The Untapped Power of Events in a Shifting Business Landscape

The business landscape is in a constant state of fluctuation, presenting both opportunities and challenges for growing businesses. In today’s dynamic business environment, and despite ongoing budget cuts within marketing departments, the power of events could not be more influential in helping companies navigate shifting landscapes. 

Not only can coordinated event marketing allow businesses to capitalise on these shifts through an enhanced market presence, it can also amplify the effectiveness of ongoing marketing campaigns, creating tangible impact and ROI for long term business goals. 

Let’s see how businesses can use corporate events effectively to access these kinds of benefits, to navigate and influence the shifting business landscape. 

Understanding your landscape 

If you were dropped into an unknown location, the first thing you’d need to do is work out where you are, what’s ahead of you, and how to get to where you need to be. The same concept applies to navigating business landscapes. Before committing to a specific direction and strategy, you first need a firm understanding of your industry to make effective and strategic decisions. Research your current market, your audience, what they care about, and how these overlap with your own goals and wider mission. Prioritising this from the outset will allow you to create a strategy that can flex and grow with the changing landscape. 

Define your objectives 

From this clear picture of your market and your audience, you then need to define your longer-term business goals. Whether it’s building brand awareness, community knowledge sharing, or strengthening existing client relationships at company away days, you can then establish the objectives of your event marketing strategy. Not only do these objectives need to be easy to measure, with a clear ROI, but they also need to ladder up to your wider definition of business success. 

Design the concept 

Now that you’ve got a clear lay of the land, and a firm grasp on what it is exactly that you’re trying to achieve with your event strategy, you can then begin to map out the experience itself. This includes crafting: 

• Your core message and proposition - what’s the one thing you want your attendees to walk away knowing? 
• Your format - which event format best supports the achievement of your goals, eg, virtual, conference, seminar? 
• Your touchpoints - how are you going to deliver this message consistently throughout your event, and create that eternal engagement with your business? 
• Your attendee journey - from the moment they sign up, how do you want attendees to feel throughout their journey with your brand? 
• Your technology - how can you elevate your content delivery to take it to the next level? 

Create an event concept that feels unique to your audience, your message, and your long-term business goals. 

Measure and Iterate 

Using emerging technology, measure the real impact of your event against the strategic goals you’ve established. With these analytics, and other insights collected during your post event evaluation, you can refine and adapt your future strategy, to stay flexible to changing market trends. This is a continuous and ongoing process, requiring businesses to be constantly fine-tuning their approach to their event strategy. But without applying the learnings from previous events, businesses run the risk of becoming static and stagnant amongst a fluid business landscape.  

Ready to tap into the power of events and find your footing in a shifting business landscape? 

It’s time to integrate an events strategy into your wider business plans. 

Get in touch with the team to find out how we can help you achieve your long-term goals as your creative event partner.