If you’re part of a conference planning team, you’ve likely spent hours discussing and analyzing ways to increase attendance at your conference or event. Unfortunately, far too often the drive for higher attendance takes our attention away from the importance of engaging attendees before, during, and after the event.

Meaningful attendee engagement drives excitement ahead of the conference (hopefully leading to more brand visibility), improves attendee experience during the event, and leads to better conference ratings, feedback, and return attendance.

Here are six ways to spark engagement among attendees, presenters, and exhibitors in 2019:

1. Provide your speakers and presenters with an engagement toolkit

As part of your pre-conference marketing plan, take time to create a toolkit of suggested social media posts and graphics to distribute to your speakers and presenters. Even a simple word document with 4-5 pre-written social media posts for Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook will make it easy for presenters to invite others to attend the conference and attend their session. Create branded graphics with the conference hashtag that will be easy for your speakers to post and share.

2. Invest in a conference app that allows attendees to connect, post, and compete

Conference planners are largely moving away from the thick conference book that attendees received when they checked in at the registration desk, and instead are relying solely on a conference app. Mobile apps are cheaper, greener, and provide better personalization for conference attendees. Apps allow you to post live updates to your schedule (including the option to send push alerts to drive traffic or make important announcements), let attendees rate their session or event in real time, and often allow your attendees to personalize their schedule and network with fellow attendees.

Apps are also moving towards gamification as well, allowing your attendees to post original content and compete with other attendees. For example, DoubleDutch creates a social media-style feed where users post photos, comment, like, and engage with each other. The app allows conference organizers to turn on a leaderboard where users compete for points. EventMobi takes it further and awards points for taking actions such as checking in at the registration desk or visiting a sponsor’s exhibit booth.

Gamification app from EventMobi

3. Incorporate giving into your conference

Allowing your attendees to contribute to charity can be a powerful engagement tool that not only leaves your attendees feeling good, but you’ll be adding valuable resources to an important cause. Examples of giving include receptions or a gala where the additional cost is donated to a charitable cause, a networking event to connect local charities with conference attendees, and an early morning 5K run can be scheduled to fundraise for a good cause.

4. Think beyond Twitter for social media engagement

For years Twitter has been the go-to social media platform that event organizers encouraged their attendees to use. If your event doesn’t include a hashtag, you’re nearly a decade late to the game. However, a recent Pew Research Center report shows that only 22 percent of Americans are on Twitter, and of those, 10 percent are responsible for 80 percent of all tweets.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t actively promote Twitter use at your conference, it’s still an important tool, but start to plan beyond Twitter for attendee engagement. Use Instagram posts and stories as well as Facebook to promote your conference, and encourage your attendees to share photos so that you can highlight their posts on your own channels or on a public social media wall. Instagram stories are quickly becoming an excellent way to engage users. Repost content and use the Q&A and polling function to encourage attendees to have fun.

No matter what social media platform attendees are using, it’s important to encourage your audience to share their conference experience to their networks, resulting in raising your conference’s visibility, and hopefully creating a sense of FOMO among those who aren’t at the conference.

5. Partner with exhibitors and sponsors

Don’t forget that attendees aren’t your only customer during the conference. Part of your conference strategy should focus on retaining exhibitors and sponsors for future conferences. The good news is that exhibitors and sponsors can help you engage attendees, while at the same time driving traffic and attention to their exhibit space or content.

Provide your exhibitors with their own media sharing kit with branded graphics for the web and print, a draft press release, and suggested social media posts. Encourage them to share their posts with your organization so that you can share with your audience.

Work with exhibitors to provide special events that will drive engagement such as morning yoga classes, competitions with prizes, scavenger hunts, or food and beverage specials. Make sure to keep your attendees informed of these special events through your app, daily email announcements, and social media.

6. Reevaluate your attendees’ customer experience

Taking the time to create attendee personas and customer journey maps is not a project you’ll be able to tackle over the weekend, but doing so can help your organization evaluate each customer touchpoint and create a better experience from registration to the final keynote speaker. The goal of a journey mapping is to align your conference’s primary goal with the attendee’s overall experience, with a heavy focus on the customer’s happiness.

Keeping your attendees engaged is a key ingredient to a successful conference or event, and can make the difference between a conference attendees need to attend vs a conference they want to attend.

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Learn more about how Final Draft Strategies can help your organization implement a comprehensive conference engagement strategy?