While you might be looking at dollar amounts when worrying about creating a corporate event, your biggest failures might not appear in dollars. When people are at your event but unclear about the message you’re pushing, they might change their perception. This lack of a message often comes from poor corporate event planning or a lack of focus because of a disorganized staff.
If you want to throw a memorable event, follow these four tips in our guide.
1. Match Your Budget with Your Goals
Before you can begin planning any kind of event, you need to know how much you have to spend. If your goal is to have a three-day free event to promote a new project or product series, you need to figure out if you can spend that much money. Get together with your team to decide the goal of your event and then see how much you have to devote to it.
You may find that you have to sell tickets to your corporate event. If this is the case, you need to be able to provide something of value to your clientele in exchange for their time. If you expect to turn a profit, you’ll have to be realistic about how much people are willing to pay for what you have to offer.
Your location can be key in this case, as choosing a place where you can attract the largest number of your customers and fans is vital.
Putting together a rough budget can start with other events that you’ve run. If not, you need to start by doing some research to see how much every element of your event is going to cost. Don’t forget to factor in any A/V needs, security, chair and table rental, and any other services that you can’t provide from in-house.
2. Find a Theme and a Location to Suit It
The theme of your event is going to be vital to attracting an audience. Your theme needs to be able to communicate what’s great about your brand or what’s exciting about this new product release.
There are corporate events there to promote products and services. There are events that are meant to allow product and service users to meet and greet one another. There are small conferences and dinners that are meant to share information and award positive service.
Your theme is going to set limits on the type of location that you should choose.
Start trying to guess how many people you can expect. If you’ve run past events, that’s a good place to start. If this is your first event like this, consider sending out an RSVP with an incentive to sign up sooner than later to get a good number.
Your venue is going to need to have some of the infrastructures noted above, including but not limited to seating, tables, projectors, servers, security, and wi-fi.
If they don’t have what you need, you’ll have to find local vendors who can provide what you need.
3. Get Some Sponsors and Speakers
If you’re trying to keep costs down, the best way to avoid having to spend all of your budget is to get sponsors. Sponsors allow you to provide some of the goods and services you plan to offer without having to dig into your budget.
Searching for sponsors starts with determining what you hope for visitors to take away, both physically and conceptually. If you want to give products or just free food and drink to your visitors, see who has sponsored events like yours. Brainstorm a list of your ideal sponsors and some backup sponsors.
Getting sponsors will allow you to invest more of your budget into guests, hosts, and speakers. The people who you have attached to your event are going to end up attracting a lot of attention to get people to sign up. Choose speakers who offer value and entertainment to your guests.
Make sure to break up your schedule so that people have a good mix of intellectual value and entertainment at your event. Give people plenty of time to eat and take a break. People are more likely to miss speakers who they might be excited about when the day is too tightly packed.
4. Start the Promotion
Getting the word out about your event is vital to have it succeed to the level you want it to. Start off with a website, social media, and put aside money for buying ads. Even if you just rely on social media for advertising, it’s important to take the time to get the word out as much as possible.
You need to start off with a message that you’re looking to share with your visitors. Make sure that every element of your promotion works to support this message, every social media post, and every email pushes your message.
Create a blog to follow your event. You should post about every guest speaker that you’re going to have and even give them the opportunity to create their own posts.
If you have the time and a budget, creating a promotional video is a great way to spread the word virally online. Create a three-minute, one-minute, and 15-second version so you can share it on different channels.
Make sure the message is consistent across every video, though.
Send out reminders in the weeks before the event to keep your event at the forefront of the minds of your attendees.
Corporate Event Planning Requires Focus
When you’re trying to get the most out of your corporate event planning, you need to make sure that you’re always focused on your message. When your attendees don’t know what they’re meant to walk away with, that’s when you’re likely to fail. You can suffer from bad food, not enough chairs, or a hot venue so long as everyone knows what you’re about and gets the information you intend.
Check out our guide for tips on event planning mistakes to avoid.
