How to plan a successful event – know your target audience

There is only one chance to make a first impression. It works in every aspect of your life – at work, in every relation with newly met people and even in business. That’s why, if you are hoping for creating a successful event, it’s extremely important to define the right target group to not disappoint your attendees.

Now let’s imagine, that you’re working on creating an event on behalf of your company. It’s supposed to be strictly business related, aimed at your potential clients and people from big enterprises with decision making powers. So there you start, you haven’t prepared any different strategy, besides doing what you always did in every other marketing related action in the past. You make a promise to your future attendees of a great agenda and a conference hall full of people just waiting to make some business or make an investment. However, to your surprise, you only encounter a few marketing managers and a place full of young people, students and people without any power of decision in their hands – in this case, not what you were hoping for.

Not only in the situation described above, you’re in trouble, but the few managers, who expected to meet other business hungry people and investors, are in trouble as well.

What went wrong you might wonder. You hadn’t created a proper target group before launching your campaign. You surely had a plan of what your event attendees are going to be like, but that might not be enough. How do you plan a successful event then? Read along.

So how to define your target audience properly?

In order to create a strong relationship between a brand and its clients you have to carefully select a target group. Doing that is one of the crucial things you have to keep in mind when planning to go online with your product or service. After completing these things, you can start projecting your physical attendance.

To define your target audience you must complete multiple stages of the process. Basic parameters you have to include in your research are: gender, age, education, level of income – these are called socio-demographic attributes. Second parameters you can include are things related to one’s interests. Like ways of spending one’s time free of work etc. – these are called behavioral attributes.

You surely know these definitions and there is probably no need to elaborate on this one.

How can you benefit from the simple fact that you know your target audience?

There is more to finding your target audience, as you imagine. To answer the question “why?”, you would need to ask yourself – what does your company and the attendees, get from the event?

First of all, attendees can create new relations with other companies’ representatives. The money their bosses spend are now put in good use. Then comes the educational part. The attendees visit an event to learn new things about their profession. Again, it’s always an investment.

For the event host it’s not a charity work either. It’s not only about doing an event to educate or to connect some people. The company responsible for creating the event, has always a chance to present it’s work and reach out to the people. Therefore without much effort, some relations and business can be done.

One thing that you must understand if you want to know how to plan a successful event to fulfill both your and your audience’s needs

It’s as important as all these things, that were mentioned to this point. This time imagine, you’re hosting a happening and let’s make it a chess competition. You obviously won’t need a huge stage or a whole tech team, because you probably won’t need that much electronic equipment or the music you would play in the lobby would not necessarily be rap. You get the point.

If however, the event is a lecture from a known professor or it’s an open day at a university you will act differently when planning it.

Understanding the differences is necessary if you care about your audience. Unfortunately it won’t be possible without taking steps like finding the right target group as commented before or planning the right facility for your happening.

When can you actually say: “It was, indeed, a successful event”?

It’s essential to find the outcome of your event. To gather feedback from your attendees, partners and co-workers. It’s not yet popular to measure the marketing efficiency of an event, which is ultimately just a giant loss. Companies spend thousands of dollars to create, promote and host an event. After that, nobody knows what they actually benefited from. There are only a few marketers that want to analyze thoroughly how to plan a successful event.

The smartest thing to do, would be to find a tool to help you analyse that data. Would you rather spend more money on events that are not creating any business or save that money and use it to make your successful events even better? The answer is obvious.