It’s 2023 and if you’re still not hosting a corporate event, you should know that 89 percent (1) of event specialists say that events are crucial for achieving major business goals. A company that wishes to develop long-lasting relationships with its employees, customers, partners or other stake holders must understand how to execute successful corporate events.
What’s a corporate event in the first place and what does a corporate event planner do? An event that is planned and organized by a business for its stakeholders, customers, employees, or the general public is known as a corporate event.
A corporate event planner first understands the goals of your event and comes up with an event strategy. In line with that, they plan the agenda, book the venues, design the event theme, and create event branding. They also manage vendors and logistics, the technical aspects, sponsorships, corporate entertainment, and monitor everything closely on the event day.
Further, a corporate event management company (like ours) can even help you get targeted audience and speakers. A corporate event planner brings his event planning skills and varied experience to the table, so that you don’t make costly mistakes.
One huge myth that needs to be busted here is that events are only for large-scale businesses. While offering event management services for 25 years, we have seen several SMBs utilizing events to build brand awareness, interact with their customers and open up new partnership opportunities.
Importance of Corporate Events:
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Improves Company Culture
In simple terms, company culture is the combination of your formal and informal procedures, attitudes, and beliefs resulting in how your employees and consumers feel about you. Since events define your company’s internal and external identity to a great extent, it makes them one of the most important aspects that form the company culture.
Getting your team together outside of the office can be quite beneficial in terms of relationship building. Further in the case of B2C or B2B events, you have a great opportunity to showcase the values of your company by the way you educate or engage your guests.
Make sure to come up with fresh and relevant corporate event planning ideas to reinvent the attendee experience each time. You can rely on a competent event management company for sure!
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Facilitates Strategic Planning
A corporate event offers a special forum for exchanging knowledge and engaging in meaningful dialogue with a niche audience. For example, a Q&A session at an end- user event helps you gain rich insights into what kind of inhibitions or issues your target audience face or what exactly they seek out of the products/ services you offer.
Further, post-event surveys help you get important information including what your target customers expect. You also learn what kind of topics they would be interested in future, where are they in their buying journey currently etc.
Talking about the benefits of company’s social events, you get to uncover opportunities, weaknesses and even the “hidden truths”. Basically, you have all the information to capitalize on and get the best out of your employees!
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A great way to educate employees and clients
Talking about employees first, the best approach to let your staff know where the company is headed is through corporate events. At an event you get undivided attention, enough time to tell your story and get a face to face feedback. You can organize corporate events for product training, sales kick-off training, security training, leadership development, and enhancing soft skills or technical skills.
Let’s talk about educating end-users! We agree that customers today are more empowered than ever before. However, it is crucial to provide your potential customers with all the information they need to fully comprehend the impact of your goods and services on their businesses/ lives.
Wondering why you should bear the cost of hosting events when marketing collaterals can do the job? Well, events will humanize your pitch, offer hands-on experience to your customers, build trust and loyalty, and reduce the scope of complaints and inhibitions.
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Boost Brand Awareness
Corporate events are a great way of getting people to talk about your business. This includes generating buzz before the event, engaging your audience through several touch points during the event and repurposing the event content after the event. Let’s take these one by one.
To create a buzz about your event, you can leverage your newsletters, website and social media. You can create event hashtags, run contests and even get influencers to promote your event. Next, to create brand awareness on ‘D-day’, make sure your event theme and branding are consistent with your brand visual identity, you have a compelling story to tell, you establish a genuine conversation and most importantly you offer a hands-on experience of your products/ services.
And finally, by repurposing the content we mean using event clips on your social media or website, turning them into an e-book, and creating educational videos or podcasts out of them.
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Fosters a Sense of Community
Events unite individuals around a common interest, fostering a strong sense of community. Corporate events can align your employees, customers, and partners with the company’s goals and demonstrate to them that you care. For your employees, team-building events can go a long way.
In the case of partner or end-user events, keep separate sessions for networking and Q&A. This helps stir positive conversations and showcase that your solutions are not about you but them.
Building a community before the event day is also crucial for maintaining attendee engagement. You can make a Facebook group, engage with your attendees on social media, and nurture them through emails.
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Supports Marketing and Lead Generation
Now that you know you can leverage corporate events to showcase your company values, educate your target audience, create a strong brand image, provide first-hand experience, and build a sense of community, what else do you need to boost lead generation? No wonder this is an important marketing strategy!
So what calls for your attention is that you should NEVER let these leads get wasted. It’s not as obvious as it seems to be. According to Salesforce, 80% of event exhibitors don’t follow up with their leads. You must do a quick follow-up to make your attendees feel that you did comprehend their pain points and needs. Don’t forget that even a registrant who did not turn up at your event is also a lead.
How to Plan a Corporate Event?
Before planning a corporate event, be it a virtual event or a physical one, take care of the following:
- Set clear and measurable event goals
- Define your target audience and analyze their motivations and needs
- Decide on the event theme
- Finalize a budget considering all the factors
- Finalize the speakers and special guests
- Decide the engagement and entertainment factors
- Leverage emails, social media and cold calling to invite the audience
- Plan all the logistics
- Have 1-2 dry runs to ensure a smooth event
Conclusion:
To put it briefly, the purpose of life and business is to bring people together, and corporate events do just that!
Hosting an event is one thing and leaving an impact through the event is another. Attendees’ shorter attention spans and rising expectations are not easy to deal with. To ensure that your event is well-received by your attendees and that they will remember it for years or at least months, make a reputed event company your best friend.
Channel Technologies is one of the leading corporate event management companies based in Noida. If you’re looking for an in-person, virtual or hybrid event agency in India, contact us!
