An Executive’s View of Live Events: Building Corporate Events That Wow

Here’s My Advice for Putting Together a Great Event

Event Insights

I spend a lot of time exploring innovative approaches to live events. It’s an ongoing process of constantly assessing the current landscape to understand what works, what doesn’t, and what should be included in our mobile ecosystem.

Live events play an important role in modern CX because they help guests network with others, learn about your brand and become familiar with your products or services. This process creates value for the company, whether you’re sending employees to a remote conference or hosting a local event yourself.

An overwhelming number of C-Suite executives believe in the impact of live events, and plan on investing in them more in the future.

As part of my work, I travel to dozens of corporate events each year, so I get to experience this kind of environment firsthand. When prospects and customers are “wowed”, they continue to view that particular brand through a positive lens. A great event requires several different components to work in harmony with each other for hopefully the right combination of education, awareness, networking, and that little bit of sizzle that makes it impressive. It’s all about the ingredients you put into it.

Think of your favorite homemade soup recipe: chicken noodle, beef and barley, minestrone (it’s raining outside, so yes - soup is on the brain). Executing a successful event is like cooking your perfect version of soup. It takes time, it takes love, and it certainly takes the right ingredients, if you want the end result to be delicious. You consider the distinct flavors of each component, how they mesh with each other, and what the appropriate proportion of each is.

Many companies opt to follow a stale playbook that is akin to serving soup from a can. It gets the job done, but it’s far from a gourmet experience. Making great soup takes a good amount of effort akin to hand-crafting an event that wows.

In fact, 54 percent of marketers believe that live events are an opportunity to position their brand among the top industry leaders.

Well, if you’re not hungry by now, I’m sure you’re wondering: what makes for such an excellent live experience?

The Recipe: Events that “Wow”

Here are a few ideas you can intermix into your overall event strategy to kick things up a notch. Remember, the ingredients are important, but you have to have the right balance and management/execution of each.

Note: I’ll also give some real world examples of a stellar event I recently attended. Let’s just say it “wowed” me enough to leave a lasting impression.

Efficient Onboarding

Plan for optimal engagement. Mobile event apps are now an industry standard and provide event attendees with a transformed event experience.

Strong promotion and support before the event helps increase onboarding and ultimately results in higher event app adoption rates. When it comes to onboarding, the more attendees you have using your app, the fewer distractions or support requests you’ll have. Especially before hand. This requires effective deployment tactics that not only communicate but encourage event attendees to first and foremost: download the app.

Key factors to incorporate into that initial offering are:

1. Focus On Messaging: define a clear set of objectives that will help you achieve your event mission or goal and communicate that to your audience.
2. Point Out Features/Benefits: beyond the event purpose, pique attendee interest by outlining value propositions that a mobile app offers.
3. Provide Clear Instructions: the simplest way to influence onboarding is by giving concise instructions, proper links, and ‘next steps’ for gaining access to your event technology.

IRL Event: Just two days before the event, 94% of attendees had already downloaded the app. One day before, 97% had done so. By the end of the event, the adoption rate was 98.5% - shy of perfection only because a few guests couldn’t make it to the conference.

To make those adoption rates climb, the event team communicated clearly with their audience leading up to the event launch and continued to release updates and interactive content long after the event had concluded.

Use Interactive Attendee Engagement Tools

Event attendees want to do more than just ‘be present’ at your event. They want to participate, provide feedback, influence conversations, and be a part of the live event experience. Interactive attendee engagement tools help make this possible.

Live polling specifically is a cheap and easy way to gauge audience sentiment and reduce the barriers to engagement. Polls provide a new way for organizations to communicate with their audience, and it gives attendees an option to chime in. It’s no surprise these kinds of interactions have become a major trend within the live event community.

An overwhelming number of event marketers believe that technology can have a major positive impact on the success of events. Interactive polling is at the forefront of event tech that adds real value right away.

Surveys are a great tool for gauging overall event satisfaction or for garnering long-tailed responses, but polls are quick, simple, and very easy to execute. Real-time results can help you tailor a specific conversation, assess gaps or needs in your event execution, and even just simply provide an element of fun or entertainment.

IRL Event: During the 4-day conference, interactive polling was part of the even’ts general sessions. Yet they went far beyond just asking simple questions - and incorporated polls as an element of the overall experience, using it to guide conversations in real-time between audience members and panel guests.

Stay On Theme

Most event groups try to do things “by the book” instead of considering what would delight the audience; it’s important to know your audience really well, which does wonders for the experiences you craft. This in-depth knowledge allows for creativity and personalization.

When it comes to the attendee experience at events, there’s nothing that makes it more personable that delivering targeted messaging, content, and in-the-moment interactions on an attendee to attendee basis. Obviously the general event tone and messaging strategy is much broader and should be minded, but it’s leveraging both the topic or theme of your event and the ability to put personal touches into play that makes it more immersive.

IRL Event: The down-to-earth, playful atmosphere was a key part of the event host’s company culture. This conference featured on-stage role-playing, where executives joined in and showed their personal side. More often than not, a “surprise” or ad-lib was thrown in to keep the execs on their toes.

The event team also created a metaphoric theme that naturally spoke to the audience in attendance and internal culture of striving for and celebrating milestones together. The theme was ever-present in the language, agenda item wording, main stage backdrop, notifications in the app, and more for a consistent tone across all event touchpoints.

Together, these elements demonstrate how important it is to know and understand your audience, but also the value in tailoring the experience to the overall event strategy, topics, and theme.

Make “Fun” an Objective

When you think back on memorable moments in your life, most weren’t just remarkable, they were also positive and fun. Fun is often underestimated in the corporate world.

A majority of company events are all about trying to get through the information and agenda items in a sterile, almost textbook way. It’s the “canned soup” formula. This doesn’t make for an an experience that people will enjoy — no matter how professional they are. I can attest to this. I love to have fun at the events and conferences I attend and make sure people around me are doing the same.

This can be small things like specific wording or messaging that is engaging or delightful to more complex ideas like live event gamification. Essentially you’re trying to create excitement amongst your attendees to encourage engagement, conversations, networking, social interactions etc. So, go ahead… play games!

IRL Event: “Fun” was clearly an objective. At the event, the language used throughout the event was whimsical and spoke directly to the audience. For instance, when users booked the event, the app window responded with casual lingo that sounded a lot more like something a friend or peer would say. It’s more real.

Also of particular note, the event DJ played great music consistently to keep the mood upbeat and drive the pace of activity in between sessions and speakers. Even if something happening wasn’t inherently “fun”, the music in the background injected positive energy.

Show Your Appreciation

Showing your appreciation for customers, event attendees, users, employees and so on, is easily one of the best ways to boost satisfaction. And reflexively, people do more for those who appreciate them. Events managers and leaders acknowledge the need for recognition, but perhaps don’t know how to best incorporate it or de-prioritize it.

Appreciation, support, and recognition can be a defining moment for your event. There are many ways to show appreciation but the top two at events tend to be honors/awards and of course everyone’s favorite… swag.

Awards are great, and are very specific to individual attendees or teams, but can be hard to control. I think one of the best ways to show your appreciation to attendees is to gift them goodies or swag.

Unfortunately, the quality of event gifts has declined over the last few years. Not just in material value, but also with how useful certain goodies are. If you hand your attendees a sticker or magnet, most are just going to toss it. Be thoughtful. By giving something that will either improve their experience at the event or enrich their lives, that changes the outcome.

Personally, I believe gifts should be a budget priority because they make the experience memorable. Guests have something tangible they can carry with them out of the venue.

IRL Event: The event host’s have a great reputation for consistently doling out great swag. As a testament, guests actively sought out the giveaway booth or rep to make sure they get their item in case they missed it. The last giveaway was the perfect wearable item for blending the Silicon Valley tech practitioners audience and the event theme. 

Expanding Your Initiatives: It’s All About the Experience

"Ultimately, it's all about the experience," HPE’s President and CEO Antonio Neri said before Golden State Warriors’ stars Kevin Durant and Quinn Cook joined the brand’s partners and media in tours of Chase Center. And his words have never rung truer.

Signing those stars was a bold move, and bold moves are what you need to make live events more impactful and engaging.

If you only take away one thing from this post, let it be that companies who create and provide excellent events are worth watching from a CX standpoint. A company’s digital transformation initiatives must start from the inside-out, placing an emphasis on memorable customer experiences. That’s true of any audience, be it professional or consumer-oriented. It’s true even for building employee engagement or excitement within internal communities.

The more positive the experience, the more likely your customers/attendees are to share with others and talk about it, which boosts the events’ promotional value — beginning a self-reinforcing cycle of success.

When it comes to events, the best ones reflect a company’s digital transformation initiatives by incorporating some of the most innovative technology out there. More importantly, they provide an experience that is fun, engaging, and remarkable. It doesn’t matter whether the event is internal (for employees) or external (for clients and partners), it serves as a manifestation of the brand, and signifies the position or rank a company holds within the industry.

Looking for new event tech? Check out these free resources!