Face-to-Face Marketing: Promotional Events

Event planners need a complete solution to increase event attendance and decrease event costs. By organizing the event planning and management processes, you can focus your time on strategic decisions rather than repetitive, time consuming tasks.

Planning the Event

When planning an event, you must think of where, when, how, and why it will happen. The venue has to have that “wow” factor to impress the attendees, and the date and time cannot conflict with any other press-worthy event in the area. The way the event is coordinated, including accuracy, enough time notice on all approvals, correct equipment rentals, and how many people for maintenance and crew are hired all have a great impact on how smoothly the event runs. Make a timeline; this will help you make deadlines. Lastly, the reason for the event must clearly be stated either in the theme of the event, or a program that is given out, or a slogan representing the company. The “why” of the event, the purpose, has to draw people to the occasion, make them want to attend a fabulous event.

Attendees and Invitations

When deciding who to invite to your event, make a database. The organization of a database of contacts will be extremely helpful when doing mailings as this will prevent you from mailing one thing to the same person twice. When this happens, the recipient will automatically feel how impersonal your intentions are as “you” have forgotten about what mailings that particular person has already received. Recipients want to feel that the invitation was made especially for them, by you. Lastly, study your list of attendees. Know what company or publication they are from, and know their job titles. By knowing this information off the top of your head, you will increase the affect of your conversations with business.

After the Event

Re-cap your conversations with your attendees. Make note of their interests from the event. This will help you to have a better and accurate follow up with them in the future. Understand what went well and what went wrong, if anything did. Make checklists of what was used or rented and how many. The more information you gather for each event, the less hectic the process will be. You will know exactly what you need and when you need it for the next events deadlines.