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Event Engagement Guide for 2019

guide to event attendee engagement in 2019

The main reason for organisisng an event is to increase the recognition and status of your business. According to statistics, during interesting events where attendees can get a valuable prize or a priceless  experience, the number of attendees increases, and the result is high event engagement. Feel free to use our event engagement guide for 2019.

What is event engagement?

Event engagement is the degree to which attendees are fully participating in and are captivated by your event. Event engagement activities can be measured in the number of sessions attended, meetings held, and connections made as well as poll participation, social media activity, event app adoption, and more.

Why is event engagement important?

Increasing audience engagement through the use of your event engagement ideas is important for continuously hosting successful events. Ensuring that your audience is consistently engaged not only improves your event attendees’ experiences but also allows marketers to collect as much rich attendee data from different touch points as possible. It is commonly believed that you can collect over 300 various data touch points.

Factors and elements of event engagement

There are a couple of event engagement strategy elements that are key for the planning process:

  • Understand the purpose of the event
  • Set real event objectives
  • Know your target audience
  • Select the right venue
  • Time everything down to the last minute
  • Create content that attracts your target audience
  • Design the message you want to share through the event

Causes of event attendees’ dissatisfaction

To organise an event with good event audience engagement, you should always keep in mind the cases of attendee dissatisfaction. It’s natural that you cannot please everyone. Someone will always be disappointed and will loudly share their dissatisfaction.

  • Pre-event engagement ideas failure
  • Volunteers that didn’t show up
  • Rain at your outdoor event
  • A major transport disruption
  • Too many people showed up
  • Speaker drops out at the last minute
  • AV/laptop/microphone failures
  • Sponsor complaints

Reasons to look for solutions

These and other event troubles, as well as event attendees’ complaints, are important reasons to hire an event technology solutions company that can give you the best possible chance for success.

Best practices to facilitate attendee engagement

The best event practices allow attendees to learn something new, make new networks, connect with peers, hear inspirational speakers, and more. They may also give attendees the opportunity to see a new city and take advantage of what that city has to offer during events. Here are some things to consider:

Before the event

So you want to know how to measure event engagement before the event? It all starts with your marketing plan. Attendees will feel engaged before the event ever begins. Sponsors will be interested in ideas that involve their brand being exposed to attendees well before the event start date. Take advantage of influencer marketing and current hot topics across many marketing channels. Brainstorm joint initiatives with your sponsor.

During the event

You may determine if attendees are likely to buy a new product during the launch. Ask questions that directly relate to whether attendees are now more likely (or less) to attend future events, if they would now recommend company products and services, or if your event is meeting their needs. Apply gamification and contests; people love to test their luck. Using live polls asking for a show of hands or doing a manual headcount can turn people off. Instead, curate your social shares via social media using social walls.

After the event

What about post-event engagement? Create and use a mobile app, and maximise event app adoption. Use event tools and apply virtual event bags as well as real swag bags on site. Ask for feedback, and use metrics to track success.

On site

Your company’s blog is a great way to kickstart audience engagement at an event because you can warm them up prior to the launch. Put out a suggestion box to set expectations with attendees for future events. In the creation of your app, decide how to customise gamification just for the event. Show attendees how to use your technology; the majority of your onsite staff should know it as well so they can be of assistance.

Event engagement ideas and how to implement them

Event managers often seek useful ideas and apps for event planning because they significantly help and simplify their difficult working routine and increase event attendance.

Ways to measure event engagement: key KPIs

Choose the metrics you will use to track success. Make sure the check-in number is accurate for each day of your event so that you can compare this number against other metrics. Then, apply the following KPIs for events engagement:

  • Attendee satisfaction surveys
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • RFID tracking
  • Social media engagement
  • Number of active community members
  • Number of messages sent within the community
  • Speaker engagement

Creating a hashtag for your event is a great way to track mentions and comments. Learn how to improve your event with this definitive list of KPIs.

Like other event metrics, it can be put into numbers using hard data.

Why is event engagement difficult to measure?

When measuring event engagement, you have to take into account many different factors. Event engagement can be measured in sessions attended, the number of individuals in attendance, etc. When finding it difficult to get attendees to engage, event planners simply put the opportunities right in front of them. It’s a lot more effective to quantify it using hard data.

Creating an event engagement strategy

First of all, search for the tool that completely meets your business’s demands. It should offer a set of event business solutions that covers many aspects of organising an event, from planning to post-event activities and engagement activities at events.

Try to choose the service according to your basic needs. It will be ideal to use something that will guarantee the following rates, at least on average:

  • Attendee satisfaction (84%)
  • Revenue (56%)
  • Media coverage (16%)
  • Team building (12%)

The rates may vary based on the solutions chosen and your event engagement objectives.

Examples of event engagement solutions

There is a variety of solutions available on the market, but these are the top event engagement and planning apps worth using for events of any scale:

  1. TopTablePlanner
  2. DoubleDutch
  3. Judgify
  4. Arrange my seat
  5. GEVME

How event apps can drive event engagement

The first step to driving event app engagement is to promote the app to attendees and highlight the benefits of downloading it.

Your event app may drive engagement in several ways:

  • Staying connected with an activity feed
  • Keeping  track of sessions with an agenda builder
  • Sharing through social
  • Utilizing relevant and timely push notifications

An active planner should be able to manage his or her agenda and tasks anywhere and at any time while on the go.

In addition, a very important benefit of the best apps for planning audience engagement at events and other services is the availability of alerts to other users involved in the event production or organisation process.

The most popular applications for managing to-do lists are for computers, mobile devices, and other modern devices. Encourage your interaction and competition with gamification through event engagement apps.

Engage or lose

Engage event attendees via professional and reliable event solutions with a variety of customised apps. When hiring a technology solutions company, it is important that you not only look into event planning but effective event engagement options as well. Attendee engagement is one of the top goals for most events. A Gevme app engages attendees at every turn. Through features like gamification, polling, and networking, your attendees will be highly engaged before, during, and after the event. If you have any trouble making your decision, contact us and get a free consultancy.

Level up your events with Gevme’s omnichannel event platform

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