Yet, your follow-up email is one of the most important you’ll ever send. Even if they did, by now they might have forgotten about it. This can be a 1-to-10 scale asking questions, such as: 1. Your second blog post should focus on the benefits of attending your event. As mentioned above, once you’ve gone past the initial launch excitement for your event, you’ll need to engineer more reasons to encourage people to register (and register now rather than later). With the initial excitement of the event launch behind you, it’s time to knuckle down and find ways to keep the momentum going. Assuming it’s relevant to your audience, you’re providing value to everyone. Summary of post-event report 2. This is particularly important if you’re running multiple tracks or have more than one stage. ... You can provide an optional slot for name and contact if the participant wishes to receive follow-up communication. See how many people you can get to pre-register for next year’s event. This touchpoint provides a valuable opportunity to promote other upcoming events, collect attendee feedback , and guide attendees towards the next step you want them to take. The post-event period could last up to 6 weeks, and so we’ve got 6 key messages to match, which are: The thanks for attending and post-event survey are hugely important. Katie Sawyer is a writer at Eventbrite, where she helps event organizers throw awesome festivals, food and drink bonanzas, and cultural events. Event partnerships can be crucial to your event’s success, so you need to start reaching out to potential collaborators, complementary brands, and media partners early — way before your event has officially launched. Intrigued? An event feedback survey will enable the organizers to understand if they could deliver an event that met the expectations of its audience. Email is also a great support tool, helping you get your content directly in front of your audience, and offering them something of value beyond asking them to register for your event (again). Why not reach out to your existing attendees and incentivise them to promote the event on your behalf? Post event engagement will actually make your life easier throughout the year because your event’s content informs what … With roughly 6 months to go, now’s the time to start mixing key announcements about your event into the event communication plan, while maintaining a drum-beat of community building content too. Hearing from you regularly keeps your event and brand top of mind. This can be as simple as a landing page with the name, date, event description, and option to register your interest. So whether it’s paid social media (promoted posts) or Google Adwords, PPC and retargeting, now’s the time to put cash behind your campaign if you’re going to do it at all. Angle option #1: Why your event is completely novel, strange, a landmark first, etc. If you write it your press release with key search terms in mind, then anyone with Google Alerts set up for those terms will see your release. Lastly in the post-event communications period, you should tell people what you’ve learned from the post-event survey. Be open to innovative thinking: Formats like video and electronic media were once deemed too elaborate or expensive for pre-com. List key recommendations Instead, you can provide them with the email templates and social updates you want them to send, and then just ask them to copy and paste. The best way to achieve this through a cycle of content creation, social promotion and engagement, and email support. Think about what would make someone chuckle or take a second glance if they saw your event in their Facebook newsfeed. So write about them! Planning to add a few emails to your event communication calendar? If you’re looking to fill a few last-minute places or get the word out in an impactful way, then influencers could be your best shot. Do they have any questions? Wow, are we at the event already? Related Articles. Whether you’ve been marketing for a matter of months or weeks, your event will eventually loom large in front of you, and with just a couple of weeks (or even just a couple of days) to go, it’s time for your las call communications. Send the survey within 12 hours after the event, and include questions where guests rate various parts of the event. So why not leverage the same principle for your event? Explain the key themes your event will explore, so people can start getting excited about the content and what the experience will be like. The Importance of Conducting a Post Event Evaluation. In an ideal world, your company would … We’ve also put together a handy template that plots all of these tactics in a sample 16-week event communications plan, that you can adapt to your specific needs. Talk about your event’s unique value proposition or mission statement, so everyone understands why it is a must-attend event, different from last year, and stands out from your competition. Are you (or anyone involved in the event) an interesting story? And they’re essentially marketing and sales plans. If your event was educational in any way, for example a conference, then the 4th week is a great time to release a post-event report detailing the key trends and findings from the event. You could always use an app like Storify to pull everything together into a nicely presented narrative. Let everyone know when the super early bird ends, when the event page is live and the detailed programme is announced. If you’re not sure why it’s important to have a mission statement or explain “why” you are organising an event, take a few minutes to watch this video from Simon Sinek (you won’t regret it!). The Complete 52 Week Event Communication Plan, a separate post and template for this phase, How to Create a Proactive Communication Plan, From On-Sale to Sold Out: Marketing and Promotion for Events, Save the date (once you’ve confirmed it), Keynote speaker / headline act confirmed (or any other major component to your programme), The sponsors, exhibitors and other event supporters, Announce the end of the ‘normal’ early bird, Tell people where to stay; and what to do while in town if you’re expecting a lot of out-of-town visitors. However looking briefly at some of the messages you can communicate over the next few weeks, you might want to talk about: And don’t forget to keep up a steady drum-beat of non-sales communications too! Don’t forget the huge range and diversity of social media available to you now. number of attendees, number of student attendees, number of committers, etc. You’ll probably find it’s a relatively time-intensive but effective way of securing a few more sales if they’re needed. You may get some local, trade, or niche press pick-up (not to mention blogs and other personal authority sites). Boy, do 52 weeks fly by when you’re having fun and communicating a lot! Announce a super early bird rate to get pre-event bookings in, even if nothing else is confirmed other than the date, venue and maybe your headline act / keynote speaker. 4. … Once your event has finished, you can scroll back to the top of this post and start again! You want to direct potential attendees and previous attendees into the “awareness” stage of your marketing funnel so that you can inform and advise them as they make the journey towards buying a ticket. By doing this, you are better placed to share good news with your stakeholders and able to build on what went well in future events. Maybe, but you’ll find life much easier if you have a large, engaged and growing community to support you. For conferences and B2B events, it’s relatively straight forward as you can create an industry report or offer a white paper that combines top tips from all your speakers. Here is a sample plan for ensuring you thank ALL donors- no matter how small the gift- in a timely manner post-event (and do so without stressing yourself out). While this is better than nothing, it’s not quite a communications plan; and it won’t necessarily help you build a strong community all year round. Whether five or 500 people attended, your post-event emails must be consistent each time. Reveal the final programme (assuming it’s changed since the first announcement) and also release an interview with your keynote speaker or headline act. This is your mission statement. The post-event period could last up to 6 weeks, and so we’ve got 6 key messages to match, which are: Thanks for attending + Post-event survey; Social media summary; Pre-register for next year; Post-event report; Videos; Key findings from survey; The thanks for … Getting on social media early is an important way to create momentum for your event promotion, building a community and spreading the mission that you’ve written about in your blog post (which you can link back to in your posts). Even if the same people are being targeted, it will give them a sense of the event’s momentum and importance, while helping to reinforce your message. Pre-Event Marketing Use these simple marketing tactics to get the word out about your event: Email: Use email to announce event details and invite recipients to join you 1. Surprisingly, post-event follow-up is often overlooked, but is still critically important. Thought leadership blog posts: Whether you’re running a conference, a charity fundraiser or a workshop, you’ve probably got some opinions and insight into the things your audience cares about. Telling the human story is a universal strategy of mainstream press, so play to that if you can. 2. Simple Post-Event Evaluation Form free download and preview, download free printable template samples in PDF, Word and Excel formats Here are some general timeline rules to stick to when planning your communication strategy: 1. You can use it to capture leads and early interest (which can then be contacted later) and it will help build up your SEO authority with Google. Good Sample Post-event reports. Too many organisers forget they can create an event page and push it live to capture early interest, even if all of the details aren’t yet finalised. You will build loyalty and ultimately help ensure long-term growth and success of your event program. Thirdly, you can use this valuable information to grow your event community and successfully promote your next edition. You can turn all of these options on and off at will. 3. An executive summary is exactly that, a summary – keep it under a page. Here are the reasons why a post event evaluation is important: To know if the event achieved its aforedetermined measureable goals; To ensure the event met the expectations of … Angle option #2: Dive into the human element. This is a frequently missed opportunity. There’s no point doing it too early when you have nothing to sell. It’s an important topic, and a simple Google search for ‘How to build an event community’ reveals almost 500,000,000 results. Again, what the specifics of this look like will heavily depend on your event. Use simple wording to express gratitude towards them. This tip seems obvious, but research shows that while 98% of exhibiting companies collect sales leads during their events, only 69% have a formalized lead follow-up plan in place. Linking to these resources is also OK. 3. An event marketing strategy is all about raising awareness of your event. If you run events, you know that no matter how amazing your events are, they very rarely just “sell themselves.” Annoying, right? A very simple key that is seldom used in the event marketing to make sure your registrants come to the next event is a “thank you email” after the event. #3: Attendee thank-you email and post-event wrap-up One of the most underrated attendee emails is the thank-you message. Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn might be obvious choices, depending on what kind of event you run, but consider Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, Medium, Reddit, Quora and others too. Attendee conversation amplification is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse and share the best communications happening amongst your attendees. Being successful in event management is multifaceted, it is much more than just communicating with the people on your team as there are many pieces to the puzzle when pulling off an impeccable event. Event highlights are your curated parts of the event that you want to make sure everyone sees, whether they’re at the event or not, so your attendees don’t miss out and non-attendees start to get a real sense of FOMO. While it may be advisable to contact them at the start of your campaign, there’s a good chance they’ll be busy and so won’t have committed. Ask follow up questions about the most important aspects of the event, like the keynote speaker. If you are uncomfortable or unable to attend for any reason, I completely understand, please let me know either way by [date]. How to Wrap Up a Successful Event in 5 Steps. While there are a million and one things you can add to your onsite event communication plan, I would focus on 3 in particular: Key timings so everyone knows what’s going on and where they need to be. (To get the most out of your paid digital marketing, check out this beginner’s guide). Along with your text about what you found most useful about the event, include photos and video or audio recordings, preferably embedded in the post. After an event, it’s time to send the post-event email to attendees and non-attendees, communicate new leads with the sales department and note any changes that need to be made next year. Yep, the life of a successful event organiser isn’t easy…but it can be hugely rewarding and being a leading figure in your community thanks to your strong communication will pay off big time over the long term. Many event promoters put a ton of time and effort into their promotional emails, then neglect their post-event communications. This is the point where your employees either take what they learned at the … First, post-event content will allow you to keep alive the interest of your attendees about topics that they discussed during the event. With the official launch of your event, and the event page being live, now’s a great time to tell the world (and particularly your audience) about the detailed programme, key features and any other key selling points you’ve had under wraps until now.Â. And there is clearly a knowledge gap, given the much smaller number of results around planning for event communications. If you go down this route, you can also offer a super-early bird incentive to those who pre-register, helping you to capture even more early interest. To sell tickets, you need to be armed with an event marketing strategy that is complemented by a communication plan to effectively promote your event to your target audience. Once a person has committed to helping out in the event, the person cannot back down, otherwise, the one organizing the event would have wasted a lot of precious time and effort. It’s basically your normal communication strategy with a little bit of extra love thrown in during the days and weeks following the event. You can always make use of an event report sample to help you with your report. Ask participants to rate the date, location, speakers, vendors, and catering of the event. © 2021 Eventbrite. These can be mix and matched, or supplemented with anything else your company does after your events. Who are the headline bands, keynote speakers, celebrity chefs, etc. The rest of your marketing comms should be geared towards building up interest and urgency in the lead-up to the expiry of your discounts, helping you create spikes of ticket sales. 3. The results provide valuable metrics with data on what went well and what didn’t go so well. Take the time once a month to write a blog post that you think will be of interest to your audience, based on your particular experience, expertise or view point. Top 16 event feedback survey questions for post-event questionnaire. By integrating your event with SurveyMonkey, you can quickly import attendee email addresses and create a customised survey to send out. If you created your own survey form using an outside tool like Google Forms, you can also use the "Emails to Attendees" feature to send the survey link to attendees. All Rights Reserved. Send targeted invitations to your customers and prospects by Now you’ve read the post, why not grab the template to help you manage your year-round event communications plan? Now comes the tricky part for an organiser wanting to stay in touch with their community all year around. Ideally this would include a deposit, but if not just a simple pledge of their intention will help you get a feel for how sticky your audience is, or how many new faces you’ll need to attract. They should go out ideally within 24 hours of your event ending, so everyone’s memory is fresh and you get the most accurate feedback possible. In other words, a communication strategy addresses all the interactions you may have with the event-related stakeholders. You can then use your social channels to promote this content to your audience, invite them to comment (or create their own) and keep a conversation going about your event. 2. A strong community and growing event will be sure to follow. Design Tip: Try making each different section a list of recommendations such as “guidelines for 1-on1s” and “team rituals to implement.”. Later communication should include any surprise offerings and last chance messaging, to encourage guests to bring along others. You can use this to fuel the rest of your pre-event marketing comms, rally people around your idea, and convince them of the need to attend your event. However, things can be more manageable if you have a great event management solution in place, this could mean doing it the manual and tedious way or be more techie and have an online event … Now is the time to play one of your strongest cards in your event communication plan if it’s a business event where networking will inevitably important: Who you’ll meet. How satisfied were you with the event? Don’t ask long, complex questions. Review our leadership infographic templates or templates to help marketing teams to go remote for more ideas.. Use a crisis communication plan to keep outside stakeholders informed. The ‘who you’ll meet’ email and blog post should highlight all the biggest brands names (if not the exact delegates name and job title, just the company name should do), which helps sew the seeds of social proof and will no doubt tip any waverers over the edge. Did they like the venue? The next stage in your event communication plan is the main marketing push, which, combined with the ‘Last call’ phase, is typically about 12 weeks long. Now is the time to ask your partners for their support. 1. By 12 weeks (at least) before the event, you’ll want to announce the event. Of course, it’s impossible to create a perfect “catch-all” strategy. With your event now ready for prime time, get your first major email blast out to your potential attendees, including those who pre-registered. Spend the next 10 weeks (or more) executing your marketing campaign and working on a strategy for communicatin… “I wanted to update you on [event] as in light of the current outbreak; I’ll be postponing it until [date] and look forward to seeing you then. Blogging on your site is important, but you need to reach new audiences beyond your website visitors find new attendees. Balance them with high value, interesting content that your target attendees will appreciate and find valuable. Schedule time to write and publish the report within 48 hours of the event. Content curation: This means rounding up content related to a theme, and then ideally adding your spin on it. If they would, a journalist may also pick up on it. The most important post-event engagement step your business can take is to actively make contact with any and all leads obtained during your event. Ensure long-term growth and success of your paid digital marketing, check out this beginner ’ s guide.! 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