One of the most important parts of a conference is keeping your audience engaged. It can make or break an event, plus heavily impact on your ROI if you end up with a distracted audience. Engagement tactics don’t just happen during the event, they should be woven in pre and post event – ensuring that at every touch-point you’re considering how to best create a connection. In this article, we look at the top ways you can engage your audience at your conference.
Your comms campaign is one of the most important elements when it comes to engaging your audience, pre, during and post event. From the choice of channels that you use, to the copy and visuals, all of these have a part to play in how you’re engaging your audience throughout. Consider each and every touch-point along the user journey and where you can drive engagement at each. For example, video content might bring a message to life, or gamification might be used to better connect attendees with each other.
By including your audience in your agenda creation, you’ll significantly increase engagement. At the start of your planning, build in surveys to understand what your audience would like to hear about. Always start off by considering what the objective is behind the data you’re gathering. Is it to determine a theme for the conference, to guide you on their desired type of keynote speaker, or is it to understand further what they might want to learn in workshop sessions? Garnering this participation from your audience early on is a fantastic way to show that you’re considering their wants, needs and challenges.
Nothing inhibits engagement more than sitting still in a large conference room all day. Breaking up the agenda to encourage active movement is a key way to have colleagues connecting and networking. Build in team building activities to the sessions that inspire collaboration. This can be ice breakers at the start of the day, through to team building workshops that are in line with the theme of
the conference.
The tone of your meeting is heavily influenced by elements such as speakers (both internal and external). A motivational keynote speaker will engage with your audience in a different way to a sports presenter, so always curate your speaker content in line with the tone you’re looking to achieve for your conference.
We all love to laugh, so by bringing humour into your content you can increase listening retention and break up your agenda. Inject humour with video content, ice breakers, or specialist entertainers throughout the day and evening and watch how it brings your audience together.
Gamification is a fantastic way to drive connections at a conference. Gamified elements don’t need to just happen on the day too, they can happen throughout the entire comms campaign. Create a dedicated event app that can help to drive better attendee connections or support engagement with polls, quizzes and challenges throughout.
Engagement shouldn’t stop once attendees have gone home. There are so many opportunities to create an extended community post-event. Create a communications plan that creates a legacy beyond the finish of the event. This might include sharing of the content sessions on demand, continuing to engage in forums, or keeping teams accountable with their objectives set at the conference. By keeping this community continually engaged until your next event, you will have an audience readily available with ideas and opinions to help you formulate
future experiences.
If you’d like support with engaging attendees at your next conference, we have a range of in-house specialists who are experts at audience engagement techniques. Just drop us a line at patrick.ockendon@bcdme.com – we’d love to help.