Undeniably, audience engagement plays an extremely crucial role during events. The overall engagement of your audience reflects your ability to hold their attention till the end of the event.
According to the latest reports and surveys, the engagement rate of the audience is an important parameter to decide how successful the event will be. However, to achieve audience engagement, you need to ensure that you put up an engaging event.
Now, audience engagement may sound like an easy process, but it is not a cakewalk. As an event marketer, you need to include elements that are compelling and captivating for your audience.
If you are wondering how to achieve this, then you are at the right place.
Continue reading till the end of this post as we will be telling you about a few tips and strategies that can help you keep your attendees hooked till the end of the event. These ideas will surely ensure complete participation from your audience, leading to an increase in overall engagement.
Let’s get started!
Best Tips, Tricks & Ideas To Engage Your Audience Throughout The Event
Include A Social Media Wall
Whenever we think about audience engagement, social media is among the first few platforms that pop in the mind. This happens due to the highly engaging vibe of the platform.
Your event attendees are regular social media users who love uploading content on a daily basis. Be it in the form of texts, reviews, photos, or videos, people spend around 2 hours daily on social media.
You can create a fun event hashtag and ask your attendees to create content during the event and post it on their social media handles. You can then create a social media wall for events by collecting the content using a tool like Taggbox Display.
The best part is that the tool gives complete control to its users while they create the social media wall. You can customize the social media wall your way, monitor the content, and make it live! What’s more? You can analyze how your attendees are reacting to the social media wall too! Everyone loves being featured and your audience will be delighted to see their content, which would further lead to more engagement.
Select An Appropriate Seating Arrangement
Before we talk about what to do during the event, here is a basic yet one of the most important points for event planning and audience engagement. Always, always make sure that you pay attention to the way your audience is seated.
The idea here is to ensure communication between your audiences. If they are completely unaware of each other, they might be slightly apprehensive to engage later on. Make sure that the seats are placed close to each other. This way, your audience will feel more comfortable and it would work as an ice breaker.
However, if you are hosting a virtual event, then you can ask the attendees to wait in the virtual waiting area before the event begins. You can run a few rounds of ‘Ask me anything, to open up the audience with each other. Once they get to know each other, they will find common topics to discuss.
Send Over Goody Bags To Your Attendees
One of the best ways to ensure audience engagement and complete participation is to send over swag bags to your attendees before the event. Everyone loves surprises and freebies.
You can customize the event goody bag based on your event budget. Fill the bag with tokens like customized T-shirts, keychains, adventure backpacks, gym towels, caps, or even a few munchies.
Keep it a surprise for your audience and send them to their home address. Not only will they be surprised, but also, feel the need to attend your event, if they were planning to skip it. Moreover, the gesture would surely touch their hearts and they will be completely engaged till the end of the event.
Don’t Forget Post Event Engagement
Lastly, event marketers often forget about the event once it’s over. You need to analyze the result of your event after it gets over.
You can send a gratitude mail to your attendees and express how elated you are to host them and how their presence made the event a huge success! It is about making a long-lasting impression on your audience and doing so would make them happy.
Further, you can send a survey or feedback form to their mail to rate their experience. This will help you understand the areas that need improvement. While doing this, your audience will feel important and they will surely look forward to your upcoming events.
Final Thoughts
We are calling it a wrap and you got to know about a few result-driven strategies that can help you overall boost the audience engagement of your event.
These tips are super easy to implement and yet extremely effective and impactful. Do include them in your event planning and you are bound to see positive results.
