Ep 029. Making the most of in-person events as part of your strategy

In-person events are looking likely to be coming back this year, thank goodness; it’s reassuring to see audiovisual companies and venues starting to gear up to get full and busy again.

It’s tempting right now to go ‘hell yes!’ Let’s have an event! Everyone is desperate for interaction, but events are costly, so it’s important to think about your end goal when setting out to raise your profile through an in-person event.

I cannot wait to get back to events, and I am also considering having one of my own this year. But people will increasingly want more value from attending I think, so how do you put on an event that has your business goals at its heart whilst delivering value to your potential and existing customers?

Transcript (edited)

How we created an event with long lasting impact

When you are putting on an event it’s all too easy to get caught up in the logistics of it. You need speakers, attendees, a venue (or a platform if you’re running it online), you need to think about what is going to draw people in and give them value.

It’s a lot of work, time and money. Apart from needing a rest at the end of it, what do you want to get out of the experience? Events can be an effective part of your strategic communications strategy, however in order to do that, you need to be thinking about the impact you are aiming for.

For example, one successful campaign I led was about shaping where we want to live in the future for a UK architecture practice. The goals were to create and deliver an event with key people from across the built environment industry, to start a thought leadership campaign, to enable great places to be built, but also to formulate an event for business development, to engage new clients and strengthen existing relationships.

The strategic goals set the content and style of the event. We decided to host a symposium, and we knew it needed to produce quality debate and content. This informed everything we did from literature, to the speakers, to what they spoke about, to the sort of people we invited.

One of the overarching objectives of the event was brand awareness. We had a huge amount of support from a wide-ranging cross-section of the industry. We had great speakers, who were leading figures in their particular topic areas and they went out and they talked about this. It galvanized support for this really important topic about shaping better places for all of us to ultimately live in.

A key question we asked at the beginning of the project was what was going to happen after the event. This led to the realisation that we wanted to create something that had a shelf life so we could use it to market the brand, products, and services long after the event. That led to the concept of creating a book called 10 Essays to Shape Future Places. In turn, that led to inviting key industry figures to help shape the content for the event, to help shape the discussion topics, and to ultimately contribute 10 essays towards this book.

By starting with the strategic goal in mind, and working back from there, we generated a much richer event content plan and event strategy. The campaign was shortlisted for an award by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.