Increasing audience engagement is important for continuously hosting successful events. According to David Saef, EVP of Marketworks, “Events are a critical component of any brand’s marketing strategy because face-to-face is the best way to engage a brand’s current and prospective customers.” That said, audience engagement makes your event interactive, fun, and enables brand growth and awareness. Ensuring that your audience is consistently engaged not only improves attendee experience but also allows marketers to collect rich attendee data from over 300 different touchpoints.

Attendee engagement doesn’t necessarily start at the event itself. It begins long before and continues well after the event ends! So what are the ways you can increase audience engagement? Here are 20 tips that can increase your attendee’s engagement sevenfold!

Pre-Event

Publish a Blog Post

Promote a future event by blogging about it. Your company’s blog is a great way to kickstart audience engagement at an event because it allows marketers to learn about critical event information i.e. sessions and keynotes, booth exhibitors, parties, lunches or dinners, etc. With a blog, you can create pre-event buzz. Not only that, link your event registration landing page to your blog to increase traffic and attendee numbers. It’s a win-win!

Create and Promote a Twitter Hashtag

Creating a unique twitter hashtag specifically for your event is a great thing to do pre-event also. This way, marketers can promote their event and start filling up their event hashtag with content. Tweets with hashtags receive 2x more engagement, meaning that if you promote your event with a unique hashtag, you can be sure that engagement will skyrocket. You’ll have people talking about your event and even tweeting about it. For event hashtag tips, see Brand24’s blog post

Hashtags are also a great way to engage with attendees during the event and after the event. Even though I put it in the Pre-event section, keep this in mind during your actual event to reach out and engage with attendees throughout the event and continue the conversation after it’s over.

Plan the Room Design

Designing and diagramming a room is the cornerstone of meeting planning. By organizing the room strategically, you can ensure peak audience engagement and interaction.

“By literally positioning attendees in a seat and/or at a table that enhances their cognitive engagement, you are framing their ability to make better decisions, engage with your programming, and remember the content that they are learning” (Socialtables)

Know Your Attendees

Before the event starts, it is important to understand your audience. By knowing all you can about who will be attending the event, you can prepare and execute it even better, ultimately increasing engagement.

Know what company they come from, their position in the company, what their company does, and how you can help them. By understanding this and preparing for all types of attendees’ needs, you can make the event relevant, fun, and interesting for your audience. When an event is fun, attendees will want to interact with anything and everything in front of them.

During the Event

Make It Fun

Making your event fun is truly the very first step in increasing audience engagement. Attendees go to events to learn, discover market trends, and have a good time. By adopting the following tips, you can be sure your attendees will have a great time during your event.

Engage Influencers

During the event, it is important to reach out and engage with Influencers in particular. Influencers have a wider reach and are more powerful on social media. You’re not only engaging with your attendees but by doing so with an influencer, you can spark a larger conversation that can incorporate hundreds of other attendees.

Be sure to make it known to the Influencers how much you appreciate their involvement and continue to engage in discussion with them during and after the event.

Plan Compelling Sessions and Speakers

What good is an event without some first-class speakers and sessions? After all, people are attending the event to learn, network, and share experiences, tips, or information. They don’t want to go to an event that doesn’t have anything to offer them. So, make sure you have ready compelling and informative sessions and well-known speakers. This way, attendees will want to come to your event. The more people you have at your event, the more engaging the event becomes. Sessions and keynotes are also great ways to engage even further with audiences and that leads into my next point:

Have Live Polls

During a session or keynote, have the speakers integrate a live poll. Not only does it make the session more interactive, it also allows marketers to collect data, which can then be leveraged for future events to make them more relevant and helpful to attendees. Polls are simple and highly effective, check out SA’s leading audience engagement specialists, Participate Technologies.

Provide a Game or Competition

Preparing competitions, awards, or games is a great way to increase audience engagement. For example, during the African Associations Congress this year we created a scavenger hunt and riddle me this to drive audience engagement with each other and the vendors. We offered attendees the chance to win fantastic prizes! To be entered to win these prizes, attendees had to visit vendors and spark a conversation with fellow attendees to retrieve and special code.

By creating a gamified experience for all attendees to participate in, we were able to engage with the community and enabled interesting conversations and relationship building.

If content marketing is all about the need to engage the audience through storytelling, interactive content makes the user the narrator of the story. By utilizing gamification, you can make your audience the narrator of a story, they have control over how they play, engage, or win. Also, gamification allows for attendees to not only engage with you but also their peers who are participating in the game. Isn’t that the purpose of an event? To provide a platform to promote not only your brand but also networking amongst attendees? If you’re the company that can do it, you will be the talk of the town.

Use a Mobile App

Exercising the use of an event app is another great way to increase audience engagement. Now, I know that this isn’t something new and groundbreaking, mobile event apps have been around for a while now, but they are very effective. With them, you can provide attendees with easy and intuitive access to personal agendas and the ability to customize their event experience. This way, attendees can reach out to via the mobile app and ask questions, plan their day, and get alerted to personalized session alerts.

Alert Attendees About Sessions

Being able to alert your attendees about sessions is another surefire way to promote audience engagement. By customizing the event experience for your attendees, you can increase engagement and demonstrate to your attendees that you care about them.

You must be asking, “how can Event Automation do this?” Depending on what your attendees do, such as visit a booth, download a white paper, or view a demo, your systems can trigger notifications that alert attendees of relevant (based on their behaviour) sessions that will be happening during the event.

So adopt marketing and Event Automation so you can increase audience engagement and provide an event that covers every need of every attendee.

Start Microblogging

Microblogging during your event can also boost audience engagement. If you don’t know what microblogging is, I’ll explain. Microblogging is what it sounds like. It differs from traditional blogging where pieces of content are usually lengthy and dense, however, microblogging utilizes different mediums, like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, and provides short content, with real-time images.

Knowing this, microblogging becomes an important tool for increasing audience engagement. For all those attendees who follow you on social media, they can engage with you and share their similar ideas about the event that you both are attending. This provides a place where information can be passed between company and client, as well as a great place to provide others with valuable information and opinions about the event, especially if they can’t attend. Those who can’t attend can still be included and engage with you (your company), those who are attending, and learn something from the event.

There’s one thing, however. When microblogging, be sure to alert your followers that you will be doing so before starting. Provide them with the start time you will be actively blogging, a timeframe, and be sure to prepare a schedule so you aren’t tweeting or posting too actively. This allows those who are interested in this event to be present and prepared, while those who aren’t can prepare themselves for an onslaught of tweets or Facebook posts.

Give Special Perks

What I mean by that is to provide audiences with a chance to receive something in return for being at your event or visiting your booth. That can mean giving them a discount if they sign up for your product during the event, special or personalized swag, VIP status to after-parties or lunches, or even free consultations about your product. These perks interest attendees and force them to learn more about your product, interact with your floor team, and engage more at the event.

Provide Cool Swag

Interest people with awesome swag. At your booth, don’t just lay out brochures with information, lay out things such as branded socks, selfie-sticks, bottle openers, stickers, pens, etc. By having something free that catches the eye of attendees, you attract more people to your booth and increase engagement with your company. So think up some original swag, because I can assure you when I see interesting swag, I go up to exhibitors and hear what they have to say.

Have a Great Booth Design

Now, this is an important one because getting people engaged and visiting booths can be very tricky. Creating a booth that drives engagement can be done in many ways. Event Manager Blog gives great examples of ways to make your booth intriguing for attendees. You can (as said above) gamify it by providing small games, giving out prizes, or having competitions, create a theme-based booth experience, or give out customized swag.

You also want your booth to look interesting and inviting. Set your booth up with interesting accessories. For example, at Dreamforce 2016, Slack’s booth stayed true to the theme of Trailblazing. They had green plants and wood and when I looked at their booth I felt like I was hitting the trails at my favourite hiking spot. This brought me to their booth and I was curious as to what else they had for me!

So make your booth interesting, stick with a theme, make it intriguing. By doing so, you can increase audience engagement at your booth, and chat with potential clients.

Host an After-Party or Lunch

Piggybacking off of a big event is another great way to promote your company and increase audience engagement. Throw a party at the end of the day, plan a lunch and invite VIPs. Each of these are great ways to meet attendees and engage in conversation with them.

And you can also! By doing so you increase brand awareness and audience engagement in a fun and exciting way.

Leverage Event Technology

There are numerous event technology applications that you can leverage to increase audience engagement during your event. A good example of this is digital voting keypads. With keypads, you can create a more interactive event and increase attendee engagement. When your speaker wants to engage with your audience with a quick and easy quiz they can integrate an interactive quiz right into there powerpoint. It’s as easy as that! So you literally have your attendees engaging with your event.

Another great example is PixxFly: PixxFly is a content distribution platform that allows marketers to schedule times to publish content such as press releases, blog posts, tweets, videos, images, on any social channel they want. It also comes with built-in analytics so you can better understand how your content is doing. If you need an all-in-one content scheduling application check PixxFly out!

So remember when I was talking about microblogging? Well, this is a good way to set up programmed-content distribution while you’re at the event. This doesn’t only help engagement during the event, it can help after the event also. By programming content to be published about the event a day or two after it’s over is a great way to continue engaging with attendees even after they have gone home. By reaching out and reminding them of the details of what happened at the event you’ve set yourself up for some great conversations and engagement.

Host a Q&A

Host a Q&A during the event using an event app or digital voting keypads. By having a place for attendees to come and get their questions addressed directly by you or your team, you’ll increase engagement and enable your team to increase brand awareness!

Post-Event

Send Out Surveys

After the event is over, you can run a survey asking questions like “Was this session helpful?” “Was it informative?” “What would you change about the event?” These are good questions to ask to improve events in the future and engage with attendees, showing them you care about their feedback. A great way to get a survey out is using an event app, this allows your audience to provide their crucial feedback at their own pace.

Send Thank You Emails

Sending thank you emails is a great way to keep the engagement going with attendees even after the event is over. Send an email to those you engaged with and tell them how great it was to meet them and learn about what their needs were. Make the email personal and relevant. Talk directly about the event you met at, use the recipient’s first name, and overall be genuine.

By continuing the conversation after an event, you increase engagement with attendees by showing them that your company wants to help solve their problems. So send out those emails and make those connections.

Overall, there are many different ways you can increase audience engagement. From interesting booth design, customized swag, polls, and surveys, there is an endless amount of innovative actions you can take at an event to drive more engagement between prospects and your company. By taking with you these 20 tips on increasing audience engagement, you can have an epic event experience that benefits both you and the attendees.

Source: https://www.certain.com/blog/increasing-audience-engagement/