7 crucial steps for your seamless event management process!

Trying to set up some upcoming events for generating new leads in the last quarter of the year, but do not know where to start? Learn more from our lasted blog to make sure you don't miss any important step for a successful event!

Step 1: Set goals for your event

Goal setting is king of determining the outcomes of events. Whether you want to organize a sales event, customer engagement events or simply an education events, it is important that you have your event goals specified with well-defined expectations. To conduct an impressive event and generate maximum benefits for attendees, you can use measurable KPIs to make your event worth the spend. Optimism is great, but you also need a bit of realism to not get frustrated in the end. To develop worthy goals, use the SMART framework. Create the objectives that are

➤Specific: If you want your goals to be effective, it needs to be specific. Ask yourself these questions: “What needs to be accomplished? Who’s responsible for it? What steps need to be taken to achieve it?” in order to make your goals clear before implementing the event.

➤Measurable: Quantifying your goals makes it easier to track progress and know when you’ve reached the finish line.

For example: Alex and her team want to grow their new customer segment for the new software – but by how much? If they get even one new signup, that’s technically growth – so does that mean they’re done? Same goes for their strategy; how many platforms will they advertise on?

➤Achievable: Goals should be realistic and something your team can reasonably accomplish. If you try to set big goals for a short period of time with limited resources, you will overwhelm your team and turn your event into a disaster for anyone who handle it.

➤Relevant: The next characteristic of a good goal is that the goal is relevant. If the goal doesn’t matter to the organization or to the president, the team won’t understand why they’re working on it.

➤Time bound: Finally, setting a time for everything in your event planning and event itself. Set a time limit on the goal. It will create urgency and help focus the efforts of everyone involved. Without a time-component, the goal becomes meaningless.

Step 2: Pick your theme and outline the event

After setting goals, one of the most important things for your event is what you want to talk about in your event and why you want to talk about it. Use The 5Ws model to determine what you need for each of your event sessions. Make your event content stand out can be difficult at first but just spend some more time on it to create a value for audiences to attend and they can be a lead or refer a lead to your company after. Using tools such as MS Powerpoint, Canva, etc… to improve your event presentation or other visualization is an easy way to accomplish this.

Step 3: Create event marketing plan/strategy

One of the most crucial parts of the event is to have several attendees that meets our event goals. In order to achieve that, is it not just post randomly on social media or just send out one or two emails telling our audience about the upcoming event. However, you must plan how you want to reach out to potential audiences with tools such as social ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram…. Varied types of content on these social platforms is only one way to gain more exposure to your audience.

Leveraging your guest speaker, sponsors and co presenters networks can be a great way to attract more audiences. Additionally, incentivizing invites by offering discounts or freebies can do wonders. Finally, don’t forget to set timeline for your event marketing strategy in order to see if you need any change in order to fulfill your event goals.

Step 4: Promote your event on different channels

If you’re only sending out emails to your current clients – that won’t gain your event maximum exposure! Ask yourself where your target audiences usually are and expand from there. Let’s say your company service aims towards young consumer, you may think promoting on Facebook and Instagram is good enough. However, there are many other platforms that could potentially help your event gain more exposure. Don’t limited yourself just with one avenue. Posting GIF photos or video can draw more attention to your audiences. Using less obvious ways to advertise could showcase your event to a wider audience - one that you may not have considered as a target. One of the best tools we would recommend for you to use to manage your social media scheduling and creating content is Sprout Social. Their platform has integration to all social media channels as well as with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform to consolidate data for a single view of prospects.

Step 5: Check your event logistics

This step might look less important than others. However, imagine your online event is ready but your internet connection is unstable, and you don’t have any back-up plan for it. Or your visuals and audio for your guest speaker are not optimized. Never underestimate this step even though your event has a small number of attendees.

Depends on the scale of your event, you should set a timeline for everyone involved in the event to have a rehearsal/ run through before one month/one week/few days before the event to make sure everyone is on the same page. Also, it gives you an opportunity to make minor changes/amendment.

Many companies have gone hybrid for their events. Choosing an application for a multi-session online events with many advanced functions to support monitoring attendees - could be intimidating. Understanding what your event logistics are so you can invest into the right software is paramount, since it will take time for your event team to learn a new event management software and how it integrates with your existing systems.

Step 7: Listen to your audiences’ opinions

Many event organizers just ignore this step to make their life easier or they just send out survey but never use it for the improvement of the next event. Making a good survey is not hard but it does take time. Try to think of some interesting incentives to make your attendees fill out the survey such as lucky draw or a discount for the next purchase or next event. This could get you more response than you expect. Also, try to find a solution where you can use the sentiment data from surveys in your overall approach or next action. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Voice are great options for pre & post-event management!

Step 8: Data utilization

Finally, based on the data of your event that you have collected, what is your next step? Think of how you are going to utilize the information you have from your attendees to find leads, potential customers, prospect for your products/services and follow up. But that’s not all, review and update your event process by looking at your collected and processed data. This will benefit your event planning process for future events with different formats (virtual, face to face or hybrid (offline and streaming).

Conclusion

By now you should have a good idea of what the event management process should look like. Organizing events is a big challenge, but it is an activity that can bring huge benefits. And this is why having event management tools are so crucial, it helps to mitigate risks allowing you to focus on the things that matter most. Bottom line is that: the more time you invest in event management process, the more professional your event will be.