Your meeting or event is not a success without attendees who are both interested and focused on your sessions. Attendees’ excitement and willingness to engage is one of the top factors in making your event worthwhile. Make sure your event is a success with these ideas to keep attendees engaged during your event.
Attendees’ excitement and willingness to engage is one of the top factors in making your event worthwhile. Make sure your event is a success with these ideas to keep attendees engaged during your event.
Play a Game For events spanning multiple days, organize a group-wide game or challenge to keep all guests involved and working towards one single goal for the complete time period. This could be a daily scavenger hunt, a point system for attending the most sessions or a trivia game that creates questions from the event content. If the prize is worthwhile, the audience will want to be involved.
Involve the Audience If you are hosting smaller sessions including breakouts or small group meetings, be sure to create an interactive atmosphere. An easy way to do this is to encourage audience participation by bringing audience members onstage for interactive presentations or to simply incorporate polls, in which users can vote by tweeting or texting. Offering hands-on activities like virtual reality experiences is a very innovative way to keep attendees excited and engaged.
Surprise and Delight Make sure your guests know how grateful you are for their attendance. Whether you shower them with special gifts upon check-in or hand out giveaway prizes for checked-in attendees throughout your event, exclusive gifts given to those who chose to attend will brighten days and encourage guest to stick around. They may even become advocates for recurring events like annual conferences!
Host New and Exciting Experiences The easiest way to keep attendees engaged is to offer new and exciting experiences they cannot discover anywhere else. These can be exclusive product launches, a behind-the-scenes look at a popular item or a personal experience with a celebrity or popular industry personality.
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It is important to have a social media presence at the trade show before, during and after the event. Begin posting about the event well in advance using the established hashtag, getting attendees and speakers familiar with and excited about your brand. During the event, encourage attendees to interact with your event posts or publish their own social posts about your brand. An excellent way to promote social conversation at your trade show is to have a social activation at your booth. Be sure to interact with attendees who have visited your booth and reach out to those using the event hashtag who have not yet stopped by. After the show ends, continue socializing with engaged attendees to build relationships and loyalty.