There’s more to the event planning business than ordering flowers, putting up signage, or picking out the right caterer—everyone knows that. The most efficient way to keep an eye on the prize is to ensure that your event strategy remains results-driven. The easiest way for event profs to stay on track with their strategy is using event tech.
That goes alongside negotiating with various schedules, coordinating with sponsors, and managing your attendees’ experience, you must make sure that the event will achieve your objectives. This can be challenging since ROI for the event planning business is typically hard to prove. So, how do event profs know if their event was a success or not?
Technology such as social media analysis, event apps for attendee management, and beacon tracking have made analytics more available, but that’s not where the real work begins—or ends for that matter. There are logistics you must study when you are making sure that your event and your tech are fixated on driving results for you and your event planning business.
For those times when the results of your efforts get lost in the utter effort of managing events, we deliver the 3-step plan to drive results in the event planning business.
Step One: Establish Your Event Planning Business Goals
The crucial first step is deciding why you’re holding this event. Some meetings have very clear goals in the event planning business, but at times the message isn’t clear. For example, at a product launch the goal is probably brand recognition and sales. Yet events like an annual meeting have several moving parts and the objective varies. So, you must know those contextual details when you’re defining your event goals.
Still, that doesn’t mean that you should disregard the first step for meetings which may seem to have obvious goals. It’s crucial to define your goals in the context of every event: hence ‘event strategy.
Step Two: Establish Your Method
Obviously, the next step contains laying out the plan that will lead you to achieve the specific goals of your event.
Having a crystal-clear idea of those goals is crucial to your capacity to properly (and in detail) establish your methods. It’s not necessary to invest in an entirely new tool for each separate goal, but it is imperative to deliberate how to best use your present tools in the context of that particular event and event strategy.
For example, to offer ways for attendees to effortlessly communicate with one another, it might be as simple as setting up internal messaging, creating a hashtag, or creating in-app discussion forums so that attendees can easily find one another on social media. If your attendees are already persuaded to interact with one another, you may only need to share info about those systems and then allow your attendees to take it from there.
Doing the footwork to break the ice and get your audience started with using these channels will inspire them to continue as the event goes on.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Success
Setting up your goals and methods isn’t the end of the matter though. Once you’ve decided on your goals and how to achieve them, you must establish ways to identify that you have succeeded.
Event tech can provide your event planning business with the data you need to realize the impact of your events. Analytics on what engaged your attendees most, attendee behavior, and what guests found most valuable, gives your event planning business incredible insight as to what worked and what didn’t. In order to make use of this data, it’s vital that you set your standards of evaluation prior to the event, so that you can measure your success later.
Planning measures of success before your event begins ensures that you have the means to track your progress and safeguards that your goals are realistic, measurable, and aligned with your event strategy.
With this 3-step plan for an event planning business to organize result-driven event strategies, you can make sure that your event uses all the existing tech tools to create, achieve, and measure your event’s success. When you know the results that you’re looking for are directly tied to satisfying your goals, you can rest assured that your objectives will be met during your events.
If you’re an Event Planner who specializes in event marketing, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact us to be featured on our blog as a guest blogger that can contribute a valuable article for event professionals.
