Meetings and events are rarely planned in isolation; rather they should form an integral part of a company’s business strategy. Just like any form of communication, there has to be a clear reason for an event being the optimum way to engage, educate, inform or motivate an audience. Almost all activity undertaken by a company must tie back to their mission and purpose. It is an overarching event strategy that supports and helps to achieve those company goals. That is why when planning out your year’s activity it should be closely aligned to your marketing, sales, or corporate objectives.
A well-defined event strategy will give you a framework to deliver within and identify the types of event that best support you goals. Most importantly, it means you are able to measure your success against those clearly defined objectives and track your ROI.
In this article, we break down all the areas to consider when building out your 2023 event strategy.
ALIGN YOUR GOALS
Your events strategy should always be aligned with the wider business goals. If a business goal includes improving company culture, then the event plan must support that. This could be achieved by including events such as recognition awards, team building or a company conference. These will motivate, recognise and build culture, making employees feel more engaged. And if your business has strong ESG goals, then these will need to factor into each and every decision on your event.
Strategic event planning should always tie back to organisational goals. For example:
Grow revenue = trade shows, sales incentives
Build the brand = thought leadership conferences
Reduce employee turnover – team building events & internal recognition awards
DETERMINE YOUR EVENT GOALS AND METRICS
It’s always important to start with your event goals, metrics and KPIs. Once you have identified what events you need to hold, you should determine the most important KPIs for each one and how they will be measured. Just as the purpose of each event may differ, so too will the measurements. For example, a Sales Kick-Off will likely have audience engagement KPIs, an incentive will have sales performance measurements, and a product launch might have brand awareness metrics.
DETERMINE YOUR ATTENDEE NEEDS AND HOW YOU'LL ADDRESS THEM
When detailing your event goals and metrics, ensure you always keep the attendee's needs at the centre. Is the Sales Kick-Off designed to arm teams with all the tools they need to sell more? Do employees need a morale pick-up, and will the company conference be the mechanic for this? By always bringing it back to your target audience’s needs you can create a strategy that better answers their challenges.
REVIEW YOUR RESOURCES
In the early stages of your strategy planning, just as you have identified what you want to achieve, you need to review what resources you have at your disposal to make that happen. If you have a full calendar of events to deliver there are a number of key resources you’ll need:
• Budget
• Staffing
• Time
• Internal support
• Technology
• Supplier partners
Budget setting and management is an integral part of your planning and with inflation rising and costs spiraling, what worked in 2022 might not be adequate in 2023. It’s also worth reviewing who is going to plan and deliver your events calendar – are your events centrally managed or spread across departments? Consolidating activity can bring savings through combining spend and staff to save time and effort.
IDENTIFY YOUR EVENT PARTNERS, TOOLS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS
While reviewing those resources mentioned above, it’s important to relook at those externally who are going to support you. From your event technology provider through to your agency partners. Are each fit for purpose, both from a cost and service point of view? Is the software being used at its maximum by your team? It can be easy to keep rolling subscriptions and software tools. But without taking the time to assess whether they’re working fully to support your events plan, you might be missing out on better products on the market.
CONSIDER SUPPLY AND DEMAND AND TALENT SHORTAGES
When building your 2023 events plan, it’s always important to consider issues such as supply and demand and talent shortages. Whilst event planners may be well versed in these issues from 2022, we’re still likely to see these problems roll
into 2023.
UNDERSTAND WHAT WORKED AND WHAT DIDN'T
Creating a 2023 strategy that’s fit for purpose has to start with breaking down what worked well in 2022 and what didn’t. Was everything measured that should have been measured? Did all the events achieve their objectives? Get as granular as you can when analysing your 2022 event strategy, as this will help form the foundations of a more improved 2023 strategy.
SET GOALS FOR YOUR ANALYTICS TRACKING
Good strategic event planning is about having the data and analytics to prove your event met its objectives. There’s a whole variety of data that can be tracked, from attendee satisfaction to event marketing statistics. If you don’t define early what data you’ll be tracking across 2023, it can be easy to miss crucial analytics. As a rule set clear, measurable goals that are realistic and can be tracked effectively from the outset.
>> TO HELP DETERMINE WHICH DATA TO TRACK, CHECK OUT OUR ‘46+ KPIs TO TRACK ON YOUR NEXT EVENT' ARTICLE.
UNDERTAKE COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
To help differentiate yourselves from your competitors, it’s crucial to be aware of what they are doing in the market. Analyse who the competition is and what types of events they’re running. How are they communicating their event strategy? What is their USP? Are they talking about a particular topic? This is not about emulating but differentiating and to do that you need to understand what’s happening in your space. By arming yourself with this information, you can help your business stand out with its events’ strategy.
BUILDING YOUR 2023 EVENT STRATEGY IN A NUTSHELL
● Understand your overarching business strategy and align your events strategy
● Identify the ‘why’. Evaluate why you’re holding your events
● Review the successes and failures of your 2022 event strategy & learn
the lessons
● Undertake a competitive & market sector analysis
● Analyse the data from the 2022 events strategy to see where improvements can be made
● Analyse your micro (specific to your business) and macro environment (demographic, ecological political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological factors)
● Set your 2023 budget
● Review your resources – people, partners, technology, are they all
fit-for-purpose?
● Determine your goals, metrics and KPIs & define what data you will track across your events
● Check industry events, competitor events, seasonal, bank holidays and attendee location limitations that might affect planned events