We have held hundreds of media events for clients in differing industries over the past three decades. Here are some top tips for creating a successful event.
Visualise your goal
What do you want to achieve? Knowing and understanding what media coverage you want to gain helps you define your target audience, timescales, budget, impacting choice of venue and style of event. Do you want to create a buzz and raise awareness of a new product or service, improve media relations, increase coverage in a niche sector, or increase sales in a specific timeframe?
Research
Before finalising details of an event, ask yourself “Does this event clash with another? Could there be travel disruptions? Is the venue easy to access? Are the acoustics good?” Put yourself in the shoes of the journalists you are inviting. Will the choice of date and venue be appealing to your target media?
Focus on your audience
Do you want to attract niche or mass market media? The demographics of your desired audience and the platforms to which you want your content shared will decide the key influencers, bloggers and journalists you need to target. Along with invitations, provide detailed timings and story outline to the potential attendees.
Preparation is key
Do as much preparation before the event as possible. Ensure collateral e.g. banners, press releases, goody bags, name tags etc. are organised in advance. To reduce the possibility of technical glitches, check the WiFi and that the venue has the necessary equipment.
On the day
To maximise brand coverage across the media, ensure attendees are aware of any relevant hashtags. It’s important to ensure the venue is well lit to allow for photo opportunities. Make sure you connect with all attendees. Key influencers unable to attend are important, so you might be able to follow up with individual meetings with them. Taking an interest, knowing and understanding each journalist and blogger’s style, areas they cover and how they prefer to be contacted are important. This level of personalisation means that you are more likely to achieve success. Good relationships with journalists and bloggers make it more likely that they will want to work with you in future.
After the event
Journalists and bloggers are busy. Following up afterwards is vital, allowing journalists to ask questions and giving you relevant feedback for future events.
To summarise:
Establish your goals, conduct your research, prepare, maximise exposure and follow up.
Organising successful events, developing strong media relations and providing a high return on investment can be a daunting task. brookscomm has extensive knowledge and experience of co-ordinating events globally. Regardless of budget, we can introduce or increase awareness and media profile of your product or service, successfully attracting positive coverage in target publications.
Email: chaz@brookscomm.com or call us on 01483 537890.
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