Events With The Audience In Mind

How to incorporate elements into an event that add value to the audience

Events always have an audience and pitching to the right audience is non negotiable. We now live in a world where our attention span is greatly reduced and we can be turned off if our attention is not captured within a limited window.

Personas

When the team at LemonZest work with customers to understand and shape an event brief, one of the questions we ask is about the audience and use this to help our customers think about the attendee persona. An attendee persona is a fictional profile that represents and describes your attendee. It’s an effective way to get into the mindset of what makes an attendee type, what a particular attendee type wants to experience, what are their traits and what they want from your event. This then helps to shape how an event can be created and how best to engage.

Tell the story

Creating an environment that encourages the audience to be involved, immerse themselves in your event, get invested to share photos, or tweet (or whatever the word for X is ??), requires creative planning.

Take the audience on a journey. That might be building excitement, showing effective LED backdrops (check out our website for how dramatic these can be) or the dressing of your event space, which can be light touch or full production. When considering what to include, think about the tone of your event and how props, table centres, star cloths and lighting create ambiance to take the attendee on a journey.

Ideas to engage

Social media walls are a good way for your audience to engage with posting live updates, messages and photos. When you have audience interaction, guests have their moment of fame on the big screen. Create a bold and event-specific hashtag for maximum impact. You could encourage tagging in social media posts too. Give your audience a voice and a chance to join the conversation.

Event backdrops aren’t only for awards and product launches. They can be branded and provide an opportunity to catch guests as they arrive for photos. This then acts as a way for guests to advocate and share attendance at the event. This links to the point above about social sharing too.

Incorporate interactive elements into your event. Can you ask quiz style questions throughout the event? Can you incorporate technology to ask the audience to vote? Maybe get the audience out of their chairs to participate in an activity or check out the options for a guest speaker or compere to keep the momentum. An example of this, for an event we delivered a few weeks ago, is a conference where each delegate had a drum handed to them after the lunch break, a notorious slot where the dreaded post lunch slump happens. Each delegate came back from lunch to the sound of the drummers on stage to then get involved in the team energiser. It was extremely powerful to watch, and everyone enjoyed the participation.

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There are many ways to deliver an event to engage an audience and build the value attendees get from it. When planning your next event, keep the end goal in mind and what you are trying to achieve. This is the basis of the plan and the best elements to engage should seamlessly fit around that.

Links, details and ideas to inspire are here ????

Website: Reels and examples:

https://lemonzestevents.co.uk/ https://lemonzestevents.co.uk/events/

Blogs and articles for more detail and ideas:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/event-marketing-must-try-ideas-promotions-louise-connor-avhne? https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/power-engaging-employees-louise-connor-6s9oe?

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