Event Marketing

Audience Engagement for Events: Plan & Strategy

Eventually Learning Team

03 November 2021

Read time 7 min 49 sec

How to engage event attendees? This has become the hot topic of discussion these days because getting global attendees for an event is good, but what next? You must deliver an informative, engaging, and productive event for the audiences who invested their time in your event. If you too are looking for an answer to this, you have landed on the right page.

Yes, we understand the importance of improving audience engagement during your event. Hence always work on the source of engagement for attendees. It’s only about during the event engagement. We must focus on the three phases of any event i.e. before the event, during the event, and after the event. So once you focus and plan for each of these three phases of the event, then you have tried your best to make your event successful.

First of all, let's start with understanding what event engagement is and why it is important. And then we will see effective attendee engagement tactics.

1 What Is Event Engagement?

Event engagement is also mentioned as audience engagement. It is the understanding of the number of attendees who are participating in your event. Now there are different ways to measure event efficiency. It depends upon the event type whether it is an in-person, virtual, or hybrid event.

For in-person events, audience retention and connection establishment are the success measuring factors. For engagement at virtual events, social media activities like the number of clicks, chat room participation are important. Further, event duration, event app engagement, and poll participation, etc. are vital. For Hybrid events, it will be a combination of both live and virtual event engagement. Organizers can think of creative event engagement ideas to enhance the event experience.

2 Why Is Event Engagement Important?

We plan a wonderful event at a prime venue or a virtual event with high-end technology. We all do this to promote our business to the world, right? So, we don't expect the audiences to secretly scroll down their cell phones because they are not able to get involved in the event content. Hence, it is always better to study the component that drives engagement before organizing the event.

This would help the business or product get noticed and hence, event engagement is of utmost importance. We must learn audience engagement strategies to make the event more interactive.

3 Event Marketing Phases

Most of the best event marketing service providers across the globe work in three phases. Let’s look at them one by one in detail. This will help you to understand how we can improve the event engagement plan.

3.1 Audience Engagement Before Event

First, we will see audience engagement before the event. This is an important stage of event marketing. This is the stage where you are going to tell the audiences out there about the event.

Hence, you must have a catchy idea or content that would make the audiences stay on the content and go into detail. So how can we do this? Please read further to find the answer.

3.1.1 Send Email Invites

Grab the target audience data and send an appealing email invite for the event. The content of the mail must be well furnished so that it won’t get skipped.

3.1.2 Get Good Advertisement Content

The advertisement content must be good enough to catch the eye of your target audience. The graphics, images, and content of the advertisement should be perfect. It should be well analyzed keeping the target audience in mind.

3.1.3 Use Social Media Trends

Social media is the best place to promote your event. Hence, you must apply the current trends of event marketing something like creating a hashtag for your event. Make the hashtag popular across social media with SMM tools. Develop networking, respond to the live tweets, etc. and then you are all set to catch the audiences for the event. So there are multiple ways you can boost the curiosity of the audiences for the event.

Though it looks simple, trust me it’s not. You must consult a professional event marketing service provider who can help you out with this.

Now once you have done this and got x number of attendees for your event then the next part comes which is the audience engagement during your event. Let’s see how we can work on that.

3.2 Audience Engagement During Event

These attendee engagement tactics are useful for audience engagement during your event. So let’s get started.

3.2.1 Understand Your Attendees

Understanding the attendees is the first step of creating an engaging event. Whether it is B2B or B2C events always understand the interest of the target audience first. Develop the event content accordingly. Getting inside of the attendee's mind is a skill and to be a successful event organizer you must learn that skill. Understand the attendee's needs and try to create a more personalized event.

3.2.2 Define Metrics

Before planning the event engagement, understand what engagement opportunities you want to offer to the audiences. Which are the most important factors to engage the audience during the event. There are multiple engagement metrics for in-person, virtual, and hybrid events.

Some of the metrics are audience retention, chat & poll participation, downloads, event rating, etc. You can choose them as per the event need.

3.2.3 Enhance Content

Content is the king. This is a known fact. Everyone works on the content in their business. So you too must have serious work on the event content. Try to have interactive content that would keep the audience engaged. Use diverse relevant topics and do not pull a single one for long.

3.2.4 Improve User Experience

Whether it is an in-person, virtual or hybrid event always focus on user experience. If it is an in-person event then always choose an approachable venue with all the amenities included. If it is a virtual event then focus on the tools, software, and event platform so that multiple audiences would feel comfortable attending the event throughout. This is the best strategy for a successful virtual event.

3.2.5 Design the Session with Multiple Audiences in Mind

Now, this point is added keeping the hybrid event in mind. If you are planning for a hybrid event you must create event content that would interest both live and virtual audiences. Always have tools to drive event engagement for both types of attendees. Both the audiences should feel connected during the event. Hence, prepare the event plan accordingly.

3.3 Audience Engagement after Event

This is again a very important phase of successful event marketing. You must work on different types of attendee engagement post the event as well. We have mentioned here some of the popular post-event engagement methods. This will make the attendee feel more considered.

3.3.1 Send Appreciation Emails

Send a post event email including thank you to the attendee for attending the event. You can also include summary of the event they have attended. This summing up mail will help the attendee to recall the event points again. You can also put some information about your upcoming events in the same e-mail.

3.3.2 Get Feedback on the Event

Always get feedback from the attendees. This will help you to enhance the experience for the next time or you may get a surprising note of appreciation for your event. So feedback is always the best thing. It either helps you to improve or to know that you have done a good job.

3.3.3 Q&A Session

You can plan for a question and answer session post the event. This way you can also analyze how many of the attendees have concentrated throughout the session. This will also allow the attendees to clear their doubts, if any about the product or business.

4 Event Engagement Conclusion

Now we are clear why event engagement is important. We have covered almost all the points to help you understand how you can make your event engaging. But, the event engagement points are not limited to this. Professional guidance will cut your efforts and will set you on the right track for event marketing.

Now let’s move towards the frequently asked question to be answered.

FAQs

Here we have included some of the crucial questions related to event audience engagement for the layman. Diverting attention towards event engagement while organizing the event is essential.

1 Why is event engagement important?

Keep the audiences engaged or connected before the event, during the event, and sometimes post the event is essential. Audience engagement allows you to understand your target audiences more precisely. It also helps the target audiences feel connected to the event and boosts their interest in the event.

2 How do you make an event engaging?

There are multiple methods and tricks to engage the event audiences. As we have already seen in the article, you can use social media platforms, email marketing, phone marketing, and live polls to keep the event audiences engaged.

3 How do I create an engaging online event?

Creating an engaging online event is the central part, and one must create good content for it. Work on the event content, and then marketing content must be the next vital part. Hence, to grab the attention of the target audiences having content that will catch the eyes of the audiences is essential.

4 How is event efficiency measured?

The event efficiency measurement is a vital part of event marketing. First, you need to decide the critical and relevant KPIs, and tracking these KPIs will help you understand the event efficiency. KPIs are the primary factor to be fixed before organizing the event. Having a clear event goal idea helps to decide the KPIs precisely.