When it comes time to plan a big corporate event, it seems like you never have enough time or resources. It's up to you to find the locale, choose a theme, create ideal engagement opportunities that help your company generate sales leads, and source the right partners to sponsor your event.
After the event, you need to crunch all the data to be able to know what worked, what didn’t work, and how it impacted return on investment. It's your goal to cultivate new sales leads for the company to make the event a success.
Ultimately, this long list of responsibilities causes many event planners to think atomistically and miss the big picture. To solve this problem, you need to add an event strategist to your team.
Forbes commented, "Developing an effective communication strategy for your company is key to creating a successful launch or event. You need to assemble the right team, as well as identify goals and which audiences that you want to reach."
Collaboration and Strategic Event Planning
Before you can start collaborating and strategizing, you need to define the roles of an event planner and an event strategist. Here's everything you need to know:
The Role of the Event Planner
When you're an event planner, you're in charge of all the details and decisions about a particular event. Event planners are tasked with various duties, including:
- Identifying the ideal location for the event.
- Choosing a theme.
- Spotlighting sponsors.
- Deciding on promotions.
- Finding the right speakers and activities.
Tackling all of these details is time-consuming, and you need to stick to a budget with limited resources. As an event planner, you probably measure an event's success by the leads gathered at the event. However, an event strategist can help your company find new ways to make events pay off.
The Role of an Event Strategist
Some people may use the terms event planning and event strategy interchangeably. However, these are two separate positions with distinct skillsets and duties. The main duties of an event strategist include:
- Working with the marketing department to apply the current campaigns to the event.
- Connecting all the events in a year or certain period into the current marketing goals.
- Determining the goals of the event and creating a plan to achieve them.
While you want your event to be fun and informative for your customers, you need to realize a benefit for your company. The event strategist always has the goal in mind, which can be summed up as increased sales and growth for your business.
With event strategy, events must concentrate on:
- Encouraging customers to adopt new products.
- Generating new leads.
- Enhancing the loyalty of your customer base.
- Improving customer retention rates.
An event strategist sees the bigger picture and considers the impact of the event on business revenue. With event strategy, you ask "Why are we doing this?" This questioning makes it easier to step back and make positive choices.
An event strategist helps you focus more on the value of the event for revenue, from the planning stages to the after-event follow-ups. Your event should drive the behavior from your customers that you want to see to help your company grow.
How Strategy and Planning Co-Exist
In the end, both the event planner and strategist have similar essential goals. However, their approaches are different and need to be brought together for the benefit of the business.
When you're an event planner who collaborates with a strategist, it's a good idea to see them as an extension of your team. While this person isn't concentrating on the details like you and most of your team, they are working to help you pull off a successful event and create a holistic event strategy. Their tasks might be different, but they can aid you in creating a profitable event.
There are many ways that a strategist can offer you, as an event planner, benefits and help. These benefits include:
- Establishing and ensuring an event design that provides the positive outcomes your company wants.
- Solving unexpected problems as they arise in a creative manner.
- Embracing risks and finding new ways to address old challenges.
- Uniting and bringing clarity to a new hybrid event model that makes positive changes and provides stellar outcomes.
Working with an event strategist can only benefit your company by helping you see the same old problem in a new light that has a solution. When you embrace the strategist as part of your event planning team and recognize the value they bring, you can easily work with them.
For your company, an event strategist can take the marketing campaign and apply it to all the events you have over a year or other period of time to maximize the potential revenue.
At Impact Point Group, we're ready to become an extension of your event planning team. Our team is ready to focus on the big picture while you handle the details that you do best. To learn more or find answers to your questions, contact us today.