Every business event will be allocated a specific budget covering everything from the marketing costs, location, and food provision to registration and communication. Additionally, the time-costs associated with the process of planning and executing an event should equally be taken into consideration.
Technology is playing a broader role in not only supporting the delivery of these events but also in reducing associated costs to increase the chances of future events being planned.
The use of technology for either a stand-alone event, or utilized across multiple functions, can assist with lowering costs by moving marketing online, monitoring registrations and attendance through apps, and transferring as much communication from traditional means to digital platforms as possible.
Reducing the Costs of Event Marketing
The success rate and return on investment of traditional marketing techniques such as purchasing billboard spaces, printing leaflets, and investing in radio or television advertising are often complicated to quantify.
Consider moving your event promotion efforts online with paid ads on social media or search engines and email marketing. Not only will this allow you to decrease marketing costs significantly, but it will also reduce the time-costs of planning and designing physical adverts, printing, and delivery.
Whether your online event promotion targets:
- Previous attendees,
- Individuals who have consented to the use of their details for marketing purposes,
- People who have accessed your site or social media platforms previously or
- Individuals identified by a search engine as potentially interested,
you can target people you know have a higher chance of investing, significantly increasing your success rate and return on investment.
Not only is online marketing more quantifiable, but it is also extremely flexible. If a particular ad isn’t performing, you are not tied down. You can simply turn it off or tailor the advertisement until it does perform.
Online marketing can be extremely cost-effective, allowing you to either make savings or reallocate spend elsewhere. You can also use the data for improved advertising for your next event, cutting out ads that didn’t perform and saving future funds.
Digitizing Communication Before, During and After Your Business Event
From hard copies of schedules and brochures to printed tickets, there are a lot of staff hours associated with the preparation, organization, and delivery of these information sources. Additionally, there are bound to a variety of questions from multiple attendees that need to be answered. This equates to an enormous amount of hours that could be put to much better use. Hours that, of course, cost money.
Tickets and schedules will always be lost, particularly if these are sent out before the event. By digitizing these, your attendees can simply download the information again, having it to hand at all times. Not only is this easier for the attendee, but it also cuts back on time spent by staff sourcing and reallocating these required documents.
Additionally, to prevent the mind-numbing and time-consuming task of answering the same questions multiple times, invest in an online document of frequently asked questions. This way, you are providing a useful source of information as well as reducing time-costs of responding to individuals who are most likely asking the same questions.
Simply cutting down on the amount of time required for these tasks by relying on technology to do the brunt work, staff will be free to move onto other, more pressing tasks related to event planning. Not to mention the sustainability aspects of digitizing as much as you can, which is kinder on your pocket, the public opinion of your brand and the environment.
Invest in an App to Store Data
By investing in a registration tool, your team will have all of the data they need regarding attendees at the push of a button; and your attendees will have access to all the information they need via their client dashboard. Need to know how many people are attending and have signed up in real-time? You can find out via the app. Is your chosen catering company asking for specific dietary requirements? This information is available at the push of a button. Need one source of information to ensure your entire team is singing from the same hymn sheet? This is possible through the app.
Attendees can also put forward specific requests via this tool. Having all of these in one secure place means that no question or request will fall through the cracks.
Having as much information in one place drastically decreases the time spent digging through different sources to confirm information or produce reports, both in the run-up to the event and afterward.
Reporting on Business Event Success
Through the use of technology, whether that be via apps, online surveys, or other reporting tools, you can quickly gather an array of information regarding the success of your event.
Via online channels, you will be able to report on how many people have seen and interacted with your online advertisements in the run-up to the event; and calculate revenue directly and indirectly associated with these.
From comparing initial interest from your digital advertising to understanding how many people attended your event, which will be less than the number of people who signed up, there is a wealth of data available that can easily be extrapolated. If you expected X amount of people to attend and catered for this amount, it is guaranteed that not everyone will show up for one reason or another, which means leftover food and the like going to waste. Reporting on this metric over a few events will allow you to measure better how much food should be ordered and how many goodie bags should be made up etc. You can then use this information to cut back where possible, allowing you to either make additional savings or reallocate that budget to other aspects of running events.
Additionally, through the use of online surveys, you can further analyze the success of your event to understand what was done well and what requires improvement. This information can then be used to determine what budget may be necessary to run the next event.
DepositPhotos – business event
