Today, we’d like to share some tips to help you plan and execute your next corporate event. At Alexander’s, we know events well. For the past few weeks, we’ve been busy planning and strategizing our own events for the year, as well as helping our clients with their events.
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Whether it’s a trade show, business networking event or a company luncheon, events often require way more work than initially anticipated. However, a well-planned event can become your best marketing tool.
Listed below are 5 steps to help ensure a successful corporate event.
1. Conceptualize
Before anything else, meet with your team to brainstorm and plan the event. Selecting a theme or central topic will give you a starting point and help you narrow down other details. Your initial planning meeting shouldn’t include too much detail, rather it should be a time when you throw around ideas for location, dates, who should attend and identifying your overall goals and objectives.
2. Create a budget and action item list
Event costs can get out of hand pretty quickly if you don’t create a budget and stick to it from the beginning. At this point in the planning process, you should consider all the individual elements including food, entertainment, room rental, invitations, photography, travel arrangements, etc. Map out every element and begin contacting potential vendors and partners.
3. Create a calendar
Once you know the date of your event, create a calendar with deadlines that need to be met by your team, as well as by vendors you’ll be working with. Nothing is worse than trying to pull elements together at the last minute. Leave yourself some cushion time so you can ensure a smooth planning and execution process.
4. Create effective marketing materials
The success of an event depends on people showing up, and you can’t get people to show up unless you have the right marketing collateral and items. Ask yourself how you plan to market this event to people? In our experience, a strong mix of printed and digital elements renders the best results. Creative print invitations can be effective on their own, but depending on the size and scale of your event, you may want to consider setting up a website, having online event registration and sending out email invitations and reminders as well. Your event may call for signage and handouts, or marketing items for guests to take home. Make sure your team considers the right marketing collateral items to convey your key messages.
5. Track results
It may sound odd to track the results of an event, but how can you determine if a corporate event is any good if you don’t have data to analyze? This may be something you collect when registrants sign up for the event online. You can also collect business cards and track sales leads. A post-event survey is always a good idea. Just be sure that you’re tying your event efforts to some form of trackable information.
We are frequently called upon to help clients and professional associations plan for and execute event-related communications. If we can help, please feel free to contact us.
