How to Plan a Successful Event: Know Your Target Audience
Joakim Jönsson
Dec 2, 2024 10:30:00 AM
Defining your target audience is a crucial first step in event planning. Understanding your ideal attendee profile helps you choose the best promotion channels, secure a suitable venue, attract compelling keynote speakers, and much more. But how do you pinpoint your target audience and begin the planning process? Can you gain insights into their buying behavior? What’s the best way to market to them? Discover all the answers in this article!
A target audience is the demographic that your event is intended to reach. It is essential that businesses come up with a target audience because they must tailor the event's message to their potential customers. Many businesses make their events and related promotional material too generalized with the hope of attracting the largest audience. Instead, their message ends up connecting with very few. Read on to learn how businesses can define their target audience.
The factors that businesses must consider when defining their target audience vary depending on whether the business is B2B or B2C. If a business deals with consumers directly, they should take into account age, gender, race/ethnicity, income level, education level, and nationality. If a business sells to other businesses, they should consider both the business as a whole and the employee who makes the purchase decision for this business. They should consider the employee as a consumer. However, they also need to consider the industry, size, age, budget, and ambitions of the business.
Hosting an event is usually part of an overall marketing strategy and designed to support marketing goals such as identifying new marketable contacts, building sales pipeline, accelerating sales pipeline, expanding brand awareness, and more. Once you decide to host an event, you need to articulate how the event contributes to the marketing goal(s) and define metrics for the event’s success.
The best marketing strategies can’t afford to ignore the power of events, as they can be extremely effective. For an event to be successful, however, you must answer questions such as: “Who should I invite to the event to hit my metrics?” or “How can my event attract our ideal buyer personas?”
To better illustrate this, let’s use an example. Imagine that your goal is to attract and recruit new talent for the sales department. You will not achieve this goal if you target your event to school-age youth or to professional accountants. Instead, your audience should be composed of people who have experience in sales and are looking for a new job.
When you know who the right audience is, you’re able to promote the event more effectively – you can choose the right distribution and social media channels and adjust the tone of your marketing messages to resonate with this group. You can select an event venue that will suit their needs, i.e., location, logistics, decor, etc. Importantly, you can also build an agenda that will entice them to attend.
To effectively identify your target audience, focus on these key areas:
1. Basic Demographics:
2. Interests and Needs:
3. Habits and Resources:
Data-Driven Insights
Leverage data from multiple sources to refine your audience profile:
Useful Tools:
Consider tools like Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics, and Eventory to gain deeper insights and enhance your targeting strategy.
A clear understanding of your target audience is the foundation for shaping your event. Here’s how to approach it:
Demographics play a crucial role in engaging your audience effectively. For example:
Tailoring your event logistics to audience demographics ensures a seamless and engaging experience.
Digging deeper into your audience’s interests and needs helps you craft meaningful event content. For instance:
To effectively reach your audience, identify how they consume information:
Analyzing these habits helps you build targeted campaigns that convert.
Finally, analyze your audience’s purchasing habits to optimize their pre-event experience:
By addressing these elements, you can create an event that resonates with your audience and drives meaningful engagement.
You can acquire information about your target audience in a direct and indirect way. The direct way is to conduct a survey. This can be done via an interview or a poll. If you have used surveys and polls in the past to plan marketing activities for your target audience, be sure to also review those results.
You can also use indirect methods. For example, you can take advantage of numerous market studies, white papers, and reports and mine knowledge about various consumer and business groups.
If you're planning an event, it is vital that you tailor it to your target audience. You can do this by tailoring the messages passed within the event, such as the event's presentations and brochures. You should also strive to choose speakers who are either from the same demographic as the customer or from a more successful demographic that your customers want to be a part of.
Gathering as much information as possible about your target audience will help you create an effective event promotion plan, informing your selection of marketing lists and targeted ad groups, campaign content, and promotion channels.
Remind your event planning team that you’re seeking quality over quantity. To achieve your event goals, it’s better to invite fewer people who will really be interested in your event, than it is to invite many people, only a portion of whom will likely attend. Going back to our example of the recruiting event, it’s better to invite sales people with experience who are looking for a new job, rather than to invite a larger audience that includes marketing professionals, IT specialists, and product development experts. Only the first audience can yield a positive return on investment.
Just remember! When you're event planning, collect as much data as possible to inform future event strategies. Use platforms that automate the event data capture, analytics, and reporting processes so that you prove event success and identify sales and marketing opportunities.
In practice, understanding your target audience and tailoring an event to their needs can be tricky. This is true whether you're planning traditional events, hybrid events, or events at a virtual venue. Thankfully, the 6Connex virtual event platform can help. The platform offers engagement tools and event tech integrations that help you tailor an event experience to your clientele. 6Connex's virtual event products even allow you to set up sustainable events.
If you need virtual event solutions , request a virtual event platform demo today.
Read 6Connex's blog post here on BizBash.com
Watch on-demand: our webinar "Raising the Bar: Achieving Sustainable Events through Innovative Technologies and Expert Insights." co-hosted with MUSE. Learn from event sustainability gurus as they share tips on reducing carbon footprints and creating events that make Mother Nature proud. Don't miss out on this industry-leading, eco-friendly event!
6Connex is the leading provider of in-person, hybrid, and virtual event technology for enterprises worldwide. Our cloud-based product portfolio includes event management tools, in-person event apps, virtual venues, webinars, learning management, and more.
From internal meetings to large scale conferences, we allow you to engage and transform big ideas into real-world results.
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