From hashtags to hospitality, your event communications and how they tie into your marketing plan can mean everything in terms of your event’s success. In this short guide, we walk you through the process of event communication.
Before Your Event
Communication Timeline
Your marketing agenda and communication schedule will be influenced by deadlines for selling tickets, signing speakers, and/or deciding event programs. Here are some general timeline rules to stick to when planning your communication strategy:
- By 12 weeks (at least) before the event, you’ll want to announce the event.
- Spend the next 10 weeks (or more) executing your marketing campaign and working on a strategy for communicating necessary information. Keep in mind that you won’t know all this information at once; it will come to you gradually, and you’ll want to be strategic about when you release it.
- You’ll need to keep your other organising teams informed about your communication strategy so they can send you information you might not have shared otherwise.
- On the week of the event, communicate any and all vital information and share directly with attendees.
Important Details to Communicate
Communicating the following information, in this order, will help to prevent unpleasant surprises for both your team as well as the attendees:
- Speakers’ and hosts’ names: Since your speakers and hosts are a huge part of what draws attendees to your event, you’ll want to start introducing speakers early on in your event communications. Information you could include on your speakers might be keynote titles, photos, and brief introductory bios.
- Event agenda and activity: Attendees will need to know the event agenda ahead of time to plan their event activities and make the most of the day, which is especially important in a conference with multiple sessions.
- Communication channels & necessary downloads: You need to decide which communication channels to use to communicate with your attendees and engage them from the moment they have their tickets. It can be an event app, social media, event website or emails.
- Food and drinks: This is helpful for people to know whether they need to eat beforehand or bring food, especially if they have a food allergy.
- Dress attire: Make sure all participants know how to dress for your event. Business casual or wear what you want?
- Weather: Outdoor events, transportation and even attire can depend heavily on this crucial detail. You likely won’t know this information until less than one week out.
Communication Tools
Now you know what to communicate and when. Knowing how to communicate that information effectively is much more important. Beyond merely announcing information, you should engage attendees and get them involved in your event as much as possible.
Here is a checklist for you, from basic to advanced communication tools.
1. The Basics
- Event page on your website. This will help anyone who is interested in learning more about your event easily find updated information in one spot. Potential attendees will most likely come to this page.
- Email marketing. Gather the emails of your past and current attendees as well as your supporters to build a strong newsletter list.
2. Social media
- Twitter: Regardless whether it is a business event or not, Twitter is a good place where you will want to feature an up-to-date stream of what’s happening, ask for feedback, answer any questions, share interesting comments and engage more. You can acquaint followers with all speakers and hosts’ official handles.
- Facebook: If your audiences are on Facebook, it is a good idea to set your event as public to promote more invitations throughout the Facebook community and moderate shared comments, photos and videos.
- Instagram: It is a great place to share high quality sneak peeks of speakers, location and anything evocative of the event’s story. Be sure to utilise your event hashtag here.
3. Mobile event app
If you haven’t used an event app yet, you would be surprised how much a well-made event app can help you communicate with your attendees, going beyond providing a mobile agenda and logistics.
During the Event
Important Details to Communicate
Remind core team members including your hosts and venue staff to share all elements of the timeline, so everyone can be on the same page and have plenty of time to prepare. This includes scheduling the opening tweets, announcements or live polls through your event app, possibly the night before.
Regarding communication with your attendees, you will need to update attendees with the following information.
- Remind everyone of the event hashtag, along with promoting where to share and engage across your social media channels.
- All breaks, meals, receptions, and other activities outside the venue should be made clear via announcements, printed agendas and/or an event app.
- Share what’s going on with those who couldn’t attend. Post fascinating photos, videos and quotes across social media, so your audience at large can feel involved.
After the Event
Important Details to Communicate
- Thank everyone involved and conclude the event.
- Did you collect attendees’ feedback from a live poll or a mobile survey before/during the event? You can share these results with attendees.
- If you didn’t collect feedback through a mobile survey during an event, it is not too late. You can still create a survey (e.g. SurveyMonkey or Snap Surveys) and send that out over email within a week.
- Take a moment to consider how you want people to share their experience afterwards and perhaps capture all their content into a memorable photo album to include on event pages or a thank you email. Their content is invaluable and can be even more spectacular than your own.
Conclusion
Your communication style and social media presence can set the tone for your event before it begins. Hopefully, this short guide has given you some inspiration for your own event.
At Innotio we are experts at organising all aspects of events, so if you are thinking of organising your own event, get in touch and see how we can help.
