With a detailed understanding of what they do for a living, what they do for fun, where they hang out online and in real life, the types of resources they possess and what types of special needs they might have, your in-depth knowledge of your buyer personas will drive all aspects of your event, from ideation to execution. Understanding your buyer personas, you’ll be able to craft a targeted marketing campaign, define content that will be relevant to them, and produce an event that speaks directly to their interests and preferences.

Expanding Our Audiences, Branding and Staying Consistent

Jessica Levin, President and Chief Connector at Seven Degrees Communication, explains how events can be a powerful extension of your branding. “Many brands have wide audiences. It’s not as much about staying on brand as carefully planning messaging and being strategic.”

Our events can be the vehicles for expanding our audiences if we understand the need to be consistent in all phases of planning. As Levin explains, “When targeting a new audience,” it’s important to ask the question, “What value do they bring to your organization and the attendees? What value can you deliver to them?”

By focusing on a high quality value exchange, we offer our attendees a unique buyer’s journey that speaks directly to their needs. When we expand this vision to include an entire season, then we have the opportunity to create a whole suite of events that reach different personas on different levels. These can include conferences, user groups, road shows, product launches, trainings, seminars, webinars, sales kickoffs and leadership meetings. Even with this many offerings, consistency from marketing to execution creates a brand cohesiveness that is difficult to challenge.

The needs of buyer personas always drive content

Most events host a variety of different personas, all of whom must be taken into account during the planning stages. For example, a conference along the lines of Techsytalk LIVE, the NYC-based yearly event tech conference, hosts a good mix of 3rd party planners, agencies, corporate and agency event planners. Session content reflects the needs and priorities of all four of these different personas.

Says Levin, “One event may appeal to many people and those people want to meet each other, but their individual learning needs may differ.” Thus planners will offer separate tracks of presented content geared towards each group of buyer personas in attendance. This commonly takes the form of breakout sessions, where people can choose which track they find most relevant to their particular needs. When an event offers multiple offerings along different tracks, there are definitely opportunities for audience expansion, but again, care must be taken in maintaining consistency.

We all want to create dynamic and exciting events, but even quality content can fall flat if it’s not in line with your buyer personas. Jessica recalled the following situation: “One group I work with created an amazing forum event. Great topic – very timely. But the core audience wasn’t interested. The group didn’t have the right audience in their database, and it didn’t meet the immediate needs of current members. It [the content] had value, but to a new group. They struggled to get attendance at what should have been a very strong program.”

Nuts and Bolts, Buyer Personas and Budgets

It really does pay to do your research up front and understand exactly what your buyer personas want and need in an event. This understanding will define the types of resources you bring to the table, how you allocate your budget, and the kind of tools necessary to execute your vision. Smart planning dictates that you gather as much data about your attendees as possible, beginning with registration and continuing through to the event and its aftermath.

As you come to understand your personas over time, you’ll be able to cultivate your communication and marketing strategy accordingly. This will include how and where you socialize your event and the types of outreach methods you use, and will ultimately connect back to the nature of your event presentations. You’ll want to make sure that you budget appropriately into the sectors of your event that track to the main personas at the heart of your audience.

Building Your Own Event Community

Over time, you’ll be able to develop a community around your events, capable of driving an entire season of offerings. Building an intimate understanding of your buyer personas is at the heart of your ability to explore new horizons within your industry and expand the limits of your engagement. Once again, Levin offers some words of wisdom on the subject:

“At the end of the day events are social. They bring people together, and that’s your best driver of excitement – other people.” An excited group of attendees can elevate your event to a whole other level: “How they help promote it, how they actively participate, how they encourage others to participate. Breaking from the norm helps too. How many events have you been to where you learned nothing? So many events play to a common denominator and then noone is happy.”

In the end, it’s best to listen to your people. “Give people exactly what they are looking for and you’ll blow their minds.”

Contact us to learn more about how Attendease can help you achieve your event objectives.

Corporate event planners tasked with managing robust, multi-event portfolios have to take a different approach to event management than those with only a few events to plan. To avoid gaps and overlaps in meeting corporate objectives and optimize every single event on the schedule, planners have to view the event landscape holistically, taking a number of steps to maximize outcomes and return on investment.

Clearly define objectives for each event. The days of “a good time was had by all” being a good metric for meeting success are long over. Today, corporate meeting planners have to be very specific about the metrics they use to measure success, such as leads, cost per lead, pipeline acceleration or overall event ROI. Setting objectives, defining metrics, and reviewing outcomes will help you make better decisions about events, audiences, and programs in the future.

Plan event types strategically based on your target markets and buyers. While it’s always a good idea to think creatively about the types of events you plan, there are a handful of commonly understood formats designed to appeal to specific audiences. By analyzing your target buyers and applying the event types that will be most effective for them—a meetup vs. an educational summit—you can reach more, better prospects and diversify your event portfolio.

Map event content to your audience personas. If one of your event objectives (and it should be) is to motivate your attendees to take a specific action—buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, become a beta user—then design content and messaging to resonate with each attendee persona during the phase of the buying cycle in which they find themselves (awareness, consideration, decision) when they attend your event.

Create a workflow to capture attendee data across your technology stack. Different technologies capture different types of data. For example, a registration platform is best when it collects contact, demographic, and proposed preference (presentation selections, for example) data. But, a mobile app can capture evaluations, actual attendance (vs. intent to attend), and content downloads. By developing a plan to capture specific data points from different technologies, you can form a more complete picture of your customers.

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Use registration forms to hone in on persona and buying cycle data. Registration software may be the most straightforward opportunity—you ask a question, the registrant answers it—now you have the opportunity to categorize attendees. Be strategic and succinct when asking for event registration data and make sure the answers lead you to the best understanding of who the attendee is and where they are in the marketing and sales funnel.

Develop an integrated event technology stack. No platform can perform every task required of an event marketer. But, an event management platform with most of the features and functionality a marketer needs plus the agility and hooks (standard APIs) to integrate with other best-of breed applications is a reasonable solution.

Focus on creating a repeatable event management process.  Every event is different until it’s not. In other words, content, sponsors, and attendees will likely differ as you plan events in different regions or for different prospect groups, but the event architecture and workflows will stay constant. To reduce the amount of work required and maintain brand consistency across multiple events, it makes sense to create repeatable processes and templates when possible.

Build brand and experience consistency around your events. One way to build the value of your brand and the impact of your events is to attach meaning to them. What your events should mean to attendees is, “if I attend, I will leave with information and contacts that will help me do my job better and/or make my company more competitive.”  That meaning can and should be conveyed through a consistent look and experience across the entire portfolio.

Measure which event types and topics resonate with your audience. Every event should involve a little bit of experimentation—throwing out topics, programming, and activities, the results of which can yield deeper insights on participants. No matter what you plan, make sure that you bake in measurement. Decide from the beginning what to measure and how to measure it so you can take those results to the next event.

Track event ROI and lead scores across your event portfolio. The question on every CMO’s mind is, “what was the conversion of the leads did we get from that event and what did it cost?” To answer that question, adopt processes, objectives, and technology that collects and scores lead data throughout the entire event life cycle starting from registration and ending with a healthy deposit of qualified leads into your company’s CRM.

Managing a multi-event portfolio requires a professional approach, skill, and technology tools designed to interpret corporate strategy, automate workflows, and generate data and results across the entire event-marketing program. If you’ve discovered how to get visibility for your corporate event marketing initiatives and made a decision to plan as many events as your budget will allow, go the last mile and lock down the strategy and the platform that makes it all possible.  

Contact us to learn more about how Attendease can help you achieve your event objectives.

Companies that organize events do so because they’ve discovered that face-to-face events enable a subset of opportunities better than any other marketing or sales channels. When those opportunities are valued by the organization, it makes sense strategically to organize as many events as possible. Understanding those specific opportunities helps event marketers devise a strategy to manage more events better.  

We know from research and personal experience that meeting people in person is more impactful, memorable, and motivational than reading their books or tweets or email. It’s even more powerful than speaking with them on the telephone. So, when companies value making an impact or gaining the mindshare of customers, it makes sense to engage them in person (and for economic reasons) at an event.   

Events that cater to the very specific needs and desires of a group of customers and prospects, i.e. persona-driven events, provide event marketers with the rare ability to gather information and contextualize behaviors in a way that is not possible using other methods. Event marketers wanting to derive an even deeper understanding of an audience can accomplish that goal with a niche live event.

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By design, corporate events deliver captive audiences of pre-qualified individuals. In other words, no business-to-business event ever threw open its doors; provided education, food and beverages; and offered access to other like-minded peers for just anyone that happened to be free those days. Because of this pre-qualification, sales teams armed with effective lead capture tools can accelerate the sales cycle with events.   

Lead generation from events is the Holy Grail for marketers. Attendees behave—attend presentations, network with peers, participate in activities—as a reflection of their interests. When these behaviors are captured and analyzed (scored) methodically, they can be used to qualify buyers, develop more targeted marketing campaigns, and close sales. More events broaden the data pool from which these insights can be derived.

Corporate events are important channels for delivering information to prospects and customers without overloading them or having to compete with other companies. Events become even more valuable when messaging is designed to reach specific buyer types at strategic stages of the buying cycle.  More events help event marketers reach a broader swath of customers with carefully crafted content.

It’s generally understood that, provided the company and products are of high quality, more leads deliver more sales. A lesser-known fact is that more events can deliver more leads. To truly take advantage of the more events = more leads sales formula, event marketers have to employ strategies—from lead generation to data collection to content design—that address the unique benefits of face-to-face events.  

Contact us to see how we can help you change the way you create and manage your events.