Many great events rely on repeat attendees in order to maintain success year after year. The challenge is providing a quality experience, while also leaving your guests wanting more.

When someone has a wonderful experience at an event, they can’t wait to return! After a fantastic event many attendees are already pumped to book their ticket for the next opportunity. This is the type of atmosphere you should try to provide at your next event and here is how you can do it.

1. Provide High-Quality Customer Service
   Providing a great experience starts with customer service. Do your best to make sure your attendees feel valued and excited to be at the event. From the time guests arrive, to the moment they leave, they should be treated with appreciation.
   Showing attendees that you are organized and prepared is also another form of providing customer service, because you are making their experience more enjoyable. Guests are sure to share their experience and return as future customers, if they feel like the event was well put together and successful.
   A great example of visible customer service is in the welcome you provide at your events.
   For other outings, the welcoming atmosphere might begin when attendee’s step inside the venue. Wherever your first point of contact is, you should be sure your audience feels the presence of your event and sees your commitment to customer service.
2. Keep Your Event Fresh
   No one wants to attend an event that is exactly the same year after year. Part of the thrill of returning to an event is to see what they have in store for each new year, month, etc. From the decor and theme, to the speakers or entertainment, your attendees will look forward to what you have in store if it varies from event to event.
   Providing a fresh and unique experience each time can be a challenge, but it also gives you a wonderful opportunity to be creative and think outside the box. Utilize your team or volunteers from your event to think of new ideas. You could also try surveying your former attendees to find out what they want to see at the next event. This helps everyone to feel more involved and shows you appreciate their input when you implement their new ideas.
3. Provide Incentives for Repeat Attendance
   Many events provide a discount code or special early-bird rates for former attendees. This is a great incentive for guests to sign up early and it shows that you value their continued support.
   Another idea would be a gift or physical item for your returning guests. At a small-scale event, you could raffle off a big-ticket item to guests who have been loyal participants. Any type of recognition or additional appreciation will show your return guests that you respect and value their loyalty.
4. Encourage Engagement
   Engaging your attendees is a very important part of gaining them as loyal supporters. Finding new ways that they can interact with each other, the presenters or the atmosphere around them will make the event more compelling. If they feel connected to the event they will be much more likely to return and to share their experience with other potential guests.
   Big or small your event is sure to benefit by adding an increased focus on attendee engagement and interaction.
   Empower your attendees to connect with others and spread the word about your event. Repeat attendees can become one of your biggest marketing tools by engaging with their friends and colleagues, before, during and after the event.
   I have seen great success with engagement at conferences where the presenters connect with the audience by using live response tools or an interactive social media wall. While speakers are presenting they can ask questions and have the audience engage with each other and the topic being presented.
5. Provide a Sense of Ownership
   Turning your attendees into advocates who feel deeply connected to your event is the ultimate way to transform them into loyal attendees. When you feel a sense of ownership in anything you want to see it do well and you enjoy being a contributing part of that success.
   This ownership can come through asking for and listening to attendee feedback. Allowing guests to provide input on gifts, venue, presenters, host city, etc. are all a great ways to get your attendees voices more involved. When you open yourself up to listening to the ideas of your guests, you are not only benefiting yourself, but you are making your attendees feel connected and involved in the planning process.
   One of the best examples that comes to mind is some of the large scale music festivals that take place around the world. These events happen year after year and the attendees are what make the events so special, not necessarily the performers. Yes, the lineups are usually amazing, but there are always people who attend no matter who perform. The reason they attend is because they are loyal fans of the event experience and this is what truly makes these outings so accomplished.

In Conclusion

Loyal attendees will fuel the repeated success of your event. Work hard to ensure your guests are happy and satisfied with their experience. When you plan an event, you want to create an atmosphere that your attendees will feel connected to. If you can provide them with a sense of ownership, create a wonderful experience and value their opinions, you are well on your way to success for years to come.

Inheriting a struggling event is a challenge or a burden depending on your attitude. But with a couple of steps you can launch a much different, more successful happening.

You hear it in sports franchises all the time–how will the new coach turn things around? You hear it on a company level too. What will the new CEO do to show stockholders larger returns? In both of these instances, the pockets run deep. But what can one event planner do to turn around a struggling event? There might be more possibilities out there than you thought.

There are three phases in turning around a disappointing or struggling event:

• Analysis. Figure out what’s wrong, how bad it is, and what you’ll do to fix it.
• Fix. Plan and change up the event to meet more of your attendees’ needs and recruit new event goers.
• Cement. Solidify the changes.

1. Analysis

Imagine It’s Worse than Anyone Told You
You can’t rely on your client or previous staff to tell you what’s wrong or how bad it is. Here’s why:

• The people who are involved might not really know what’s wrong.
• They may be underreporting the problems because they want you to get involved.
• They may want to get it off their hands so they don’t bother to do their due diligence to uncover the true problems.
• They may feel overwhelmed.

When you’re coming in to take over, always assume it’s worse than what you were told. If you’re prepared for it, you won’t feel so overwhelmed from the start.

Identify the Event Problem
Sometimes a board or client will tell you exactly what they believe the problem is, such as not having enough attendees. But that isn’t the problem. That’s the indication of a problem. Think about a romantic relationship that just broke up. If you ask the jilted person they may tell you the relationship is over because the other partner left. But that’s not why the relationship is over. The relationship is over because of some need not being met that caused the other person to leave.
Your event is in peril not because you’re not getting enough attendees. That’s merely an outward sign of something that’s lacking – like attendees not getting value.
You’ll have to uncover the situation on your own. Review past analytics and offerings. See what’s been done and what the results were. Look for areas of weakness and challenge. Don’t forget to take notes on areas for potential wins as well such as improvements introduced through new technology.

2. Fix

Make it About People and Personalization
One thing attendees are becoming accustomed to is personalization. It’s difficult to host a successful event without making it about people, and not just any people, your ideal attendee. Identify that market. Decide on what they want and how you can give it to them.

Create an Experience
Attendees will only remember the food and the exhibitors for so long but an experience will captivate them and cause them to share it with others. After you’ve analyzed the problem(s) with the event and changed your focus to people and personalization, it’s time to think about that experience.
Attendee experience is always important. Even currently successful events need to focus on it to remain successful. What works one year may not continue to work years into the future. Instead of reinventing the wheel each year, look for ways to improve the experience.

3. Cement

Bring in a Branding Expert
If your budget doesn’t support bringing in a branding expert for a consultation, you’ll need to do a lot of that rebranding research yourself. Companies are always in need of rebranding and a failing event will need the same. You can change everything about the event and make it the best event ever, but if it’s brand remains the same, and people think the event is the same as it always was, those changes won’t amount to anything.

Do It Yourself
As Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You advises, “Rebranding just means changing how others view you.” Consult someone who knows how to rebrand a struggling entity or try the following ideas on your own:

• Decide on a new brand/positioning based on what your ideal audience will respond to.
• Rewrite your existing content to follow your new brand and mission.
• Produce new content that speaks to your new brand.
• Build a relationship with an industry influencer and introduce them to the new brand.
• Look for tie-ins with other events that are similar to what you want to be. Movies, TV, and books use this approach. They are always likening their product to others to build off of an existing audience. For instance, many fantasy books liken themselves to Harry Potter. You can use ideas like, “If you want to go to SXSW but don’t have the travel budget, visit the ______ event instead.
• Use social media targeting to get in front of your ideal audience.
• Look for write-ups on your previous event (before you took over). Where appropriate respond with how you’re changing things to address concerns or dislikes. For instance, if someone wrote a review on the old event and how its lines were too long, respond back to tell them about the new beacon technology you’re using to mitigate that problem in the future.
• Get social and have conversations. Explain what you’re doing that’s new and different and invite people to check it out.
• Live the new brand. You can’t paint your event as “innovative” for example, if you’re still checking people in by hand off of a printed list. Every aspect of your event must support the new image and brand if you want it to ring true for your attendees.

In Conclusion

Inheriting a challenged event can feel a lot like orchestrating a squirrel rodeo some days, but if you break it down into manageable steps, you can begin to turn it around. Take the time to analyze the problems/challenges, assess how deep they run, implement a fix for today’s audience, and make your hard work stick by implementing a rebranding. Then you’ll be on your way to turning that event around.

Hiring conference speakers ain’t a walk in the park. In the socially-techy world we live in, requirements for hiring speakers changed dramatically. Here is what you should look for when hiring a conference speaker.

Do you remember when selecting speakers was super easy? Most of the traits of the successful conference performer were known: charisma, presence, eloquence, and storytelling.

These are still very valid characteristics, yet the changing nature of the attendee’s requirements is impacting the speaker selection process. Attendees want more from your conference. As a result finding awesome speakers is not as straightforward as it used to be.

In Conclusion

Ask more from your speakers, demand awareness of what your job involves and what your objectives are.
Be respectful of those speakers who try harder and choose awareness over narcissism.
You cannot give up charisma, presence and storytelling for any of the above but if you are able to combine them with modern requirements you’ll end up with a powerful weapon of mass engagement.