These days, it’s not enough to draw a crowd to an event. You also need to ramp up and improve audience engagement to create a truly impactful event.
Fortunately, we have a lot of technology and techniques at our disposal to help us out. With chat increasingly becoming the communication tool of choice by many, chatbots with a human touch can help spice up your event without the extra manpower.
You can also try injecting some unique activities into your event, from inviting influencers to using highly interactive games to energize the crowd. Then there’s the effective but often forgotten art of team building to engage groups, especially during breakout sessions.
Need to learn more? Hop on over to our webinar and learn how to improve audience engagement from the best #eventprofs in the biz!
Chatbots Are The Future
Communicating with event attendees is always the best way to engage them. Unfortunately, it’s also becoming increasingly hard to do this as we handle bigger and bigger audiences. Thankfully, technology is once again to the rescue. AI chatbots are changing the events landscape, so much so that they are seen as the future of the industry. From increasing engagement before, during, and after the event to creating more human conversations, various players are getting in the game. Find out how chatbots could play a role in your next event.
Win Events Through Group Engagement
Engagement stems from interaction, but sometimes we don’t get the interaction we expect from attendees. Failure to engage might be because of lack of interest or understanding, or maybe it’s just plain shyness. This is why industry pros have various techniques to get engagement flowing in every event. How about playing around with the seating (check out our article on unique convention layouts for ideas)? Maybe banning smart devices. Or perhaps limiting the activity choices of participants? These techniques might seem a bit unorthodox, but they can really change the engagement in your next event. Get the full playbook by reading this article.
Landmark Event Marketing Strategies We Can Learn From
Sometimes, event marketers do their job so well that their methods deserve deeper study. One great example is Facebook when it started promoting Facebook Live. Instead of holding a simple speaker-centric event, the social media giant created a roadshow concept that brought them closer to their fans and their marketers. Another example is Guinness. They made things more personal by harnessing the technology of VR and creating an individual experience through 3D environments. These brands offered not just simple events, but created true interactive experiences. Find out exactly how these brands did it, and how you can implement the same techniques.
Communicating with event attendees is always the best way to engage them. Share on X
Up Your Trade Show Game With These Cool Ideas
To the event professional, every trade show must have an ROI. It’s all about building a business and hitting your numbers. But to the attendees, it should be all fun and engagement. It’s not always easy to marry these two sides, but there is a way to do it. This guide illustrates some of the best examples include streaming everything on a giant screen, to using witty event elements. You can even try treasure-hunting and puzzle-building events, where each attendee could participate. Or maybe you can add singers, dancers, and even zombies to light the floor up and get some buzz from your audience!
How to Successfully Attract Influencers to Your Events
Influencers are like lenses. They channel the hype their followers generate and focus it into your event. Of course, you’ll want as many of them as possible on your roster. The question is how do you attract them? First, start with understanding which influencers you need to include. Then, include them and their ideas when you plan the event. But that’s just the start. This guide gives you the lowdown on everything, from creating relevant visual elements to building up inter-brand buzz by interaction with your influencers on social media.
Simplicity is Best in Experiential Marketing
When doing experiential marketing, often it isn’t the complicated twists that captivate audiences. More often than not, all you need is a simple and authentic event to send a clear message. So says Bruce Henderson, Jack Morton Worldwide’s Chief Creative Officer in this interview. It’s also important to marry your brand’s experiential marketing strategies and that of your overall brand experience. Learn how to do this and pick up some high-value lessons on getting experiential marketing inspiration.
To the event professional, every trade show must have an ROI. Share on X
eBay Open Delivers B2B Event Insights
eBay Open dominated the MGM Grand Las Vegas last July, with a whopping year-on-year growth of almost 50%. This success gives us a lot of insights about how we should be doing our B2B events. With the “Fill your Cart with Color” campaign as the backdrop, the conference focused on the use of color as a focal point. From using color-coded areas as networking opportunities to incorporating colorful designs throughout the whole floor, eBay made maximum use of its theme. The company also deepened attendee engagement through personal business counseling and the active role eBay’s employees took in generating conversations and obtaining feedback.
How to Build Burning Man
Known as one of the most controversial and eccentric festivals in the world, Burning Man is nevertheless a superb feat of the events industry, and one worth a careful study. The entire event seems like it springs out of nowhere each year. The fact is, each occasion is backed by solid event management principles and meticulous planning. The event also highlights just how important a communal attitude is when creating an event. When everyone’s goals are the same and when everyone helps to the best of their ability, anything can happen.
Diet and Productivity Go Together
You are what you eat. But did you know what you eat is also how you work? Eating the wrong way can impair the way you work. For example, gobbling down too many carbs can wreak havoc on your insulin and your energy reserves. Low blood sugar can also decrease your self-control, sending your schedule haywire. Your diet can even impact how well you sleep tonight, which in turn defines how you work tomorrow. Read this to learn how you can optimize your diet and improve your productivity.
How To Spot Someone With Exceptional Productivity
Sometimes, scorecards and targets won’t really tell you much about what goes on in the background. There are lots of exceptional employees who run the extra mile in record time, but what they do may not reflect in any performance evaluation. In order to spot them, it’s necessary to really observe how they work. These are your employees with specific goals and systems, those who don’t treat work as simple routines. They have a tangible sense of self-respect, and that can be seen in how they control their life’s activities. When you find an employee that has these, make sure to treasure them. The industry needs them to succeed and break new barriers.
Another theme in this week’s roundup is learning from the best. From eBay Open to Burning Man, there are a lot of great nuggets of event management wisdom in each of these long-running successful event series.
Have you been to one of the events mentioned in our articles today? What do you think makes them so special and so successful?
