Conventions showcase your brand and what you have to offer your industry. If you’ve ever tried to plan a convention, however, you know the many challenges you can face. From juggling logistics to making sure your audience stays engaged and interested, you have a number of components you have to track.
We will break down for you how to plan a convention that successfully promotes your business and drives audience engagement.
Define the Goals and Objectives of the Convention
Before you do anything else in your planning process, you need to know exactly what you want to accomplish. Once you identify your goals you’ll find the rest of the process goes a lot smoother and works more cohesively overall.
Identifying the Purpose of the Event
Your event or convention can have several different purposes. For example, do you want to educate people? Do you want to focus on networking within the industry? Do you want to drive a new product that you just put on the market?
As you outline your goals, develop measurable metrics that will tell you if you succeeded. For example, you might track sales following the event, digital audience metrics, sales leads, or overall brand reputation. Metrics will help you evaluate your convention and find areas to improve future events.
Understanding the Target Audience
Once you know what you want to accomplish with your event, it’s easier to start identifying who you want to attend. For example, if you want to pitch a new product, you’ll target your leads and existing customers. Other potential audiences might include the general public, VIPs among your existing customers, or industry professionals.
Knowing who you want to attract will help you create strong content that will engage them as you promote the event. During the event itself, it’ll also help you plan activities that will interest them and organize your logistics to keep them engaged throughout from start to finish.
Budgeting and Financial Planning
Drafting your budget is one of the most important steps in building a successful event. Your budget will help you prioritize different components and where you want to spend.
Establishing a Budget
To draft your budget, you first need to list all the significant expense areas.
Some of the most common cost areas include the following:
- Venue
- Speakers
- Technology
- Catering
- Marketing
In addition to these core budget lines, you also want to have some funds set aside for unexpected expenses. Consider your backup plan if something happens to one of your speakers or if you offer to pay for their flights and tickets suddenly increase. Having some funds aside will help cushion you against these problems.
Securing Sponsorships and Funding
Sponsors and exhibitors can help provide your team with income, bolstering your available budget for the convention and generating some income from the event.
To bring in sponsors, you need to build a case for why your event is appealing and what benefits they will receive if they sponsor it or participate as an exhibitor.
Sponsors like to hear how the audience attending your event aligns with their target audience, so the better you understand your audience, the easier it will be to find sponsors who align well. You can also create packages that showcase all the ways your sponsors will be promoted and the benefits they will receive. For example, you might outline places their logo will appear, opportunities for them to present their brand and products, and special discounts and VIP opportunities they might receive, such as the chance to select attendees for networking opportunities.
Ticketing and registration fee strategies can also be intertwined with your funding. You might offer discounts for those who register earlier or offer tickets to those who participate as a sponsor.
Choosing the Perfect Venue
Choosing the right venue is an important part of the planning process. Let’s examine how to make the right choice for your event.
Factors to Consider When Selecting a Venue
As you start to evaluate locations in your targeted city, we recommend you keep some important factors in mind.
Location. Will your attendees be able to get to the location easily? Will the location encourage more people to attend?
Capacity. Does your venue have enough space to comfortably accommodate everyone you want to have at the convention?
Accessibility. Keep all your audience members in mind. Will those with physical disabilities be able to comfortably enjoy the convention?
Amenities. Consider also what the venue has to offer. If your caterers will need a full kitchen, make sure your venue includes this. If you want to have multiple breakout sessions happening at once, make sure your venue has enough spaces set aside. Think about anything else you want to have happen during your convention and what type of space will make that possible.
Negotiating with Venues
Your venue will be one of the most significant costs you have to consider. Therefore, getting the best possible deal will have a big impact on your bottom line. Negotiating with venues can help you get the best possible deal while still ensuring a quality location for your convention.
Sometimes you might be able to get discounts if you promote the venue in your materials or perhaps if you extend your event over multiple days you can get a type of bulk discount. Other venues might offer package deals with their catering service. Research your venue to know what types of negotiations you may be able to offer.
Event Programming And Scheduling
Next, let’s think about the program and scheduling you’re going to put together.
Creating an Engaging Agenda
Your itinerary should be balanced and interesting to keep your attendees interested. It will likely include several different components, including keynote speakers, breakout sessions, activities, and networking opportunities.
Create a schedule that moves people around the different types of sessions. Breaking things up helps prevent boredom and keeps people more interested. Moving from speaker sessions, where people spend most of their time listening, to interactive workshops, for example, can change up how people are engaged so they enjoy their time more.
Managing Speaker Selection and Coordination
To find the right speakers for your event, research people who have presented at other industry events in the past. Consider also big names in the field and even look internally at your own company to help you find great speakers for your event.
As you organize your speakers, provide clear guidelines about topics and the audience they will speak to. This will help your presenters create enticing sessions. Ensuring everyone knows the session duration and how long they should expect to speak can also help you keep your event on schedule and running smoothly.
Logistics and Vendor Coordination
When organizing your event, it also helps to think about logistics and vendor coordination.
Vendor and Supplier Management
You rely on your vendors to help you provide an outstanding experience for your attendees. Therefore, verify the reputation of your selected vendors by reading objective reviews, speaking with past clients, and learning more about past events where they served. Pay close attention to the vendors you select for critical components like catering, AV, security, and signage.
Once you book your vendors, you will also need to work with them to create a schedule of when they should expect to work the event or deliver your final products. Work backwards to create effective timelines so that you have time to troubleshoot. For example, have time to review mock-ups of your signs so you can make adjustments. Have the signs then delivered so you have enough time to check them and place them in the appropriate spots. For the food, build enough time to verify the menu and ensure the caterers have enough time to set up.
Part of this scheduling process also means ensuring that someone on your team is responsible for coordinating with that vendor, which will be particularly important the day of the event when you want to get the different vendors in place.
Registration and Check-in Process
Keeping track of your registrations so that all your attendees can easily secure their places at the event and then check-in when they arrive will get your conference off to a great start. Technology helps here. Designated registration pages can sync all the relevant information with your databases so you can collect payment and keep people’s information organized easily. Apps can also allow people to check-in independently when they arrive to keep everyone moving through the entrance quickly.
Having multiple options for on-site registration can also help. Some people will show up to the event and want to attend on the day-of. Having options for them to work quickly with a team member or to run through the process through a kiosk or app can avoid bottlenecks. Systems for printing badges immediately and extra welcome packets will get your new registrants set and ready to attend within minutes.
Marketing and Promotion
To encourage people to attend your event, you also have to think carefully about your conference event promotional strategy.
Creating a Marketing Strategy
Back in the beginning of this process, you did a deep-dive into the target audience for your conference and what you want to accomplish with the event. This information will also guide how you look at promoting your event and how you will design your promotional material.
A successful campaign will use various touchpoints to engage potential attendees.
Leverage social media. People use social media to connect with others and brands. You can use social media to create event pages that will help people easily find all the important information about your event. You can also create ad campaigns that will target people based on demographics and geography. Show ads to people in particular locations, industries, or with certain interests, for example, and direct them to the event page.
Email campaigns. Make sure you reach people who have already expressed interest in your brand by signing up for a newsletter or otherwise handing over their email addresses. Tailor your messages based on the recipients who fall into your target demographics. The closer you can personalize your messages, the greater success you will see.
Partnerships. You can also promote your event through partnerships. Discounts for those who help promote your upcoming event, such as sponsors or speakers, can drive interest and conversation.
As you promote your event, consider the enticements you can offer to start building your registration list. For example, you might offer early bird pricing or similar promotions to encourage people to sign up, which can further spread the word of your conference and build excitement.
Leveraging PR and Media Coverage
PR and media coverage can be powerful components of a successful promotion strategy. The word of industry journalists and bloggers can encourage people to learn more. Working with influencers who have a strong overlap with your target audience and offering them bonuses in exchange for event promotions can be a great way to build excitement for your event. You can also encourage coverage from industry journalists by inviting them to the event and drafting press releases for publication.
On-Site Event Management
Once you get to the event itself, your planning and preparation do not stop. Considering what your team will need during the event will be critical to your success.
Coordinating Staff and Volunteers
The team you have on hand will greatly impact how smoothly your event runs and the overall impression your attendees have as they leave the conference.
To run an effective team, we recommend the following:
- Have clearly defined roles for each member of the team.
- Make sure each role knows its responsibilities. This includes where they will be at different parts of the event and what jobs they take on.
- Have training sessions to make sure your team members have the chance to walk through different scenarios that attendees might encounter.
- Have volunteers designated to troubleshoot different problems with vendors, attendees, or emergencies.
- Build an effective communication strategy between your team prior to and during the event itself. Make sure everyone knows how to get in touch with other team members.
Handling Emergencies and Last-Minute Changes
As your team prepares for the big day, develop contingency plans that will help you manage unexpected challenges effectively. Having effective plans in place will help your team cope with challenges that might arise and pivot quickly to a new plan that keeps everything smoothly.
Creating effective contingency plans requires looking at different scenarios that might occur, how disruptive they would be, determining the likelihood of that occurring, and creating a list of potential alternatives.
Having contingency plans and emergency plans for scenarios such as the following will help considerably:
- A speaker canceling at the last minute
- A medical emergency during the event
- Parking shortages
- Apps or other technology not working.
Post-Event Evaluation and Follow-Up
Even though your event might be over, you still have a few steps you want to walk through. Collecting feedback from your attendees and following up with your leads can help you maximize the potential of what you can accomplish.
Gathering Feedback and Measuring Success
Once your event is over, having a plan for reaching out to your attendees to learn more about what they thought of your conference can help you see what resonated with them best so you can identify the most important areas for improvement.
There are several different types of strategies you can use to collect this important feedback. For example, you might:
- Send surveys to your attendees, asking them questions about what they liked and didn’t like. You can get their feedback in areas like venues or the food. You can also ask about speakers or their impression of your brand. Try to keep your surveys quick and to the point. Make sure they are not too arduous to fill out so people are more likely to complete them.
- Use analytics during the event. You can also use apps and other means of tracking attendees to see how people engaged throughout the event. You might see how many people attend or participate in different sessions, for example.
- Collect audience insights. During the event itself, you can send out prompts to get feedback on what people think at the moment. Apps can be great for this as well.
As you bring in this information together, you can then use analytics to better understand the overall impression of your conference. You can create data charts for multiple choice questions that bring all the responses together. Open-ended questions can be scanned for key vocabulary that help you quickly gather valuable insights so that you can see what people appreciated and what needs to be improved for future conferences.
Keeping Attendees Engaged After the Event
Finally, your attendees now have a very important interaction with your brand. Capitalizing on this opportunity can help you turn leads into customers, build firmer relationships with existing customers, and upsell to customers and encourage them to engage more frequently with your brand.
Some great ways to do this include:
- Follow-up emails
- Social media engagement through hashtags, photos, and unique pages
- Future event teasers
Conclusion: How to Plan a Convention
Planning a successful convention requires you and your team to carefully walk through each of these components. However, if you take the time to identify and target your audience, select the right venue and vendors, design a budget, build a marketing plan, organize an outstanding schedule, plan for the day of, and then keep in touch with your audience after the event, you will be on your way to hosting an outstanding convention.
Follow this guide to plan a convention and see how you can boost your brand with an enthralling convention.
