Know Exactly What You Hope to Gain from the Corporate Event
One of the first stages in the planning process is determining exactly what you hope to gain from the corporate event. What you hope to accomplish with the event plays an important role in who is invited, event promotion, sponsorship, and even location. Possible event goals include:
- Brand/product awareness
- Customer retention and appreciation
- Brand engagement
- Establishing stronger relationships with investors
- Brand positioning
- Employee satisfaction and retention
- Product/brand education
- Increased revenue
- Lead generation
- Increase of MQL's & SQL's
- Establish a strong brand culture
It's not unusual for corporations and business managers to get together and create a list of event-related goals they want to meet during the upcoming months. They use the business objectives to determine the types of corporate events they wish to have. These events usually consist of one or a combination of the following:
Every time you work on another aspect of the corporate event, you should ask yourself how that particular aspect helps the event meet the end goal. Are you struggling with defining a corporate event goal or aren't sure how to go about creating a corporate event that achieves that goal? Feel free to request a free consultation, and we'll provide you with assistance. Indeed, it's needed to create exactly the type of event that helps your company grow.
It's Never too Soon to Start Promoting Your Corporate Event
Concert promoters and for-profit event directors know that the best way to maximize event revenue is early promotion. The sooner they start selling tickets, the better the overall sales are. The same is true of your corporate event. It doesn't matter if you're selling tickets to raise money as part of non-profit fundraiser, hosting a customer appreciation event, or taking part in a conference or trade show, the sooner you start promoting your involvement with the event, the better the attendance will be, and you'll maximize your event's ROI.
The best early promotion strategy is marketing the event to loyal customers and encouraging them to share the event via word-of-mouth and social media.
Networking and Experiential Marketing Improve Attendance and Sales
The great thing about using a corporate event to grow your business is that it provides you with ample opportunities to reach new members of your target market via networking, and social media platforms are the best way to market before, during, and after the event.
It's in your best interest to promoting the event way in advance. You want to get people excited about attending. The early promotion involves more than simply sponsoring a post that gives the details of the event. Make the event personal. Post updates about the guest list and itinerary, offer behind the scenes glimpses of what goes into the corporate event planning process, ask your fans for suggestions. You don't want to simply let people know about the corporate event, you want them to actively engage with you. Networking and experiential marketing are the most economical and effective methods for promoting corporate events.
Likes on Social Media Lead to Attendees
Happily, there are some things you can do to encourage consumers who "like" the event on social media to actually attend the corporate event. One of the reasons people who express interest in your corporate event is because after clicking like, they forget about the event. Facebook created Facebook Checkout to help. What Facebook Checkout does is invite interested parties to purchase tickets to your corporate event directly through Facebook. A Brisbane beer festival started using Facebook Checkout and experienced a 10% growth in ticket sales.
There are always going to be people who want to attend the corporate event, but who simply are unable to. Rather than leaving them out, let them feel like they're thereby creating a live-streaming system available on social media. Make sure you make the live-stream shareable. Livestreaming is more valuable than you might think. According to Thirdteam.org live-streaming not only helps you engage with a much larger audience and leads to a significant revenue increase.
Following the event, use social media to encourage guests to share their photos and experiences. Post-Event marketing builds hype for your next corporate event.
Set up Videos on Demand
One of the newest ways businesses can use corporate events to help build their business is video-on-demand. In the past, videos have been a great form of persuasion marketing, but now they can help generate interest and create a loyal fan base long after a corporate event. Videos on Demand can feature an assortment of content, everything from showing talks given during trade shows/conferences, backstage footage of splashy corporate events, the old live-stream of events, and more. Set up the VoD content so that your audience can choose when and what they want to view. Make sure the content is shareable, and invite people to leave comments about the videos.
Make sure you occasionally use social media to promote your video-on-demand channel.
Create Corporate Events that Appeal to Baby Boomers
If company growth is the event's goal, it's in your best interest to create one baby boomers love. Eventbrite conducted a study that revealed that 59% of all baby boomers preferred to spend money on a memory-making event than on items that simply cluttered up their homes. Marketing to baby boomers can pay off. The same study revealed that over half of all baby boomers happily spend $100 yearly attending events, and 15% will spend over $500 on corporate events. The types of events that really attract baby boomers are:
- Fundraisers for non-profits
- Events that promise fun
- Educational events
Baby boomers are surprisingly adept at using social media, making it an excellent way to promote your event to baby boomers. The trick is phrasing your posts so that they appear in the proper searches.
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