Persona-Driven Event Planning Toolkit: Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we examined how to produce an event that is perfectly crafted to fit the needs of your buyer personas, also known as your event attendees. In the second part, we’ll show you how to best serve your overall business marketing strategy using this event planning approach.

Creating an event template that is consistent with your brand priorities

Regardless of how many and what type of event personas you are catering to, you must make sure that your content ultimately tracks back to your event objectives. Partnerships with sponsors, types of exhibitors and the nature of your presenters must all be in keeping with your overall business philosophy and support your position within the marketplace, yet effectively appeal to your target audience and the suggested event sessions, to ensure all the details are aligned.

You should start by thinking about your brand and what it stands for, then build out an event that displays your industry expertise and thought leadership, by offering an assortment of useful take-aways to your attendees.

One of the best examples of this is techsytalk LIVE, the NYC based event tech conference that’s a must for every event planner’s tech conference calendar, offering a broad selection of tech solutions and industry updates. While the conference producers, Liz King Events are not tech vendors, they lead by example, integrating a ton of event tech into their own high end planning services. The conference demonstrates this. It also supports and promotes many people in the event tech industry while reinforcing the strength of LKE’s event planning acumen.

Creating an event budget, by segment, allocating resources in keeping with attendance

Once you understand who your marketing personas are and what sorts of offerings make sense for each of them, you can properly allocate event budgets and resources to support each segment. For example, your conference may be attended by a mix of technical buyers, executives, IT professionals and folks from the business unit. Understanding in detail what each of these groups wants and needs will guide the streams of content you offer each of them, and help you develop separate tracks accordingly, in proportion to the size of the groups. This, in turn, will dictate the types of room set-ups and technical requirements for each track, as well as the corresponding budget allocations to make the whole thing fly.

Developing an event toolkit to cover the technical needs of each of your events

Whether you are planning conferences, user groups, road shows, product launches, trainings, seminars, webinars, sales kickoffs or leadership meetings,  you’ll want to make sure that you have the appropriate event technology and tools to execute on every level. In the best case scenario, your tools will have comprehensive enough capabilities to work for you across a whole suite of events, throughout your entire season. Integrated event platforms such as Attendease offer the ability to be used across multiple segments for a repeatable event process.

Download our Marketing Personas E-Book to learn more about understanding your attendees and creating messaging & content to meet their information needs.