What The Electronic Entertainment Expo Can Teach Us About Event Management

Every year in June, game development studios from all over the world gather for an event known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’s one of the largest conferences of its kind, and people from all over the world tune in every year to watch and listen for the latest and greatest innovations and developments in video games. Suffice it to say, a savvy event manager can learn a great deal from such a successful conference. Here are a few pieces of insight I’ve picked up by watching the annual show: Even The Right Topic Can Be Bust With The Wrong…

Optimizing the Look and Feel of Your Event

As an event management professional, you know full well that presentation is everything. I’m not just talking about appearance, either. I’m talking about everything from layout to décor to what sort of tech you’re using for audio and video. If you don’t put any work into these things, it shows – and your guests are bound to get bored. Pay close attention to the look and feel of your event. The trick is to draw the eyes of your guests where you want them to look. Who Are You Running The Event For? The first, most important question you need…

The All Inclusive Guide To Perfecting Your Event Budget

As an event management professional, you need to take a ‘master of all trades’ approach to your job. You’ve got to be creative, artistic, and passionate in order to transform your clients ideas from conceptual to concrete; at the same time, you need to be analytical, logical, and disciplined in order to lay the groundwork to bring your events to life. One of the first steps in laying that groundwork – and consequently, one of the greatest challenges in event management – is budgeting. Though we’ve touched a bit on event budgeting in the past, this piece is going to…

Selecting Your Event Management Niche

In any industry, choosing a niche is a great way to give your business a much-needed boost, establishing your organization as a unique entity. Particularly in the world of event management, it’s important that you differentiate yourself from the competition, and find a demographic to which you can sell yourself directly. As for how you go about doing so, well…there are a few things to keep in mind. You Need Knowledge First and foremost: do you have any idea what you’re doing? In order to run a passable event, you need at least a halfway decent knowledge of the industry…

5 Ways to Leverage a Guest Speaker for Maximum Effect

A good guest speaker can be the most memorable aspect of an event – but only if they’re properly managed. It isn’t enough to simply plop down an orator in front of an audience. There’s a certain art to it, a sort of delicate dance which will require you to juggle your own objectives, your speaker’s desires, and your budget. Mastering that dance is the key to populating your events with effective keynotes. Here are just a few things you can do to ensure you get the most out of your speakers. Draw Up A Decent Contract The first thing…

Tips For Branding Your Events

One of the more common reasons for a business to hire an event planner is that they’re looking to raise awareness of their brand. They’re looking to get people talking about what they do, and maybe capture some leads in the process. There’s definitely nothing wrong with that – it’s a perfectly valid reason to host an event, after all. The problem is that a lot of people don’t fully grasp is that branding at an event is every bit as complex as it is elsewhere – perhaps even moreso. Do it right, and you’re sitting pretty with a whole…

The Five Components of A Good Keynote

I’m not all that surprised so many people try to avoid public speaking. It’s absolutely terrifying, and probably one of the most difficult things most people are ever going to do. Particularly if you’re speaking at a conference in front of hundreds of audience members, making a presentation of any sort can easily be both exhilarating and frightening beyond all belief. Of course, as an event management professional, you should already have a pretty good grip on public speaking. You are, after all, a natural storyteller; your job is to keep the audience engaged with personality as much as words.…

Why An Event Planner Needs To Be A People Person

As I’ve said on multiple occasions, event planning is just as much about managing people as it is conferences and shows. Today, I’d like to revisit that topic in a little more detail – we’re going to discuss the importance of networking to your career as an event manager. Trust me, it’s essential. As any businessperson will tell you, business is just as much about whom you know as it is what you can do. You need to be able to connect with the right people – to work your way into the good graces of men and women with…

Everything You Need To Know About Getting Your Events Going On Facebook

Whether you’re running a trade show or a corporate fundraiser, Facebook is going to play into your events in some fashion. That’s simply the reality of the world we live in. As the largest social network in the world, Facebook gives brands an unprecedented level of access to their audience. This is especially true if those brands are working in event management. “In the event industry, people have always been social by nature,” writes Cvent’s Eric Eden. “It’s an innate part of what we do.” What that means, continues Eden, is that event management professionals can no longer afford to…

Things To Remember When Creating Your Event Registration

With the Internet, social media, and mobile technology, event registration has evolved in ways I’m certain our forefathers never imagined possible. The unfortunate side to that is that it’s introduced a whole host of challenges they never anticipated, either. See…selling tickets and registering attendees might be easier to do, but it’s also easier to botch. Likely as not, the first thing anyone’s going to see of your event is the registration page. With that in mind, you want to be sure you make a good first impression. Here are a few things to keep in mind when setting up the…

Five Features Every Conference Needs To Have

I’ve said on several occasions that conferences are fast becoming one of the most valuable tools in any marketing agent’s repertoire. The thing is, not every marketing professional knows exactly what they need to plan an event. While marketing and event management do require very similar skill-sets, the knowledge base required for each tends to be more than a little divergent. Thankfully, while every event is different – and brings different challenges, requirements, and concerns – there are a few starting points you can lay down that’ll make things much, much easier on you as you move forward. Ignore any…

Why Your Event Needs to Account for Weather

If you think the only time the weather matters is when you’re running an outdoor event, you’d be sadly mistaken. The weather has an impact on virtually every facet of your event, even if it’s not immediately obvious. For this reason, ignoring it entirely is a foolish thing to do.

Today, we’re going to examine how the weather affects your events –and what you can do to account for it.

The Top Event Industry Trends Of 2015

A new year is well upon us, hopefully it has been kind to you so far. It’s another huge year of event planning and it’s time to start preparing for what’s coming – it’s time to make yourself ready for the technology, trends, and changes that are bound to happen. 2014 was a pretty big year for the event industry – though admittedly, it was something of a rough one, as well. Faced with the echoes of a global economic recession, many event management professionals were by necessity forced to do more with less (though granted, event planners were hardly alone…

Learn to Relax—You’ll Have Better Events

Event management is pretty hard work – any event planner worth their salt is well aware of that fact. It’s a profession given to long, irregular hours, and one which requires deep passion coupled with a seemingly endless reserve of energy. Plenty of event planners speak of working almost constantly, with nary a moment to rest. If you’re a novice event planner, you might be tempted to believe that this is the best road to success; that the best way to rise to the top of your profession is to toss aside everything not related to it. Unfortunately, you’d be…

Common Hurdles Event Planners Face

No industry is perfect. Particularly in a field as fast-paced and fast-growing as event management, there are bound to be a few pitfalls, roadblocks, and growing pains scattered along one’s path. What separates the good event planners from the great ones is how they address these problems; how they meet – and overcome – the challenges thrown their way. Here are some issues that you may run into, and how to successfully overcome them: Keeping Your Clients Happy One of the most enduring problems in event planning is that many clients simply don’t have any idea of how the profession…

The Event Manager’s Guide To Search Engine Marketing

What exactly does search engine marketing have to do with event planning?

Alright, so this is probably something of a strange topic for an event management blog. A lot of you are probably confused as to why I’m writing on it, but the answer is actually “more than you’d think.”

Five Things To Consider When Selecting Your Conference Venue

As I’m certain you’ve heard on more than one occasion (you’re likely growing tired of hearing it by now), location is everything when planning an event – especially a corporate conference. Generally, the people attending these events are going to be discussing some fairly important stuff – a bad venue can leave a dark cloud hanging over the entire affair, something which can, in the worst case scenario, effectively derail the entire gathering. You want to do whatever it takes to ensure this doesn’t happen. Here are just a few of the things you’ll need to take into account when…

Best Crowd Management Tips for Controlling a Crowd

We’ve said on more than one occasion that event planning is as much about managing people as it is about running events. Today, we’d like to explore that statement with somewhat greater depth. Today, I’d like to talk about crowd control and offer some of the best crowd management tips we could think of from our experiences.

Six Example Venue Amenities Every Venue Should Provide

We’ve talked a great deal previously on our blog about what event planners should do, what they should look for, what they should provide, how they should approach clients, and more. What we haven’t really touched on is venues. Today, we’re going to go over some example venue amenities that should always be included, since the amenities provided to you is what separates the great venues from the good, and the good from the mediocre venues.

The Three Most Common Hazards At A Winter Festival

As I’m certain I’ve mentioned on at least one occasion before, winter’s a pretty incredible season from an event management perspective. Although it’s admittedly a little less inviting than the warmer seasons of the year, all that snow – and the holiday cheer that everyone experiences around Christmas – can make for some pretty incredible festivals, in the hands of a skilled event planner. There’s practically a limitless list of Winter-themed activities you can throw at your guests to keep them entertained, to say nothing of how much fun guests at such events tend to have. Of course, there are…

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