An event organizer's guide to mastering meetings скачать в хорошем качестве

An event organizer's guide to mastering meetings

In this webinar, we explore how event organizers can master meetings to deliver a better return on investment (ROI) for all stakeholders. With a backdrop of a challenging economic climate, the pressure is on event professionals to prove value, and meeting programs are a powerful solution. This session, hosted by Grip, features product experts who share their insights on designing, implementing, and measuring the success of meeting programs from start to finish. Key Takeaways from the Webinar: Why Meeting Programs Matter: This year, marketers are under pressure to justify event spending, and many companies are unhappy with the number of leads and meetings they get from events. Meeting programs are being adopted more and more by event organizers to drive revenue, prove ROI for exhibitors, and improve satisfaction for attendees. These programs also benefit organizers by helping sales teams with rebookings, giving marketing teams higher satisfaction scores, and reducing operational overhead. Types of Meeting Programs: The webinar categorizes meeting programs into three types: Manual or Free Flow: Attendees connect with each other in advance of the event and add meetings to their schedules. This allows them to look at directories, find who they want to meet, and arrange a time before the event starts. Strategic Meeting Program: This type of program uses mutual matching and automated scheduling to arrange meetings. Unlike manual programs, the scheduling process is automated, freeing organizers from having to manually go through spreadsheets. Hosted Buyer: Similar to a strategic program, but the buyers' expenses (hotel, flights, meals) are paid for by the organizer. Designing Your Meeting Program: Start with Your Audience: The key is to research your audience to understand what they want and need. For example, do suppliers want longer, in-depth meetings or quick introductions with many people? Define Participants: You can have a meeting program with a large number of people, but you need to get the ratios of buyers to suppliers right. A great approach is to define the group based on a buyer's intent, then approach suppliers with the knowledge that buyers want to meet with them. Any to Any Networking: It doesn't have to be just a buyer-supplier model. Peer-to-peer networking is a great use case, especially for association events where the focus is on building relationships and learning. Key Phases for Success: Pre-Event Planning: Focus on getting participants to complete their profiles with relevant information. This can be encouraged by offering exclusive content in advance or even through onboarding calls for first-time participants. When setting preferences, it is more effective to allow people to choose "must meet," "meet," or "no thanks," rather than asking them to rank all potential connections. Live Event: Ensure there is a sensible meeting area that is quiet enough for conversations, with refreshments to encourage people to stay in the meeting area. Make sure there is good Wi-Fi and clear signage to help people navigate easily. Post-Event Follow-up: Collect feedback to assess success. A realistic timeframe for this might be six months after the event to see if meetings led to business deals. Data exports with notes and lead scoring can be easily uploaded to a CRM system, helping exhibitors measure their ROI and organizers to prove the event's value for rebookings. A Call to Action: The event industry is at a pivotal moment, with the goalposts moving from display advertisements to meetings and connections. Organizers need to be proactive and deliberate in ensuring the right people are in the room having the right conversations.