How To Plan A Successful Corporate Event

Corporate events can be a double-edged sword. When they are pulled off properly, they can serve as a great platform for launching new products, excellent opportunity to acquaint the selected audience (investors, press, associates, etc.) with your business’s, market position, operations and future plans, and, to sum it all, put your brand into a good perspective. When they are not organized with care and diligence, they can easily become a series of aimless conversations that cannot possibly lead to any tangible results. It is obvious that you should strongly avoid planning an event that will befall into the latter group. Let us see how.

Know What You Want to Achieve

The main reason why some of the corporate events end up being aimless is that there was no one core idea behind them to begin with. Sure, you may decide that you want to launch a new product, but launching is too broad of a term to give you some general direction where your event should be going. Solve this problem by beginning at the end. Find out who is your target audience, and go backwards to determine things like specific goals, format, location, etc.

Set Yourself Limitations

While doing all of this it is very important to constantly be aware of your limitations, be it in regards to time or money. Otherwise, you may overstretch your resources, and be forced to make some last minute compromises. For the start, watch out for other industry events while scheduling. If you are forced to organize an event in some short time period, always opt for the smaller scale and more intimate atmosphere. If you have to choose between functional and impressive, you should go for functional.

Plan the Details

Now that you have envisioned your event’s frame and goals, it is time to take care of the details that will bring your plan into existence.

• Not all of your guests will be able to come to your event with their own vehicles. Make sure that the place where the event is going to be held is accessible via public transport, or provide some similar alternative.
• Food and Entertainment. Do not make the same mistake that already ruined a huge number of events – Entertainment and food are there to relax the audience and help them to engage in conversations that can open up new business opportunities, not to steal their attention.
• The thing that will provoke the mentioned conversations is the quality content. Taking the care of event technicalities is easy, be sure to have something to show your audience once it arrives.
• Audience Engagement. It is widely known that engaged audience is able to recall more presented information than the passive one. Make sure, then, that your event activities are interactive workshops rather than series of boring lectures. If you manage to successfully marry entertainment, content, and audience engagement, your event will have immensely better chances of succeeding.

Think About a Follow Up

All of the things we mentioned above will, however, amount to nothing if your event does not leave a lasting impression on the audience. The number of assets you can use to keep audience engaged in this post-event period is vast and it ranges from simple things, like for example quality promotional material or prepaid visa cards that will allow audience members to spend some pleasant times with their families, to follow up workshops, engagement in social media activities, etc. Just do not allow that your activities seize when the last guest leaves the event.

If carefully planned, corporate events can become not only valuable business assets, but also a brand of their own. The accent here is “if carefully planned” part. Do your best to give your events some purpose, and take care of all the small details, and your corporate arsenal will become richer for one new lethal weapon.