Often times, many businesses and organizations will find themselves looking to increase their influence, promote their brand, or reward their own customers. One of the most effective ways to do this is to run an event! They are a great way to meet your customers in person, provide them with value, and have a little bit of fun!

But what goes into running a successful event? Your business might not have the experience or expertise to organize a successful event or the money to pay for that expertise. If you’re bootstrapping your event, we have a few tips here that we want you to keep in mind when you are organizing your own event!

Offer real value

One of the most important things with any event is to make sure that you have people who want to go to your event! While that should be obvious, many event organizers fail to come up with an event that is suited for their target audience. When organizing events it’s important to come up with a few goals or ultimate outcome for your event, which can help guide your decision making.

At the end of the day, what your event MUST do is offer some value for your attendees.

In other words, what are your attendees going to get by coming to your event? Is there a unique speaker? Will they be able to meet interesting people and network? Will they learn something? Or will you promise them that they will have a lot of fun.

As you attempt to answer some of these questions, the most effective way is to directly ask some of your customers. Reach out to them, ask them questions, have conversations. The earlier you do it, the more effectively you can come up with an event that people get people climbing over each other to join.

Presales, Online Registration

Whenever you want people to take action, you should make it as easy as possible for them to take that action. Gone are the days when customers had to travel to the ticket booth and buy their tickets in person. It is almost an expectation that tickets should be available and easily accessible through online channels such as EventBrite or even Google Forms.

Depending on the channel you may be using, and the nature of your event, an additional use for the online channels would also be the launching of early bird tickets. By pre selling tickets, you will be able to gauge the demand and interest surrounding your event, and make any needed adjustments!

Leverage your past customers

Your past customers are probably one of the most important factors in ensuring an effective business event. They know the brand, the business, and if they are your customers, then they are much more likely to join your event! At the very least they can definitely help out with the creation and planning of the event. Here are a few actions you can take to use your past customers to their full advantage:

1. Ask them for ideas and feedback for your event. Your customers are your ideal target market, and they may offer you insights that you didn’t consider before
2. Offer them discounts for the event to reward them for their loyalty. You can make sure that the event will have an ideal number of customers in addition to helping other become interested in the event!
3. Referrals, if you create an event that is uniquely tailored to your customers, when they decide to attend, they will often tell their friends about the event too. It’s free marketing!

Effective Online Promotion

So you have an event. You’ve done your research, and you think it’s going to change the lives of everyone who attends. But how are you going to make sure that event has enough people?

While you could just run around telling everyone you see, there are certainly much more effective strategies to do so. One aspect that a lot of businesses neglect when it comes to event promotion is the online marketing platforms and tools that can exponentially increase their reach.

There is so much more to online promotion than simply launching an event page on Facebook. Using paid ads on social media and Google can help you target and sell your event to a wide group of your target customers that you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise.

Influencers

Another strategy that you can look into is the use of influencers or thought leaders. Simply put, inviting people who have a lot of influence in their industry. As an extreme example, if I was running an event on clean energy, one influencer I could potentially invite would be the Tesla CEO Elon Musk! When he states that he is going to the event, or believes that your event is very interesting , then a lot of people would become more interested in your event because Elon Musk is considered to be a leader in the clean energy field.

Of course, Elon Musk is an extreme example. On a smaller scale, you can find influencers who run small blogs, Instagram pages, or even local community groups. If you have made an event that people will love and that offers potential customers a lot of value, these influencers should have no problem recommending your event to others.

Event planning is no easy task. It’s always important to evaluate your goals and make sure that your event can successfully meets the needs of your clientele. Regardless, with a successful event, the benefits outweigh the risks, and with this knowledge you should be ready to go launch your own successful event!