How to engage attendees for the long-term

Events may take place in one moment in time, but your relationship with attendees can start before and continue long after, giving you the opportunity to increase levels of engagement. Adopting such a mindset is particularly important in the current climate, with delegates being increasingly choosy about where they go and what events they attend.

Cvent recently hosted a webinar, entitled ‘Will you Marry Me?’ exploring how events can be used to shift short-term engagements to long-lasting relationships. Here are five takeaways:

Pre-meeting discovery

Create a moment of discovery when you bring like-minded people together. Facilitate a pre-meeting gathering so that when attendees get into the meat of your events, they know each other already. Felicia Asiedu, senior marketing manager, Europe, Cvent, said: “Some events do this with fun runs in the morning, or they'll have an element of gamification, a coffee get-together, or just something that helps people to feel less awkward and more welcome. It can even be doing something as simple as having images of people in your conference programme so people can feel reassured if they’ve met/seen someone previously.”

Help build agendas early

Give attendees as much ‘know before you go’ information. Build up people’s agendas before they arrive at an event. This can be as simple as providing an online conference guide with suggested sessions, making it an easier proposition for them to attend, to providing free Ubers to get them to and from the event. If you find out where delegates are coming from, you can offer additional services such as tracking their carbon footprint or giving them a voucher for a coffee when they arrive.

Making it small first

Organise a smaller, more productive meeting from a bigger event. Continue conversations post-event. “It could be a dog walker meet-up for all the people that have dogs in a particular area,” said Asiedu. “I've had some of my best B2B relationships from smaller meetups where I felt I was valued, because the person that was organising it was there in the room with me and personally invited me.”

Event recaps

Make attendee event recaps available. These can encourage people to bond and be more personalised. Event recaps are different from session and content videos shared post-event. As Cvent outlined, they are similar to reels which can be produced from an event. Consider creating an area where everybody that attended the event can drop or upload their videos, and event organisers can pick a selection of phone-made videos and splice this footage together to send out to delegates.

Do it early

Plan online events content as much ahead as possible to make it catchy. “If you think about what makes catchy content ahead of time, you'll set up the scenarios when you get on site,” said Asiedu. “We held an event previously that was disrupted by train strikes - we asked people to car share or if they needed Ubers and everyone shared their journeys to the event and it was surprisingly fun. We should have made light of the challenge [rather than overthinking it] and captured these journeys for online content - we missed an opportunity to do this, as we didn’t think about it till after.”