Events are an excellent way to promote your business. While the main purpose is connecting with customers, there is a whole range of other reasons why you should host events. Attending or organising events gives you the opportunity to connect with other businesses too as well as to generate leads, increase brand awareness, network, etc.
Hosting an event gets you exposure and that is invaluable. However, planning, promoting, and executing an event can be a lot of work and it’s easy to overlook details that might be crucial for the success of your event. In order to use events to grow your business, you need to learn about some successful tactics to help you plan a great event.
Know Your Audience
Hosting an event is demanding, time-consuming, and expensive. You don’t want to go through all that trouble only to be disappointed with the results. A successful event will help you grow your business and in order to host a successful event, you must know your audience. You need to do thorough research in order to discover what your audience really needs and then deliver appropriate content to meet their needs at the event.
Give Your Audience Something Unique
It’s all about event strategy. What do you offer that people can’t get elsewhere? A great event is meaningful, authentic and gives something to the audience that others can’t provide.
When hosting an event, it is important that you provide a unique experience, something of value that they can’t get elsewhere. One of the ways to achieve that is by inviting a celebrity guest or a visiting expert who can share useful ideas, tips, etc. The choice is yours and it depends on the size of your business and your budget, of course.
Show Them Your Personality
People like seeing the human side behind an organisation. Putting a face to the name from that email helps them connect with you on a personal level. Your business, just like you, should have a personality and you should aim to show that personality at your next event. This is especially important for organisations that conduct most of the business online. It’s a chance to connect with your audience and show them that you’re human, just like them.
If you are not sure about your business’s personality, think of it as a person. If it were a human, what kind of person would it be? The market is too competitive, as you already know, and nobody remembers the boring brands (or boring people). This is important for building your brand and increasing brand recognition as well. You should aim to use every possible tactic to differentiate your brand from others.
Have a Goal
What do you wish to achieve with this upcoming event? Attract sponsors? Connect with other businesses? Attract more potential customers? Before you set out to plan the entire thing, set a goal for your event. Sure, driving sales is one of the most common purposes of hosting an event but perhaps you need to establish long-term connections with customers and businesses. Know your priorities and work on that.
Start Promoting Your Event in Time
Without marketing, all your effort to host a terrific event might be in vain. That is why it is essential to start spreading the word about your upcoming conference, trade show or whatever event you’re hosting. Use as many ways to do that as possible. Start with your email list and send emails to your subscribers to inform them about the event, post on social media to remind your followers about the meetup, use hashtags, etc.
There are countless ways for you to promote your event and again, it depends on your budget. You can also consider paid ads on Facebook and other social media networks. Whatever channels you use, make sure that you start promoting the event in time. It’s never too early to start your event marketing campaign. In cases of annual events, marketing experts suggest you should start promoting your next year’s event while this year’s event is still happening.
Hire an Event Planner
Because planning and executing a successful event is a bit of a challenge that requires not only time but also expertise, it’s always a good idea to hire someone to do that for you, especially if you want this event to be the first step to growing your business.
Hiring an event planner will take the pressure off as they can do all the work with minimal supervision. Meanwhile, you are left with a lot of free time to focus on other things. Remember that they are experts in their field and will be more careful not to overlook the details.
These tactics are nothing new; however, it is very easy to overlook them, especially if you’re new at hosting events. Therefore, focus on the important things and start planning early!
