4 simple steps for a perfect attendee-event fit

In order to maximize the success and enhance the reputation of your business event, it is essential to know exactly how to address your attendees. You must know them, their needs and their expectations to fully satisfy them and get the best reputation.

In this article we show you 4 simple steps how you can address your attendees more precisely, that you get the perfect attendee-event fit and increase registrations.

1. Know your attendees

The first key to success is to know your attendees and their needs to address the right kind of people. Not only your regular guests or fans you have already fully convinced, but also when thinking about expanding your target audience. It’s very important to answer the following questions upfront to host a successful event. What kind of common interests do they share? Do they speak a particular language? Or, do they like special places where they can meet?

People want to have fun and want to meet in nice settings. The places near the convention center are getting more important. Hotel capacity, meeting space and airport access remain the basic needs, but more destinations are playing up their unique experiences. Authenticity, sustainability, technology, community engagement and, of course, reasonable prices, expert say, are increasingly important to attract business groups.

Keeping that in mind, you should get answers to all those question marks. A very successful way to find out, what your attendees exactly want is to run interviews or do online surveys upfront with people of your target audience. This is a very cheap and effective way to find out what you really need to take care of, when doing the event planning.

2. Know your competitors

The second crucial work that needs to be done, is to understand, who else is addressing the same group of attendees and what do they offer. Are this regional or international players? Do they have a very high quality of the program and speakers? Do they have a special show or are there any evening events, that attracts people?

This is a very easy task, since most of the information is online anyway. A couple of hours of competitor analysis, will answer most of those things. Whatever your findings on competitors are, do not copy them and sell them as yours. Try to find something new, that will attract your attendees, and this leads directly to step 3.

3. Have a Unique Selling Point (USP)

This step is not directly improving the communication with your costumers, but can have a huge passive impact on it. Because of the increasing number of business meetings, it is getting more difficult for participators to attend every congress available in their job sector. A unique selling point is essential to set oneself apart from other competitors and ultimately for the success.

Unless you can pinpoint what makes your event unique in a world of homogeneous competitors, you can’t address your target group successfully and start improving your congress to fit everyone’s needs.

As described in the competitor’s section, its crucial to provide something your competition does not offer. This can be special hands on workshops for hands on attendees. A very prominent keynote speaker in that sector, or a very fancy location. Maybe you can offer your attendees some additional services like a matchmaking platform (e.g. b2match), simple travel planning tools, that helps attendees travelling to your event.

4. Personalized communication with your attendees

Since not everyone of your potential attendees is at the same stage in the decision-making process, whether they should attend to your event or not, it’s very important to deliver the right messages in order to make them register. Therefore, they need to be addressed in different ways to get most out your marketing budget.

Typically, people can be categorized in 3 different target groups of business congresses and conferences.

• The regular guests

Your regular guests will always attend the congress if they’re free. They probably know all details about the event and have already marked the date in their calendar. You don’t have to convince this group of your event. Just make sure that they can subscribe for updates and provide them with regular content. A simple newsletter with exciting news keeps them informed and happy.

• The uninterested

This group likely never heard of your congress or is barely in that field of work. Therefore, this target group will be hard to reach and even harder to convince for our event. It is not impossible, but there is no reason why we should exhaust our marketing resources on this group, when we can reach more people with less effort somewhere else. People who show almost no interest in your topic should be ignored if possible.

• The undecided

This group is unsure if they should attend. They would be interested, but just did not get the all the help they need. This is the group who needs a little nudge in the right direction.
Basically, this means you should focus your resources on this group to convince them of your advertisement and speed up their decision. Further, you need to lower the onboarding barriers and help them to register as easy as possible.

In order to do this, it’s critical to understand the decision-making process of the attendees and erase all the question marks they have in mind as quick as possible.

If you want to learn all the details about the decision-making process of your potential attendees, you can read our blog post about this important topic here.

Conclusion

To fully satisfy your attendees and maximize the reception of your congress it is essential to address them as precise as possible. The first step to reach this is to know your attendees and their needs. A very successful way to find out, what your attendees exactly want is to run interviews or do online surveys upfront with people of your target audience.

Understanding your competitors and to think how you can stand out with your offer is very crucial. This helps you to develop a unique selling point. Unless you can pinpoint what makes your event unique in a world of homogeneous competitors, you can’t address your target group successfully and start improving your congress to fit everyone’s needs.

Keep in mind to address your attendees in different ways to have the best effect on them. Typically, people can be categorized in regular guest, uninterested ones and the undecided ones. Try to focus your marketing resources on the undecided ones to be as effective as possible.

When you get these 4 steps right, you already make a huge step and spark your congress reception.

If you want to leran more about Event organizing with EnterAnGo, then visit our Event information page above.