Guest Blog: How to Engage Conference Attendees without Breaking Budget

No matter how hard you work in setting up an exceptional event for your organisation, you will not be able to reap maximum benefits unless you have fully engaged attendees.

Attendee engagement is crucial for the success of any corporate event, especially in this digital era. Moreover, it can influence the overall quality of your attendees’ experience. Professional conference organisers also pay great attention to enhancing attendee participation and engagement throughout the conference.

Here we’re listing down 4 ways to boost attendee engagement without going overboard with the event budget.

1. Utilise Social Media

Social media is one of the easiest and cost-effective ways to increase attendee engagement. By carefully drafting a social media strategy for your event or conference, you can keep your attendees engaged before and throughout the event.

Create a unique official event hashtag to start gathering the interest of the attendees. It should be catchy and easily memorable. Start spreading the hashtag before the start of the event and also encourage your attendees and special guests (the influencers) to share the hashtag on their social media profiles.

You can also work with your professional conference organisers to create a social stream for your conference. A social stream is a real-time discussion about a specific topic, event mentions, pictures, etc., that’s based on the data gathered through social media monitoring of your event. It can be projected at a large screen at the conference venue.

In addition to this, it’s important to assign a dedicated social media team for your conference. The team should be highly responsive and active on social media, interacting and responding to people who mention your event or have any queries related to the event. Live streaming, online polls and questions, and giveaway competitions are other great social media tactics to consider.

2. Keep the Conference Interactive

You should extend your conference content to the audience by making sure that speakers keep the audience involved. Discussing questions, doing live surveys and gathering feedback during and after each session are must-do activities.

Other than that, you can also increase the participation of the attendees by making them complete short exercises and carrying out group case studies, exciting games, raffles etc.

3. Create Dynamic Networking Spaces

Attendee to attendee interaction is very important. Create networking spaces at your conference venue such as lounges so that attendees can connect with each other and fully benefit from the large gathering. You can get in touch with a professional venue finder to select the most appropriate location for your event. Top tip: unique venues such as Techniquest also provide integrated entertainment and talking points to keep guests engaged.

4. Go for Assigned Seating

Conferences are not just about presentations and speaker sessions. You want to keep them interactive and beneficial for the attendees. One way to do this is by assigning seats or tables to attendees where they don’t know anyone. Through icebreaker activities, you can then force people out of their comfort zone and encourage interaction and engagement.

Keeping your attendee engagement levels high is a key theme for today’s business conferences and events. With a little bit of planning, you can give your attendees a captivating experience while sticking to a budget.

Author Bio

Sarah Hill is a content writer at Seven Events Ltd – corporate event planners in Birmingham offering event production, meeting planning, team building, incentive travel and venue finding services. She started her career in the events industry almost a decade ago; as time progressed she became an avid event blogger sharing her insight on corporate event planning.