Set Clear Goals

The first thing on your mind – to have clear goals for your event planning ideas. Depending upon the kind of goals you want to achieve with this event, you can proceed to decide what kind of event would be suitable. Later, you also have to take into account the attributes of your target audience, the impression you want to create on them, and what can you attendees gain from your event.

Team Up

For small business owners, events can be a little heavy on your pockets. Collaborate with similar businesses to share the workload, expenses, and of course, the benefits. You could even hire a professional event organizer to make sure your event is remembered by all your attendees. Also, ensure that the marketing needs of each of the businesses are met during the event.

Help Is Given To Who Ask For It 

And if this is your first time organizing an event, you need to ask for it. Most people think – “How much effort is it going to take me to put up an event that’s only going to last a few hours?” and the answer is A LOT. Setting a date, finding a venue, organizing a team and allotting tasks, finding caterers, putting up decorations, sending invites – it’s a seemingly endless list. Don’t panic; ask event organizers or those who have done it before to help you out. In such cases, collaborations can be highly beneficial.

The Right Kind Of Promotion 

More than what you say or how you say it, the right kind of promotion relies on where you say it. Once you know who your target audience is, you’ll be able to find out their online and offline hangouts and carry out promotional activities there. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are regulars when it comes to social media marketing. Apart from these, you could go up to your customers and clients and get the word out about your event face-to-face, encouraging your team members to do the same, too.

Incentivize Event Attendees

Even after the right kind of promotion, you might want to be on the safer side and ensure attendance by offering the right kind of incentives. A remarkable guest speaker, a quirky theme or venue, interesting interactive sessions, all pose as points that intrigue attendees and make them register for events. In fact, they might even recommend your event to their friends, boosting people to buy tickets for your event and filling up your venue.

Return Gifts

Who doesn’t like gifts, now? All kinds of freebies make event attendees happy. You don’t have to necessarily provide them with expensive ones. Promotional goodies, product samples, information packets, all are real charmers. They create brand recall after your corporate events are done.

Get Feedback

Where there is scope of being better, there is scope for growth. Getting feedback from your attendees is extremely important so that you can figure out your flaws and correct them, and polish the things you did right. Yapsody lets you have a personalized FAQ section on your online ticket platform, and you can even mail your attendees a short questionnaire. Apart from that, publish blog posts and update your Facebook and Twitter with the highlights of your event, so that your attendees have access to the wonderful moments they spent at your event.

The post What Makes A Corporate Event Successful? appeared first on Yapsody.

One bright and sunny day, Event Presenter bumped into a very cool guy with sparkling eyes, a grinning face, and a big car. He introduced himself as Event Management Software, and requested to know the reason behind Event Presenter’s sulky mood.

“That’s it? That’s your problem? I can solve that!” Event Management Software exclaimed after hearing Event Presenter’s story. He patted his car and on seeing the look of bewilderment on his new friend’s face, said, “I can offer to bring all your friends together in my car so you could have a good time with them. That’ll bring a smile on your face, right?”

It sure did. Event Presenter enjoyed a lot with his friends and they all lived happily ever after. Oh, wait! Don’t you want to know what else Event Management Software did to make Event Presenter the happiest person on earth?

He brought together all the Required Data into One Single Place

Whatever data was collected from all other platforms (or friends, for that matter) was available on a single software so that making data-driven decisions could be made extremely simpler for the presenter (yep, that’s a generic term for our Event Presenter guy). This way, analysis becomes efficient, as the entire customer cycle can be tracked – right from traffic driven to the website, online registrations, buy event tickets, to physically attending the event.

He let Event Presenter experience the company of all his friends at once

Of course, this was the key point. Now, presenters need not sit down with a web developer to figure out their website then set up an email marketing platform to send out newsletters while juggling with the N number of social media channels for online promotions. They can get a full-fledged webpage for their event, an online ticket store, social media widgets, email integration, and so many other features all on one digital platform. To get a glimpse of what exactly is offered by an efficient event management software, take a look at Yapsody’s features.

He showed the door to Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets undoubtedly hold a special place in every presenter’s life, but it’s high time we came to terms with the fact that lately, it’s not really working out. When it comes to filtering out required information from the tabulated pile of registrant data, it can be a tedious task. Using an event management software, these analyses and filtering out processes are way faster and absolutely foolproof. These will not just save your time, but also help you put together like-minded groups or help people meet people that might interest them.

Epilogue

Of course, Event Presenter was happy with Event Management Software because he was a high-spirited, friendly guy. But, if you look closely, he was able to help because he had a car that was enough to fulfill the needs of Event Presenter.

There are hundreds of event management platforms out there, and you can’t draw lots and randomly pick one. You first need to list down your requirements and then choose the one that fits your need. If you’re looking for something that’s professional and easy-to-use, you can always turn to Yapsody, though!

The post Event Presenter & Event Management Software: The Saga appeared first on Yapsody.

I see presenters spending so much on advertising and marketing campaigns that have zero (why am I using this word, or number, so much!?) effectiveness. What they don’t realize is that the conversion rate (percentage of website visitors who end up registering for your event) should be their prime focus. For example, if a 1% conversion rate meant 600 attendees, 2% will directly imply 1200 registrations. Now that you know how serious this is, let’s go ahead.

Oh, and I totally forgot, all these methods are going to cost you zero (again!) money, just like Yapsody’s General Admission events (that’s how marketing is done, folks).

CONTENT

The primary rule of website content is that all of it should aim at selling your event, directly or indirectly. All. Of. It.

Once you’ve fitted that in your head, drill these rules, too:

• Start with your conclusion
• Use headings
• Keep the content crisp and brief
• Bullet and number information
• Summarize
• Highlight important information
• Respect privacy and copyrights

Now that we know the rules, let’s play the game. The kind of content that you could put up on your website includes:

• Information related to top speakers, previous participants, and also feedback that previous attendees have given, celebrity endorsements, press mentions, pictures from your previous events etc. in order to build trust.
• Up-to-date information i.e. always keep an eye on prices and discounts that your website displays. You could also embed a Twitter/Facebook feed or run an active blog.
• Nothing that doesn’t serve the purpose of getting people to register for event. This is usually the annoying banners selling foreign products, newsletter subscriptions, or auto-playing videos that can be really distracting and ward off potential registrants.

CALL TO ACTION

This is how you have to actually provoke website visitors to register for your event. To the eyes of the audience, it’s just a button, but to a presenter, these four elements actually build the button:

Offer your registrants something that’s beyond good speakers, food, venue, and agenda. It’s only when you offer them discounts or free coupons that you actually grab their attention.

Create a feeling of urgency to persuade them to register immediately, or they might exceed the time limit or the event might sell out. Limiting the time and quantity makes people who are probably not even interested get in the flow and register.

If you’re hosting a great event, you shouldn’t be hesitating in assuring registrants that they are guaranteed complete refund on cancellation or in other similar scenarios. This makes you more dependable and eradicates double thoughts from their minds.

Your call to action statement should be a strong imperative verb that invites the viewer to perform a task immediately, almost subconsciously. Verbs like “Buy Tickets” or “Register Now” possess the characteristics of a strong call to action.

COSTING

Start off with chalking out the average price of your ticket, and construct all ticket categories, special offers, and discounts around that price. For example, if your average ticket price is $30, your tickets should range from $25 to $50. Make use of these tactics to maximize sales:

• Have a minimum of two categories always (VIP and Executive, for example)
• Have at least three ticket types that trigger urgency (Earlier than Early Bird, Early Bird, Standard)
• Special offers can comprise of discounts for tickets amounting to more than $100, group discounts for 5 people and so on.
• Code discounts are yet another way to offer discounts that can be made exclusive and limited in time/quantity so that people feel the urge to use them.

NEVER offer tickets at a lower price than you did before for the same event. This is highly frowned upon in the events industry because your attendees will be infuriated if they purchased tickets to your event 3 months prior to the event, and people are availing “last minute discounts” to get them at a cheaper rate.

CHECKOUT

Your advertisements and promotional gigs may have lured people into visiting your website, but if your registration and checkout process is not impeccable, your conversation rate may take a dip. Make sure you keep the following points in mind when you craft your registration process:

• Make your registration form as simple as possible. If you have fields that may be unclear, don’t forget to add help text.
• Make it concise. Don’t ask for irrelevant and unnecessary information.
• Account registrations seem to lengthen the process to visitors, so try to avoid them.
• Localize language, currency, and payment methods depending upon the market and your target audience, because this is said to boost registration by up to 300%.
• Restrict the registration process to your website and avoid redirecting your visitors to another webpage, as this discontinuity and inconsistency may tamper with your brand’s identity.
• Use the right event registration and ticketing software that caters to all your needs. Yapsody offers you a ticketing platform that is user-friendly and professional at the same time, and has a number of other features *embed a link to the features page here* at your disposal that can help you plan out your event efficiently.

CONCLUSION

Your marketing campaigns are bound to fail if your website, which is practically the face of your event, isn’t up to the mark. Make sure you incorporate these four C’s as you work on your website, and your conversion rate is very likely to boost up.

The post Ways To Sell More Tickets With Zero Budget appeared first on Yapsody.