What's the goal of your event?
As event marketers, we sometimes struggle to answer this question. And although clearly defining your event's value proposition can be difficult, it's necessary. In fact, it's usually the reason why someone decides to attend your event in the first place.
In this Run of Show episode, we walk through how to build an event value proposition that will help you increase event attendance.
Watch below to master the art of creating an effective event value prop:
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One of the hardest things that we have to do as event marketers is to build a clear mission statement (or value proposition) for our event.
So today, we're going to outline some of the ways that I have gone through that process – and it's a really hard process. It takes a lot of iteration, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of waking up, throwing away what you thought about, and starting over.
But this process is incredibly important as you think about promoting your event through all of your channels. It's gonna be your single source of truth – your beacon for why people should attend your event. It's gonna make event promotion possible.
So, let's dive in to how we build a successful value proposition that drives registration.
When you're building a value proposition – first and foremost – you have to remember that you're building this for a specific set of people, the right people.
These are typically customers, or prospects, or loyalists, or fans that you're trying to capture their ear. And the most important thing that you can do when you start this process is to create a persona: a very clear articulation of who you are talking to.
Once you know that, it all starts to become pretty clear. When you talk to them about why they should attend your event you can start to think about, where are they when they receive this promotion? And what are they thinking about? What do they need in life?
And that's the next most important mindset as we develop our value proposition.
Once we know who we're talking to, we need to think about what they need – what drives them to take this action and spend this time at your event, and often spend money to get to your event.
There are a lot of ways to think about this. I recently read a book that I found to be very useful in articulating what drives humans, called Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices. And in this book, they walk through an anthropological study of what gets humans to do things.
They outline four different reasons that humans do the things that they do:
1. Our drive to acquire things: to get stuff
2. Our drive to bond: to connect with other people
3. Our drive to learn: to be inspired and to grow
4. Our drive to defend: from our fear of losing something or losing our position
So those four drives really dictate why someone would do something. And if you can speak to one of those drives, and even get really crystal clear on how your event meets one of those drives, you can often create action. You can create behavior.
The next step is to put pen to paper, and there are a couple things to think about before we do that.
I usually find that it's very important when you're building a value prop that you frame what you're saying with a "you." I'm speaking to you, the attendee, and telling you what you're gonna get by attending our event.
And then, what I try to do is come up with a verb to start things off like, "hear from," or "listen to," or "grow," or "connect." These are things that are typically happening to you that you're gonna get by attending our event.
Once I have that verb, then I really begin the rest of the sentence. And what I do is build it collaboratively. I ask people – internal and external, my team, our attendees, our users. I typically find if they help plan the fight, they won't fight the plan. If I can get their input, I can really build a solid base of a value proposition for our event.
I've actually found a really great example of someone who I think has done this incredibly well. It's Joseph Zuniga over at segment.com. He has a user conference and it looks awesome. It's called Synapse 2018. And what Joseph has done an incredibly good job of, is clearly outlining what the value prop to an attendee is.
And he breaks it actually into two tracks and two themes:
1. Build: you as an attendee are going to learn to build.
2. Grow: you as an attendee can grow from attending our event.
And they're communicating this in multiple different ways. Their speakers are segmented by these value props. Their tracks are segmented by these value props. And they have places for underrepresented groups to feel included in this value prop. He outlined this in a really clever and careful way.
Be sure to check out the underlying text below each track because I found that this is very useful to see how Joseph outlined his value prop. This is framing up the conference in terms of what the attendees are gonna get by coming.
That's just one great example. But I want to urge everyone to really spend the time on their value prop. What I typically see is that people will call me and say, "Hey, how do I get more RSVPs to this event?" And right when I open their page, it's clear that they have not spent time articulating why someone should attend their event.
So, I want to ask yourself that question. For your next event, it should be crystal clear why an attendee should attend, and what they're gonna get from spending their time there.
If you want more ideas about how to frame up human behavior, check out our episode called "The GIVE Checklist." It's one of the earliest Run of Show episodes and we walk through our event promotion strategy and why people actually show up at events.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing some of your value props and I hope you will send examples over. And thanks again to Joseph Zuniga from Segment. He's an incredible event marketer out of San Francisco, and Synapse looks awesome.
Need help identifying your event's purpose? Discover your event's superpower and how to leverage it to maximize your entire event program.
Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.
