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Corporate Event Planning Mistakes to Avoid

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | Corporate Event Planning Mistakes to Avoid83% of corporate marketers believe that business events are more useful in driving sales than awareness. With this in mind, you can’t afford to make mistakes when planning an event for your company. Although mistakes are bound to happen, they can be costly to your business.

Here are some common mistakes that can happen and how you can avoid them.

Lack of a Definite Goal for the Event

You should never start planning an event without a clear goal and objective. You need to deeply understand how the event will boost your business. Is the end goal to make employees more knowledgeable or skillful?

Once you have a goal in mind, set clear and measurable objectives, like the number of registrations you’re targeting. Whatever your objective, it should be measurable and concrete. Share them with your team for brainstorming and informed decision making.

An Underwhelming Agenda

While you might have a plan for the event, it may not be what the attendees want to experience. Make sure you’re delivering a life-changing experience by looking at the list through the attendees’ eyes.

Questions to ask yourself include:

  • Are the topics in the agenda fresh and relevant
  • How engaging are the presenters or speakers
  • Is there a communication strategy in place to let the attendees know what to expect?

You’ll need a mind shift to be able to pick what matters to them most.

Planning Late

One of the greatest enemies of progress is procrastination. If you want to pull off a successful corporate event, start planning as early as possible. Waiting until the last minute can bring a host of problems later and you could end up not selling half as many corporate event venue tickets as you would want to.

As soon as you set a date for the event, come up with the occasion’s general scope. You also need to draw up a budget as soon as the date has been set. Book a venue in advance while you still have many options to work with. Remember, hotels and other venues tend to have many bookings all around the year.

If you plan to invite guest speakers, book their services early enough. Do your research to see what you can expect from your performers, including the entertainment band. Create a checklist, and as you make your plans, map out all the steps, and determine when they should be completed.

Not Checking the Competition

It can be counterproductive to plan an event and discover a more competitive one happening on the same date. It goes without saying that only one event will draw people in their numbers. You don’t want to take chances as you don’t know if that event will be yours.

Due diligence is essential to check for events scheduled on the same date as yours. Look at industry gatherings for sporting events and local events in your proximity. Once you’re sure the calendar is clear, you can send out “save the date” notifications to your guests. This gives those interested in your event enough time to mark their calendars.

Final Thoughts

Organizing a corporate event is not easy without the right skill set. Sometimes, you need to engage professional event planners like MTI Events to help you pull off a successful occasion. When planning from an expert perspective, you’ll cut down on these mistakes and more.

How to Successfully Organize Virtual Events

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Virtual Events|How to Successfully Organize Virtual EventsOrganizing a virtual event requires the utmost care and attention. You need to promote the event, engage participants, create memorable moments for everyone present, and eventually prove that the event was a success.

In this article, we’ll provide some tips for organizing successful and memorable virtual events.

What Virtual Event Organizing Entails

Virtual events are built around data, participant engagement, and content. They contain the same elements as other types of events.

These include:

  • Event registration
  • Live presentation content
  • Live audio/video
  • Event website
  • Live polling
  • Note-taking
  • Question and answer
  • Interactive video conferencing
  • Recorded content
  • Feedback surveys

With all these elements in place, you can start planning your event.

Fundamentals of Virtual Event Planning

When hosting a virtual event, keep in mind that your attendees want to be informed, included, and entertained.

Your event will need adequate marketing. Without targeted, aggressive promotion, attendance will suffer.

In virtual settings, content rules. Create engaging sessions with powerful keynotes tailored to your participants. Provide options that are relevant to each participant to keep them engaged.

Lastly, you’ll need to capture attendee data and measure engagement, so you can prove your event ROI and the event’s success.

Planning Your Virtual Event

With the right tools and proper planning, you’ll create opportunities for all involved, including yourself, to forge meaningful business connections.

At your event, entrepreneurs and businesses will meet potential business leads. When planning, you should have inspiring speakers, a strong marketing strategy, informative and relevant content, and the opportunity for participants to network – but with some valuable twists.

These tips will help you plan for the event:

  • Gather all the information you need. List and secure resources on time.
  • Inform participants on time and follow-up with reminders, so no one is left out.
  • Send out materials on time, so participants can prepare.
  • Allow and prepare yourself and the attendees for some adjustments in the schedule.

How to Simplify Event Planning

Organizing a successful event comes with its own challenges. Even if you have planned out every detail, some road bumps are inevitable.
A good plan of action can help you overcome any challenges. Let’s look at some best practices to approach event planning.

Break Down the Event into Small Tasks

Breaking down the workload into small tasks is an effective practice to handle the organization. If you write all your tasks down, it’ll be easy to distribute the workload and simplify the decision-making process.

Once you conquer your schedule and to-do list, everything will be ready on time, and your team will organize accordingly. You need to have exceptional time management skills so that you can supervise the progress and make sure everything is going according to plan.
You can create a clear time table and share it with all parties involved to reduce any friction and delays.

Avoid Multitasking

Although an event planner is often perceived as someone always doing many tasks concurrently, you should avoid multitasking, especially at the planning stage. According to research, using multiple screens and devices is not good for your mental health.

Whenever you multitask, you’ll not only end up doing a few tasks but will also do them less efficiently. Focus on the most urgent tasks with the biggest impact, and give it your undivided attention.

After tackling the “big” things first, like settling on the site and time, booking speakers, and other essentials, smaller things will fall into place more naturally.

Build a Collaborative Team

Organizing a successful event depends on collaboration and coordination. If you can’t rely on your team to do their share of the work, you’ll also be forced to assume their duties, such as negotiating with suppliers, implementing the budget, and so on.

That’s why it’s important to diligently distribute tasks and deadlines, so everyone knows what their duties are.

Accept That Something Can Go Wrong

Watching the organization and event unfold according to plan is a joy, but things rarely go precisely as you envisioned.

Understand that you can fail, even in the tiniest detail, and you have to embrace the concept. As an experienced organizer, you should be calm when something goes wrong.

You may have a backup plan that’ll prevent any major fallback, but you cannot have a backup plan for everything. By embracing failure, you’ll stand tall and strong without blaming yourself. Take the failure as a lesson to make things right in your future events.

Final Word

A virtual event can be a powerful marketing tool. As an event planner, you need to deliver the most exceptional experience to all participants. To achieve this, you’ll have to vigorously follow your plan and schedule and make sure that all parties involved are on the same page.

A successful event is an event that provides value to your audience and participants. If you plan your event with that value in mind, you’ve set the foundations for an event that participants will remember for a long time.

About the Author

Joe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters