17Nov2015
The event might take only a day or two, but magic happens also before and after the event. If you are an event partner, don’t just settle for having a stand where you pass out candy and fliers. It can be so much more. The goal is to find your target group and engage them.
Nordic Business Forum 2015 was a huge success. We pushed extremely hard to give our guests high-level service, and the speakers such as John C. Maxwell, Simon Sinek and Guy Kawasaki truly made an impact and gave food for thought to our 5,500 seminar guests.
Besides bringing on stage the incredible speakers, we strive to give our guests the best possible seminar experience throughout the event. Our partners play a huge role in that. Their focus is on engaging the guests in the networking and exhibition areas.
It’s all about engagement
The times of ordinary stand areas are now over if you are looking for customer engagement. We encouraged our Nordic Business Forum partners to build functional areas in the event where seminar guests had a chance to get to know our partners in more unconventional ways. In the event, we had 5500 top-level business people sharing tweets and photos on social media and making new contacts with each other. It is not that easy to catch these professionals attention let alone engage them. But it seems like our partners made it.
And how they did it? Well, one of the partners built a 7-meter tall exhibition area that you just couldn’t miss and the other offered you an opportunity to become an Estonian e-resident. A third one brought in Audi Q7 e-tron and a fourth put you up on the cover of Kauppalehti which you could share on social media.
During the year of planning the partnerships, we hold meetings not only individually with every single partner but together with all of them. After all, we are building the event together, so it’s very essential that the partners have a possibility to share their ideas with each other. With good planning, we can create an event that not only benefits the partners but offers our event guests the best possible experience. That makes it a killer combination.
3 tips for event partners
This year in one of our joint partnership meetings, our chairman of the board Petteri Kilpinen ran a coaching session. Petteri is extremely experienced in several business areas and he shared his best knowledge of partnering with business events. Here are his top 3 tips:
- Define your goal for the partnership. Be as concrete as possible, so you can easily measure how you are doing.
- Come up with a stopper. Who belongs to your target group and why would they stop and have a conversation with you? How would they remember you after the event?
- Put the right people in the right positions. Make sure you always have the right people with you in each step: planning the partnership, engaging visitors in the event, and taking care of the leads after the event.
To be able to better meet the needs of our partners and event guests, we have started tailoring the partnership packages for Nordic Business Forum 2016. No matter what the package includes, the coaching sessions and joint meetings will definitely be part of every partnership. This might come as a surprise to you, but we kind of believe in coaching.
Next year is going to be very interesting as our themes are Digitalization, Marketing, and Culture. We cannot wait to see what kind of ideas our partners come up with within these topics. Do you have any particular idea on what you would like to see from our event partners next year? If so, feel free to tip us your ideas!
About the writer:
Marko – the number one football lover at our office – is our sales director and head of sponsor relations. Besides football and business, Marko keeps busy playing with his two kids and listening to audiobooks. Marko doesn’t own a car, but instead enjoys biking to work every day.
