Organizing a successful business event allows you to display your company’s prestige, boost your competitiveness and gain new partners, investors and customers. Still, in order for all of this to work, you first have to know how to build a corporate event and make it achieve all of its primary goals. With this in mind and without further ado, here are the top 5 unwritten rules that you should definitely be aware of.
1. Create an agenda
Before you even start, you need to be clear that you, yourself, understand the reason for hosting this event. It might be in order to showcase your latest product, do some networking, attract investors or something entirely different. What you also need to understand is that your successfulness at fulfilling this agenda requires SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals. In other words, setting an abstract and emotional (something that you can’t estimate the increase of) goal is definitely a bad idea from your standpoint.
2. Create a guest list and send invitations
Another thing you need to think about revolves around the guest-list and invitations. This needs to be done early on, seeing as how the mere number of participants determines the size of the venue you have to find for the event, the catering option and so much more. Apart from this, you also need to determine whether it’s an open event, a plus-one type of event or is the attendance limited to the invitation-only people. Once you have this figured out, you can start sending out the invitations.
3. Make a budget
As soon as you have the number of attendants, you should make a budget and see what is it that you actually can afford. Catering and a venue are a must, however, there’s no need to stop here. You should also hire a team to record and photograph the event and plan for any additional expenses demanded by the activities that you’re about to look for. For instance, you may decide to hand out corporate awards to the most valuable members of your team or even outsider contributors (investors, suppliers or partners). This too is something to consider.
4. Check for the schedule of your competitors
Hosting an event at the same time as your competitors can hurt your business in more than one way. First of all, you stand to make a powerful enemy within your niche (keep in mind that a competitor is not necessarily an enemy unless provoked). Second, you stand to potentially lower the attendance of your own event. In other words, you don’t stand to win anything tangible (apart from a slight ego boost if your event is more successful than the other one) and you stand to lose quite a bit. Fortunately, this is something that can be avoided with just a bit of scheduling.
5. Create a false sense of urgency
Finally, there’s a reason why people are so attracted to limited-time offers, even for items, events and services they don’t actually need. The false sense of urgency appeals to their subconscious need to get the best deal out of the event (regardless of the nature of the event). In other words, sending an email mentioning your event might not make people want to attend as much as displaying a huge countdown clock to your homepage. Furthermore, you can remind people of time running out over your social media profiles, thus maximizing the reach of this technique.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the above-listed 5 aren’t all you need to know about throwing a successful corporate event, yet, they are the core criteria you have to fulfill in order to get what you want. You still have to learn how to recognize a good catering offer, how to market your event and how to choose adequate activities for the event. That, however, is a story for another time.
