Over the last week or so we’ve focussed mainly on Sponsorship and shared a few insights from our own experience in this year – hopefully you found it useful and of course give us a call anytime if you’ve any queries in this area.
So, now we’re going to move on to Events and delving further into the Events world, primarily B2B and corporate events. Events are organised for many reasons including raising company profile, generating leads, raising funds & education, as well as employee engagement, brand loyalty and talent retention.
We’ll look at events under the themes of Event Strategy, Event Design and Event Execution, so that regardless of the type of event you’re planning, these overarching themes should help in your planning process.
Event Strategy – Not a term that’s widely used in Ireland, but a very popular concept in the US and internationally. Event Strategy is not as daunting as it sounds, it’s merely taking a closer look via your data, as to whether your event calendar activities align with your company goals and strategy.
We’ll go into this in a little bit more detail in a while, but basically you can look at small tweaks in order to align your events with your company goals, there doesn’t need to be any radical overhauls or transformations – just a bit more thought about what the purpose of the event is and how it helps your company growth.
An event strategist will holistically examine your activities throughout the year and not just align themes, goals and outcomes, but also help to tweak and update repeated events. There’s no need to trash an event because it’s not exactly aligned to your goals, you can tweak and improve it so that it does. Don’t waste a strong audience in creating something new when what you have is probably working somewhat and can be greatly improved.
Your Event Strategy is so much more than just an Event Calendar, it is a well-thought out roadmap of your entire event strategy, aligning all events with your overarching company goals and objectives. So, before you start building your event strategy, have a think about the some things that will feed into it such as:
Your organisational goals for the year
What events don’t align with these and what events are missing?
How many events and activities will happen throughout the year?
What types of events will be in your plan ie trade show, conference, thought leadership, employee engagement, product launch?
What is the purpose of each event?
Do you have the resources to run all of the events in your calendar? That includes time, people, finance as well as the supporting technology and skills?
What event tools could be used to enhance your event as well as gather vital data?
Putting the time into your strategy will ultimately save you time on the other side, as well as protecting your investment.
It’s important to ensure that you have all of the resources that you need in the early stages of your Event Strategy work, which could be anything from:
People (planning, co-ordinating, driving the strategy forward)
Finance/Sponsorship (underwriting the costs of execution as well as activation and promotion)
Technology (event, data, insights, analytics)
Don’t worry if you don’t have the exact right technology set up yet – you can trial different software until you find the one that meets your needs and there are some great apps out there to help you with bookings, attendee analytics, feedback and customer insights, as well as those can capture engagement data from your event.
You can contact us at Leigh Gillen Events if you have any questions about Event Strategy.
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