These days, technology plays a huge role in the success of your event planning; in the corporate, live event and brand world. Not only does it help everyone in the events industry do their job better, it will create an engaging and flawless attendee experience. The meetings and event industry will forever change as improvements in technology make it easier for event planners to engage with their attendees. However, what is not changing is the importance of maintaining consumer engagement throughout your event lifecycle to increase ROI.
Exhibiting at, or throwing a conference, exhibition or corporate event is fantastic to drum up new business, network, gain awareness and generate sales. Yet this is only just the beginning. Once you have decided to organise an event, the next most important thing is ensuring that you have a strategy in place for engaging those that attend – and this is where the hard work really begins.
Finding new and exciting ways to do this is just as integral as the event itself when looking to engage your customers, measure the success and encourage them to come back the year after. A conducted survey found that 48% of professionals believe that attendee satisfaction and event engagement are the most important indicators of event success. If you are looking for ways to engage event attendees, we have put together just a few below.
Your most important attendee experience? Registration. If your registration process is slow, unprofessional or takes a lifetime to complete, then you will quickly lose credibility with your consumers, this could result in them attending your event with a negative impression or worse, not completing the process in the first place. This is easily resolved by using an event software platform that can build a professional and automated registration website. Your customers want a simple, quick and trustworthy experience, there is an abundance of technology out there that can create a seamless, branded experience for your business.
How will people know that your event is happening? You need to draw a crowd, enticing people and generating excitement the first thing you will want to do. Prior to it starting, devising a comms strategy or curating social media campaigns is key to the success and the promotion of your event. Perhaps you can generate an event poll or survey – this will pique interest and encourage people to come to see you on the day. Creating bespoke content in the way of promotional videos is always a great way to engage your audience too, studies show that videos are a consumers’ favorite type of content to see from a brand on social media because it allows you to be concise and capture viewers’ interest in the first few seconds.
Your event is nothing without intelligent, engaging, branded content that can effectively market to your attendees. If you advertise the wrong type of content, people might leave your event feeling like they’ve wasted their time. At an event, you want to not only capture your attendee’s attention but keep it. A video is a great way to get someone interested and entice them in, encouraging them to engage with you, asking questions and hopefully answering them through the clips too. By using comprehensive, state of the art LED screens you can showcase your offering or services in the best quality – also portraying to people your commitment to quality. By creating a survey prior to your event (see above), you can leverage this data to understand your audience better. Track the levels of business titles, age groups and other important demographics attending your event so that you can select and curate the content most appealing to your audience.
Experiential events are a way of taking your event further and engaging your attendees in a way that nothing else quite can match up to. By utilising state of the art motion capture technology, gesture control software and live performers, you can create a fully immersive experience your guests won’t forget in a hurry. Past events have seen a full-scale Lego Technic replica of a Bugatti Chiron built to promote the brand against a backdrop of information on the brand and M & M’s flavour rooms where each room in their event correlated to a certain flavour with cocktails, snacks and scents. These encouraged people to get talking, sharing and visit the stands.
Another great way to engage those attending an event is through games. There are many types of games you can introduce, whether it be more traditional funfair style ones, high-tech games through TV screens, or even virtual reality. These will get people both involved and recommend you to others at the event, enabling your message to spread through word of mouth. Keep a leaderboard of scores and offer prizes or other incentives for those that do the best over the course of the day. Why not consider adding a trivia event that is based on the industry you are in? It could encourage people to get involved, teach them more about your brand and give people a positive takeaway from the event.
Depending on the type of event that you are at, it is likely you are going to want space to network. After all, when else do you get that many people in the same industry as you together in the same room? It is important not to pass up the opportunity to make new connections, drum up business and encourage conversation. It can be an idea to set up a seating area with coffee, water or other refreshments, enticing people in and getting them to sit down and chat. You could print out brochures, have your business reel playing on a screen and have a bowl where people can put their business cards.
This might seem simple in theory, however implementing technology comes with a lot of questions to some businesses. Ask yourself these questions:
These are just a few top ways that you can work to engage attendees. Find ways that will have people talking about you prior to the event, during and after. You want them to be fully immersed in your brand and what you offer, leaving them feeling like they have learnt a lot and got everything they possibly could from the event. If you are looking for a company to elevate your next event and help to engage your attendees, get in touch with us at Bigabox today.
Bigabox Productions are one of the UK’s leading independent, full event production companies, fusing the gap between creativity and technology.
0330 120 1424 | info@bigaboxproductions.co.uk
