An event is a great way to promote your brand, engage with customers, and connect with your audience. At the same time, hosting an event has a great deal of moving parts so careful planning and focused execution are required.
Whether your event is in-person or virtual, Norby’s events feature has a full suite of tools to help take your event to the next level. In this blog post, we’ll go over how to take full advantage of the resources available on Norby and turn those into a repeatable playbook that you can use again and again.
Let’s first start with three strategy tips on planning your next event:
- Define what success looks like for this event - Ex: “I would like 20+ people to attend who previously had no knowledge of __ but leave with __.” In simple terms, success will ultimately come down to knowing what you want to achieve with the event and what type of planning and execution will need to go into making that a reality. At this stage, you’ll also want to decide on a budget for the event.
- Determine your audience and how you are going to reach them - Specifically what kind of person(s) do you want to attend the event and what will set your event apart from other events they could attend. This will enable you to understand how to differentiate.
- Pick a time and location - Make sure that you’re setting the event up for success by choosing a time and location that fit the needs of your target audience. Even if the event is virtual, you want to ensure that it’s being held at a time that will best accommodate a large majority of your audience. So research holidays, cultural events, and local events to mitigate overlapping with your event. Above all though, make sure that your chosen time and location align with your goals and budget.
While diving into the ins and outs of event planning with Norby's full suite of tools, grab our Event Marketing Checklist, a comprehensive guide designed to streamline your event planning process. Perfect for both virtual and live events, this checklist covers everything you need for a successful, memorable event. Download it now and unlock the secrets to effortless and effective event management. Get Your Free Event Marketing Checklist Here.
Now, let’s go over the eight key elements that make up a successful event playbook for managing all of your events through Norby. Here we go!
- Registration - You’ve got full control over what to collect when it comes to registration information for your next event. Now you can start with the basics and ask to collect the registrant’s name, email address, and phone number. However, you can also utilize custom fields on a Norby event to collect even more information about the registrant. For example, if you’re throwing an album release party and there is a special t-shirt giveaway with each ticket sold you can set up a custom field question to collect t-shirt size. Another example is if you’re hosting a dinner event then the custom fields can be utilized for guests to pick their meal. I can keep going, but I think you get the idea!
- Tags - When creating an event in Norby, you can set up contact tags to be assigned to each registrant which will allow you to segment your audience and keep track of how contacts originated in your Norby. For example, you have an event in Los Angeles and it's part of your summer event series. You can create a tag to help you keep track of both these things. In this case, let’s say you create two tags, “Los Angeles” and “Summer Tour 2023”. After the event, you’ll be able to send out targeted messages the next time you’ll be in Los Angeles or if you want to send out a special promotion for everyone who attended a show on your summer tour. With tags you can easily do all of that.
- Ticketing - All that you need to have for taking advantage of Norby’s ticketing capabilities is a Stripe account and a few minutes to integrate it with your Norby. After that, you set a ticket price and you’re good to go. And don’t worry about fees! We’ve all had an experience where it comes time to checkout and our event tickets are in the cart but the impending doom of finding out about the additional fees will be, gives you anxiety. Thankfully, our ticketing fees are so low that purchasers can skip the checkout fee doom and move right ahead to getting excited for the event.
- Promotion - The best time to promote an event is before it's even planned. No, that wasn’t a typo. Here is what I mean, when it comes to engaging with your audience you want to make it very easy to stay in touch with you. This is where Norby helps you out. I recommend every person on Norby set up a Signup with keyword registration. This means you can utilize having a phone number on Norby’s Growth or Pro plan by setting up a Signup that allows folks to subscribe for your updates simply by texting “updates” or “Luke” to your phone number. As you do this, you’ll be building out your contact list. When you have an upcoming event you can send out a quick send’s campaign on Norby that links out to your event’s registration page. Think of Norby as your digital street team that helps get your audience to your events!
- Reminders - If you’ve ever hosted an event you know that registration is the first part of the process and then comes the hard part, actually getting the registrant to show up for your event. Anywhere from 10-20% of registrants may not show up - life happens and other commitments get in the way. People forget things and need to be reminded. Thankfully, we’ve got you covered. Right when someone completes registration you can send them a confirmation text or email that is fully customisable. Additionally, there are built-in reminder messaging options as well to help keep the event top of mind in the days leading up to your event. So, whether it's an awards dinner, album release party, or open mic night - you can utilize Norby’s reminder messaging to smash that show up rate.
- Engage - Now, let’s focus on how you can really differentiate your events using Norby. The audience engagement opportunities are endless when it comes to Norby’s platform. My favorite one though is utilizing keyword SMS sign-ups for live audience interaction. Simply create a Signup, build out questions utilizing custom fields, assign a keyword for registration, and ask for someone’s name in the registration information. At the event, you can direct people to text the keyword to your unique Norby phone number and they’ll be sent an SMS message with a link to complete the questionnaire asked on your Signup. Best of all, you’ll be able to create customized follow-up messages based on each respondent’s answers after your event! This hyper personalization helps create deep connections with your audience/registrants.
- Follow Up - Since you now have someone’s contact information and you’ve utilized custom fields in both events and signups to learn more about them, you can customize your follow-up messaging to uniquely fit each and every attendee using Norby’s Sends feature. Easily segment your audience based on responses to questions or send out a mass message to everyone who registered for the event. You can do it all seamlessly on Norby. And best of all, you can utilize Norby’s Inbox to keep track of each audience member’s interactions. That brings your entire event lifecycle into a single and organized location in Norby.
And, in closing, you can utilize advanced segmentation within Norby’s Sends feature. The tags you created for this event along with behaviors (like “joined” or “not joined”) allow you to create specialized follow up messages and market your next event(s).
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Hosting an event can be a lot of work, but with the right planning and execution, it can also be a rewarding and impactful way to connect with your audience and achieve your goals. By following these tips and best practices, you'll be well on your way to hosting successful events that leave a lasting impression on your attendees. And, most importantly, thanks to Norby you can easily stay in contact with your attendees to keep them coming back! If you’re looking for more event resources head to our blog or knowledge base.
