Corporate events: Do Big Events Still Work?

Events have always been used to get people together, either to motivate them or update them on things that are going on, to disseminate information and generally make everyone feel part of a group. However, it’s worth thinking about the internet has changed the way we think about how we communicate with others in our sector and how we get information about the sector’s we are involved with.

Convention halls are costly, air travel isn’t getting any cheaper and then there’s the booking of hotel rooms, restaurants, not to mention the industry wide loss of productivity an industry event can cause, when thinking about this it’s easy to see why there has been a reduction in the number of those massive corporate events that used to go on for days and days.

There has been a growth in the number of people questioning the value of big corporate events (whether that be conferences, product intros or huge exhibitions). Think about the types of people that sign up to these events and you’ll see how the world is changing, by and large the people who sign off events are marketers (and they’ve got to get past the younger marketers in a lot of cases before they reach the actual decision makers), and nowadays marketers are so focused on return on investment, because they can see ROI every day using a much more analytical approach to marketing than previously would have occurred. With big, expensive events are much harder to work out whether they’re going to deliver any return on investment.

Most of us can probably name literally dozens of large corporate events that have had to skip a year, or that simply don’t take place any more.

What’s replacing big conferences and industry exhibitions?

It’s fair to say the internet is the main thing that’s replacing corporate / industry events, think of those invites you get to webinars or simply the amount of content that’s put out there and that you casually consume (as you are doing reading this blog post).

The decline of the large corporate events represents a real opportunity for other businesses and event goers are looking for much smaller events where their niche can be displayed with much more impact. Many of these smaller events are regional events rather than the big national events, they tend to be cheaper to attend and when considering the old phrase “people deal with people” it makes sense that these regional events will attract the people the corporations are likely to deal with (ie their local customers).

Expect to see more of these local events, better still start thinking about how you can create one of these small events yourself. Skiddle do this with our Skiddle Socials in which we hire out a bar for the evening and invite a bunch of event promoters from the local to come and have a drink and chat about the industry and how Skiddle can better help them achieve their goals.

How important are registrations to a corporate event?

Probably the most important element of holding a corporate event is knowing roughly or exactly how many people will actually be attending. Skiddle’s event registration facility enables both paid for events and free-to-attend events to distribute tickets and promote the events with strong analytics that enable the event promoter to change the marketing message of their event to best maximise the number of registrations.

Big events need to move with the times to get more people attending them because ultimately it’s a chicken and egg scenario, it’s only with big attendances can large events get away with demanding the high fees to their exhibitors, that means they have to stop relying on the old methods of simply sending out invitations to events, they need to be on social media, doing PR effectively and interesting (basically doing everything a big business would do in order to be viable), and don’t rest on your laurels, just because you think everyone in the industry knows about your event doesn’t mean they do. Carers are more transient than ever before with decision makers moving in and out of industries at a rate of knots so you are need to make sure you are constantly hitting people about your event throughout the year in order to make it a real success.

To use Skiddle’s event promotion software simply visit Skiddle’s Event Promotion Centre.