It’s no secret that the event industry has changed a lot over the last few years. As incentive travel has become more commonplace in B2B industries, guests are beginning to expect more out of the trips, meaning event strategy is more important than ever. Long gone are the days when simply going somewhere was enough – incentive trips need to be well-planned, informative, and engaging.
This isn’t just on the guest’s side, either. Brands are expecting more out of their trips – if the return isn’t great, why bother investing?
With so much riding on the success of an event, it’s more important than ever to clearly define your events, from engagement between guests and brand to ensuring that your events will continue to extract value in the future.
This definition begins with our first meeting with our clients. The first question we always ask is, “Why do you run this event?”. If you don’t have a good answer to this, don’t feel bad – the most common response is “Because we always have”.
This lack of clarity on the purpose of events, annual spend or the contribution events make to overall business objectives is unfortunately common because it means that our clients haven’t been optimising their planning for almost the entirety of the history of its run.
This lack of reflection can be detrimental to your brand – slowing innovation, hindering progress, and preventing growth. This is why we developed the Event Strategy Model – to better align your events to your business objectives and the needs of your audience, allowing your brand to welcome a new range of opportunities and relationships.
The first step, as with any good process, is defining the purpose. We need to ‘find the WHY’ by assessing current events and trends against a process that audits effectiveness and finds a way to improve where possible (trick question: it’s ALWAYS possible to improve).
The need to define the purpose is to allow our client to pursue new opportunities, build stronger relationships across a wide range of stakeholders, and be better positioned for success across a wide range of business markers.
The importance of reviewing all events regularly – ESPECIALLY in the current economic climate – is to:
The importance is compounded as your workforce demographic changes, meaning you’ll need to review your event content and itinerary to ensure its relevancy. It’s easy to overlook this considering past success, but the event should be specifically aligned to what you want out of it, and that relates specifically back to the needs and wants of the guests.
This goes hand-in-hand with our process for designing B2B loyalty or reward programs. By defining your audience, their needs, their ways of developing value, and how your brand intends to relate to them, your loyalty, rewards, or event travel program can ‘find the WHY’ and subsequently find success.
After noticing a series of trends with new customers, we created our Event Strategy Model (the E-Series) to future-proof events and ensure a high ROI. Our model applies to a series of event-specific attendee behaviours, which work to identify both current and future event attendee outcomes.
With our model-defined behaviours, we can effectively target the client’s needs and work towards desired attendee behaviours first, which will inform the itinerary and inclusions as a result. This helps bolster the desired outcome determining the event, rather than the other way around.
Here’s how the Event Strategy Model works:
Overall, our Event Strategy Model puts your events through a thorough evaluation process to determine whether your current approach aligns with your business objectives or you need modifications to enhance their effectiveness.
