Attending an event can be stressful for new or uninformed attendees. As an event organizer, you can benefit from providing a quintessential “know-before-you-go” guide for attendees to improve their event experience and inspire return visits.
Whether your event is a musical, a concert, or a sporting event, you can expect people to attend your event for different purposes and priorities. Guided event pages on your website offer a strategic way of personalizing the experience for your different audience personas. These trusty references guide attendees through relevant event details so they never find themselves frustrated, lost or confused.
The first step toward scoring a winning impression on your event attendees lies in pre-event messaging and engagement, but the relationship-building process goes far beyond.
Present the Basics
Know-before-you-go content should provide attendees with fundamental references to guide a smooth-sailing event experience. These reference points usually include the following.
- Program Timeline: This is a concise breakdown of the event’s programs divided into blocks of time (such as an hour or 30-minute periods). Include the length (or typical length) of the event to set expectations.
- Parking Information: Provide helpful information for attendees who wish to drive to the event, including parking fees, the estimated distance between parking lots and the venue, and accessibility matters such as the nearest exits and elevators. Consider offering parking as an add-on during the initial ticket purchase to make it easy on your attendees.
- Sanitization and Cleaning Policies: The pandemic has led to newfound hygiene standards that you should include in your pre-event communication and landing pages. You might share the frequency of cleaning and disinfection practices and mention the accessibility of hand sanitizing stations. All health and safety protocols should be clearly stated so that attendees understand what is expected from them.
- Food and Beverage: Prepare a detailed guideline to the nearest eats in the area with popular orders that add to the attendee experience. This information should include the food offered in your venue (including unique or themed concessions), along with area restaurants that could play host to your attendees before or after the event. This is an opportunity to highlight a restaurant sponsor to push business their way.
- Pricing: Event information should offer transparent pricing details, including surcharges, offers and discounts. You may also include accepted payment modes to guide attendees through the transaction.
Identify Eventgoer Personas – Creating Something for Everyone
Personas enable your business to categorize and strategize attendee programs according to their preferences. You can generally define a persona by shared attendee traits such as age, location, and expectations for the event. However, creating a specific persona goes beyond these factors, tapping into personalized interests.
Asking simple questions during the ticket purchase process will provide you with an opportunity to capture highly relevant information that will help you create a customized attendee experience.
It’s critical to have a ticketing platform with an integrated CRM that allows you to easily capture and store the data in customer profiles that you can action to build eventgoer personas.
Examples of eventgoer personas include:
- The Family: These attendees prioritize the needs of their young children. Some families may seek information on event conveniences such as the accessibility of eateries, parking lots, and restrooms. The family’s interests may include kid-friendly concessions, stroller policies, the availability of booster seats, mascot meet-and-greets, and event duration.
- The Date Nighters: These attendees use their evening to connect and make memories as a couple. They often look for restaurants in walking distance for a pre- or post-event meal, opportunities to pre-purchase drinks, and event mementos.
- The Premium Attendee: These personas opt for the ultimate event experience and seek premium packages where pricing plays a secondary role. The persona seeks queue-cutting options, exclusive perks (such as VIP memberships), and white-glove service throughout the event.
Sort Communications by Event Lifecycle
You will need various tools and engagement methods depending on the stage of the event lifecycle. A pre-event initiative focuses on audience discovery, providing prospective eventgoers with the information required to decide on attendance. For instance, you might consider a virtual tour that provides consumers with a look inside your venue. Or, you might focus on highlighting a promotion or a must-see star.
On the day of the event, you might consider providing information about parking or entry gates that will minimize the stress that often occurs during the last leg of the journey to your venue. You can also welcome them to the event with a mobile notification offering a discount on a beverage once their ticket is scanned and you know they’ve arrived.
Also, it is essential to include post-event engagement. Surveys and forms that acquire eventgoer feedback can give your business a clearer idea of event success and what needs improvement. Also, you might consider including invitations to future events as a strategic CTA during post-event engagements.
Use a CRM Customized for Your Business
Your CRM serves as the essential tool for intelligently interacting with your eventgoers. A customized approach to audience engagement (based on persona) enables you to optimize interactions across multiple attendee types in an efficient, automated way. Communication tailored to the needs of each persona build strong customer relations from the first point of contact, promoting future attendance.
A robust CRM should integrate with your ticketing platform to ensure that you can automate and personalize marketing, sales and customer service – all in a single place – to help connect more enthusiasts to your events.
Closing Thoughts: Using the Power of Guided Pages
Guided event management pages provide eventgoers with a satisfactory experience at your events by eliminating the complexities of ticketing and program attendance. By categorizing eventgoer demographics based on an attendee persona, you can significantly improve engagements, increasing the likelihood of return visits.
Once you identify attendee personas (like The Family, The Date Nighters and The Premium Attendee), develop landing pages on your website that provide these special segments with all of the “know-before-you-go” content they will need to have an amazing experience. Dig deep for the information that is most meaningful to these personas by conducting focus groups and post-event surveys. Walk the venue and ask attendee questions for that extra insight that only surfaces when people are in the moment.
AudienceView, Your Trusted Partner in Events Management
AudienceView provides user-friendly tools to help make every aspect of your event more successful, including marketing, ticketing, fundraising and customer engagement.
Here are reasons why organizations like yours partner with AudienceView:
- Effective Listings: AudienceView offers access to high-traffic consumer sites like TheaterMania.com, significantly improving the potential of growing your ticket sales.
- Seamless Migration: Our experienced and dedicated team will assist you through fuss-free data migration as we shift your legacy event programs into the AudienceView system.
- Detailed Reporting: The event management solution offers in-depth reporting capabilities that enable you to generate essential insights for improving your overall processes. AudienceView’s reports include automation and file exporting features to CSV and Excel format, facilitating efficient decision-making for your business.
Are you interested in learning more about the fundraising and ticketing features made available to AudienceView Professionals clients? Click here to take a product tour.