19- How An Event Creates A Buzz

Creating an event for your business provides your clients or customers memorable experiences, and increases the value of your product/services by providing speakers and networking opportunities.  Creating an experience that attendees want to participate in includes several key pieces. There are a few kinds of events you can create.  An online event, an in person event, a paid event, or a free event. Different services cater to different events. Below we will discuss these different types of events, and what works best for what type of event.  

Having A Successful Event

To ensure a full house and happy guests, you'll want to plan ahead with your events.  A Three week lead time is standard for invitations for more formal events, like a Team Party, or an Open House.  For events like a causal lunch with leaders, or an online training webinar, 10 -14 days is ideal.  Being spontaneous always makes life fun, so don't hesitate to create events that happen with a shorter amount of notice. Like a Super Saturday Sale just for fun.  This would be advertised with just a few days notice, and the "event" would be people coming and eating free cookies and chatting while they shop.

Whenever there's a registration fee, exchange of money or cost involved for your event you will want to use a service that will allow you to accept the payment, track the registrants, has the ability for guests to print offtickets and provides you a registration list that you can use at your event.  If you've ever been to an event that does not include these things, it can be very disorganized and unprofessional. People can tell you they've paid when they actually haven't, or say they've registered when they haven't. When using a service such as Constant Contact or Eventbrite, guests are notified where your event is located before the event begins.  As a host it's your responsibility to have all of these things covered. Constant Contact and Eventbrite are great tools for events because their service covers all ofthese things to create an event.

Examples Of When To Use These Services

+ Facebook Events- Promoting a webinar, holiday party, team training and inviting leaders for lunch.
+ Eventbrite- Hosting a specialty class, training class, team partywhere you will be collecting a registration fee. You will link this event to your Facebook event page for exposure.
+ Constant Contact- Party for the launch of a new program, hosting a training class, team party where you will be needing a registration list and collecting a registration fee. Constant Contact is different than Eventbrite with the cost of payment processing.

Creating A Valuable And Compelling Event

+ Focus on creating value, not selling. Create an event where attendees actually want to be there and are getting something positive out of it.
+ Be consistent across the board! Your customer's face to face experience with your brand should be the same experience they have with your online presence.
+ Keep it fresh! You need to be willing to continually improve your events, innovating and adding content that keeps it relevant and valuable. Attendees go through a lot of trouble to attend an event. If you don’t make it worth their while, they won’t come back and they’ll have a negative experience.

TAKE ACTION: Start thinking of events you would like to create for your business.