If you are an event planner or marketer looking to organize a successful gig, your job is clearly cut out for you. You have to find the best event sponsors and speakers, curate the most captivating and actionable content, and ensure that your attendees get an exceptional experience. You are expected to outdo yourself, to make a pleasant impression on everyone, in every step of the event planning and execution process. And then there are much more complex challenges that event planners have to contend with such as finding the best tech solutions, such as attendance tracking software, that will help you follow up with each speaker and track their deliverables without becoming a nuisance. That is why we come in as B2B tech vendors to create and polish software solutions for B2B events planners.
As a multinational B2B tech vendor with years of experience serving big corporates and government organizations, we have accumulated tons of insights into what it takes to organize a successful gig. Our commitment and passion is to share event planning insights to help your business grow through event marketing. Here are five such insights.
1. The art of curating and submitting content
Even before you send invitations and get attendees together, you need to be sure that the content your speakers will be sharing during the event is up to your preferred standards. The content should be educational, appropriate, entertaining, and most importantly, it must incite action if you are to make any new business leads through the event. Each speaker must be on point with your brand identity, mission, and reputation.
But then, in most cases, your speakers are not people you can boss around. They are experts in their fields- highly respected people. Maybe you are not even paying them enough to speak at your event. You, therefore, have to give them the freedom to curate their own submissions. Your job will be to supervise and guide them on your intended conference theme. That’s where we come in as event tech vendors. We will help you design software that you can then use to collect, review, and revise submissions from speakers early enough. We understand that speakers are busy people, so we will create tech solutions that will help you follow up with each speaker and track their deliverables without becoming a nuisance.
2. Reaching out to non-native attendees
The ever-growing event tech space has made it possible for event planners to reach global audiences and provide them with seamless and immersive experiences while at it. Live translation, for example, is now more accessible and affordable than ever. You can share your content in multiple languages through instantaneous translation feeds, be it via earpieces during in-person events or standard dial-in services for virtual events. B2B tech vendors come in to help you leverage different technologies that minimize the logistical troubles that live translation might precipitate. As for the actual translation, the smartest idea would be to work with professional translation services. Professional translators are experts in your industry. They understand your content subject matter, so you can be sure that their terminology will be on point especially in regards to industry jargon. They also understand and respect the cultural differences that come with multilingual audiences, so the content they translate cannot be flagged as insensitive or culturally inappropriate.
3. Scheduling submissions
Which speaker will be making submissions when, and to which audience? That is a challenge that event planners struggle with especially when an audience encompasses multiple demographics. In such a case, you may have to divide up the audience into different groups and assign them different presentation rooms. Some speakers will be speaking to the entire audience, some will only speak to one group, and some will be speaking to more than one group but in different sessions. We come in as B2B tech vendors to help you design a content management system that you can then use to plan, build, and manage schedules around your content, speakers, presentation rooms, and audiences.
4. Monetizing your event
The most effective monetization strategies in event marketing are sponsorships, endorsements, and selling booth space. If you are selling sponsorship slots for your B2B event, you will need a tech provider to help you design banner ads on your website, ads that will not affect your site’s navigability and/or UX. Other monetization resources available to you include displaying graphics on your shuttle bus, running a trade show alongside the event, or allowing sponsors to speak during the event. Managing these revenue streams can be challenging. B2B tech providers will take this challenge off your shoulders by designing tech solutions to manage corporate relations with sponsors and track expo sales from trade shows and affiliate booths.
5. Engaging attendees and measuring results
Event planners and marketers crave onsite engagement. To many, engagement is nothing more than a buzzword that encompasses anything and everything that keeps attendees entertained. But it should be more than that. Onsite engagement should involve trackable actions that planners can later use to measure events’ ROI. That is where a B2B tech vendor can be of help. We can help you track how much traffic your booth got, for example, and who actually paid for whatever your booth was selling. We can also help you design digital signage that guides and encourages attendees to purchase your products or services. In the end, our audience response system will give you a real-time analysis of all the interactions attendees make with your brand.
Conclusion
Streamlining your B2B events is effortless when you work with an event tech vendor. What’s most important, however, is to always use the qualitative and quantitative data that tech vendors help you collect from attendees to improve your brand. You will boost your business revenue by creating new products and making data-driven marketing changes.