Attending annual conferences and events can be a daunting task. Let’s be honest: we all have a love-hate relationship with them, yet we understand the value and importance of connecting with potential customers, business ops and partners. While some event-goers are more successful than others, we all attend them with one goal in mind: ROI.
Companies invest thousands of dollars per year in events. They are spending big dollars, but many leads are not converted into sales due to lack of time management, poor planning and not setting measurable goals. Do you fall into this category? If you said yes, then we have the solution for you.
Planning ahead is the key to your success. Through the socially-driven applications listed below, you can be connected to attendees before, during and after the event.
- Meetup allows you to discover events and the communities surrounding them, and connects users to groups based on their interests. Through Meetup, you could potentially meet communities of similar interests groups both professional and socially.
- Checking-in to an event on your smartphone through Foursquare allows you to see who has arrived at the event. Foursquare allows you to create your own events within the venue, and provide offers and giveaways to those who check-in through it.
- Bizzabo’s nifty app connects event goers to one another, using their LinkedIn profiles to make professional connections. This app allows you to meet attendees, identifying the community of people who check-in through the app, so you can really network duringthe event.
While these applications allow you to stay on top of who’s who, other applications enable you to stay in the loop with all the chatter around the event in real-time.
- For a more socially centered application, Sprout Social allows you to create a search to track all the keywords or hashtags surrounding the event.
- With Colabo, you can listen and monitor all the conversations surrounding your event by creating a live feed board with the key terms or hashtags for the event. In addition to measuring metrics internally, you can showcase your real-time data around the event. Colabo extracts data from social media chatter, news and more, and displays it in an attention-grabbing display on large digital monitors.
The real key to succeeding lies in what you will do post-event. We all know that once the event or conference ends, so too do our efforts to re-connect with event-goers. The event may be over- but conversations and chatter are not.
Bring your A Game to post-event activities by follow these tips to succeed:
- Create a list of prospective leads and follow up within a week after the event. Don’t let them go stale!
- Identify event- or industry-relevant conversations and engage in the discussion. This allows you to continue the conversation, leveraging the impact you have made during the event.
- Use Bizzabo, Meetup and Foursquare to connect with attendees you missed during the event.
- Continue to follow the conversation through apps like Colabo: create specific boards to track relevant topics, and take action based on trends and real-time discussions.
While working an event used to be a chore, with today’s powerful apps the entire process becomes much more interesting, engaging and rewarding. Don’t just show up and hope for the best. Leverage apps to find out who will attend, plan your strategy, connect with key people during the event, and stay on top of what’s being said. With apps like Colabo, you can even bring your targeted message to attendees in a compelling visual manner. Finally, when the event is over, apps can help you drive sales, forge stronger relationships, and stay on top of the ongoing conversation.
For more on Colabo, check out our website: www.colabo.com
