From concept to conclusion: crafting your approach to strategic event planning

Coming up with creative ideas to engage your audience is one thing. But for brands that really want to create trackable impact, you need to be able to fuse that creative direction with an insight-led strategy. 

What is strategic event planning? 

Strategic event planning is a multi-phase process that goes beyond logistics to create meaningful, goal-aligned event experiences. This means creating a comprehensive event plan, mapping out exactly how you’re going to achieve your goals, and then using insights to refine your strategy for future event success.

In this blog we’ll be sharing our expertise on applying strategic event planning to every element of your event lifecycle, from initial ideation, to post-event analysis. 

Step 1: Define your goals and event objectives 

Creating an event strategy without understanding your event goals is like trying to navigate a path without knowing the end destination. By ensuring that your event strategy goals reflect the aims of your wider business strategy, you can confidently make progress in the right direction for your business.

With your event goals and KPIs clarified, you also need to select the right technology to measure this, ensuring that the systems and enhancements you harness streamline your processes, enhance attendee engagement, or help to measure an element of your event experience. 

Step 2: Know your audience 

Part of being able to create an event that creates results within your attendees is understanding exactly who those attendees are. Invest the time in researching your audience, in particular their: 

• Preferences 
• Expectations 
• Demographics 
• Behaviours 
• Interests 

With these insights, you can tailor the event experience to their needs, and this will inform the strategy of your event plan. 

Step 3: Harness event expertise

When creating your team, you need to ensure you’re fulfilling the relevant specialisms that are required by your event concept, and your wider strategy. Across your people, you need to be able to access and harness the latest insights and technology, as well as innovative creative direction, ensuring they’re applied holistically across your strategy. 

Step 4: Design the event experience 

Now you can begin to map out: 

• The event offering
• How attendees will interact with this event experience
• The event content that will be used to deliver key business messages

With this clear event offering and attendee journey in place, you can then look to elevate these with speakers, partnerships or engagement tools. But for every elevation you make, you have to ensure that this arches back to your main event goals and the wider message of your brand and your event strategy.

Step 5: Execute and elevate

Every element of the logistics of your event should ladder back up to the key purpose of the event and stay aligned with your wider business goals. Use your insights about your attendees to craft and execute delegate management plans that anticipate their needs, for a slick and seamless attendee experience.

Step 6: Distil, understand, and action 

Using the tools and technology you agreed at the outset of your planning process, measure your metrics to determine whether event success was achieved or not. It’s also useful to look beyond the confines of your definition of event success, to see if there are any areas where you created unexpected impact on your attendees. You can use these to refine the focus of your event strategy, and create more targeted events in the future. 

Ready to bring a consistent approach to your strategic event planning? Get in touch with the First Event team, and let us be your partner in crafting your vision, and turning this into a strategic plan for brand event success.