Discover how to host community events with a purpose, maximize your reach through engagement and, in turn, contribute to your business goals.

Community Management Tips3 Tips For Hosting Community Events With Strong ROI

Community Management Tips3 Tips For Hosting Community Events With Strong ROI

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Building a community of like minded, passionate individuals means activating people both online and off. Hosting community events is an effective way to get personal with your customers and fans, as well as connect with prospects while encouraging real time feedback loops.

Deciding to commit the necessary time and resources to planning an in-person event requires the confidence that you will be able to prove ROI. You will need to leverage support company wide, develop an effective communications plan and curate the perfect attendee list. Not to mention nurture and retain relationships months and even years after the event.

Read on to discover how to host community events with a purpose, maximize your reach through engagement and, in turn, contribute to your business goals.

1. Events with a Purpose

2. Maximizing Reach

3. Measuring Impact

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Before you can decide what type of event to hold, you need to align your decision making with both your internal business goals and the external needs of your target audience. Event planning can not only be time consuming, but also demanding of your resources. In order to ensure you are getting the most value out of your events, try following these steps:

Set Business Goals:Hosting events can contribute to a variety of business goals, including lead generation, customer acquisition and brand awareness. The first step in organizing a successful event is deciding which business goals you aim to support. By weaving in a clear strategy from the beginning, it will be easier to structure the event around optimizing impact. Moreover, when doing an event retrospective, you will be able to effectively measure both KPIs and ROI.

Audience Care-abouts:Once you have decided which business goals your event will be built around, it will become clearer who your target audience is. At this point, it’s important to research what your core audience careabouts are and where their values and interests lie. This will help you develop the type of event that will get the most response from potential attendees. For example, if you are hosting an event that is tied to lead generation goals, you may consider targeting your audience around a specific vertical.

Advertising the Event:Socializing your event before the big day arrives is key to guaranteeing a packed house. Be sure to establish an event hashtag early on and include it in all your promotions. Build out and leverage your attendee list ahead of time and use your brand advocates to target and amplify via their networks. Having a strong communications plan from the get go is vital, including key messaging, channel distribution plans and prepared social content for both internal employees and external community members to use.

1. Events with a Purpose

“Discover what the industry

best practices are and

what’s appropriate for

your audience. This is a

vital step for planning any

event. Aim to curate the

activities towards your

target audience. Do so by

attending industry events

yourself and listening to

conversations on social

media.”

- Elaiza Datar Community Events Coordinator, @elaizadatar

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With the right preparation, bringing your community together at an event will be smooth and painless. With time saved not having to troubleshoot during the event, you will be able to take advantage of networking opportunities. To make the most out of your event, you need to have a thorough communications plan that covers real time engagement both online and off; here are a few strategies how:

Online Experience: The size of your event doesn’t have to be limited to the capacity of the venue you are using. Creating an online experience for those who attend virtually is a great way to expand the impact of your offline event. Consider a live stream of your keynote speakers or panelists and dedicate an individual on your team for live tweeting and engaging. Holding a live chat session after a keynote allows virtual audiences to pose questions and comments. Remember, even though the room is full of people, the best conversations may be happening online.

Offline Experience:Building a community online is an important skill, but nothing compares to the power of in person networking. Make sure you have enough freedom to socialize with attendees during the event, be familiar with who you are talking to and be sure to thank attendees for making it out. Offline events are a great stage for sourcing brand ambassadors or strategic partners for your organization. Make the venue fun and photo worthy, so that guests will be encouraged to share their experience online.

Gain Company Wide Support: Getting stakeholders across your company to buy in to the event is crucial to its success. This allows you to attract a wider audience by leveraging your coworkers’ professional connections and, in turn, tying the event closely to other departments’ business goals. Not to mention, the extra support advertising on social media will help your event dominate the online space both before, during and after the event. Your attendees will also benefit from the increased networking opportunities.

“A great way to track how

much people are talking

about your event, as well

as promote ahead of time,

is by creating a unique

event hashtag. This way

you can not only monitor

and engage with online

conversations in real time,

but also use the data later

when compiling your

metrics. Perhaps even

take your event a step

further by incorporating a

TweetUp on site to better

include virtual audience. ”

- Connor Meakin Community Manager, North America @connormeaks

2. Maximizing Reach Through Engagement

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After hosting a successful event, you have the opportunity to share the event’s ROI with the rest of your organization. To ensure you get the most out of your time and resources expended, ensure that the relationships you started don’t go stale over time, here’s how:

Establish a CTA:It’s important in the initial planning phases of any event to consider how you want to continue your relationship with attendees afterwards. Your post event call-to-action should be a key component of the overall communications plan you have in place-- this includes those who attend both online and offline. Don’t forget to gather contact information for any influencers or advocates. Depending on the business goal your event targets, you can strategically engage with your attendees afterwards.

Continue the Conversation:Another vital part of your event communications plan is conversation. Continuing the conversation is key to supporting your post event call-to-action and also nurturing valuable relationships. Individuals who take the time to attend or track your event could be potential brand ambassadors, business partners or even new customers. By using a hashtag for the event, you allow your audience to identify follow up activities and other ways to continue connecting with your organization. In turn, attending a single event will be a small part of a larger customer journey.

Measure Key KPIs:There are many metrics that can be tied to events, it’s choosing which ones to focus on that is the difficult part. As a start, gather information on who actually attended, as it will most likely be different than your RSVP list. As a general measurement of the success at your event, track hashtag mentions, social reach and engagement through comments, tweets and conversations with your brand. Another valuable measurement is sentiment analysis, you can do this using HootSuite Analytics. Finally, when possible, compare competitor results for overall share of voice to better set benchmarks for future activities.

3. Measuring Impact

“Incorporating

measurement can be

quick and easy as there

are a lot of great free

measurement tools

available online like UberVU

for HootSuite. Remember,

it is important to measure

both quantitatively and

qualitatively, so even

out the number data

with engagement levels,

sentiment analysis and

potentially valuable

relationships that came out

of the event.”

- Lotta Ygartua Community Manager, APAC @kinalotta

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