The Power of Surprise and How it Can Improve Your Events
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Written by Ben Hindman

@bennydotevents
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The Power of Surprise and How it Can Improve Your Events

January 3, 2018

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The Power of Surprise and How it Can Improve Your Events
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Written by Ben Hindman

@bennydotevents

[VIDEO] The Power of "Surprise" And How it Can Dramatically Improve Your Events

January 3, 2018

The world we live in is becoming increasingly visual. We need something that's engaging and will connect with us on an emotional level.

Let's be honest: even the most special events aren't that special anymore. 

 

In this Run of Show Weekly video,  I dig into the psychology behind "surprise," and why it's something we're missing in events. How does it create deeper relationships? How can it shape your attendees' experience? How can it make the "er" moment happen?

 

The element of  "surprise" is so powerful, it can make your best event happen. See how:


Check it out below:

Love the animation in this video? Check out Ink Factory. 

Want to see more Run of Show Weekly videos? See our archives page here and make sure to subscribe!

Video Transcript:

Today we're going to leave our calculators behind and talk about why we got into events in the first place. 

Surprises For All

Partners are incredible -- they help you bring in new audiences, they can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. So, how do you get great partners?


The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. You find the right partner, you wanna pitch that partner, and then you really wanna lock it in, and execute, and get the most value out of that partnership.


We're gonna walk through each three of those things right now.

Make Your Event Flow

Let's walk through a real life scenario. We're throwing a 100-person event. So, in order to fill the room with 100 people, I like to send out about 10 times the number of invitations, so that's inviting around 1,000 people.

 

Then, I like to try and get about 4 times the ratio of RSVPs to the capacity of the room. That comes to 400 people. In an event, you typically see what's called a flow, in and out of the venue throughout the event. You're really gonna try to get about 150 people or more to actually attend the event, so we're gonna look for about a 1.5x attendance rate.


The goal that we're gonna talk about today, is how to improve the percentage between RSVPs and attendees.

2. Combine areas of expertise

We’re also guilty of planning events around our own ideas and wants as event marketers.


But keep in mind that while we’re the experts with events, we’re not experts with how to close deals -- that’s where the sales team comes in.


Sitting with sales and understanding how they’ve effectively used events to help expedite and close deals is important info you need to shape the overall event experience. For events that will truly help close deals, combine your team’s knowledge of event execution  with the sales team’s expertise of closing opportunities.


Even if you’re looking for a snapshot of an adorable dog, you definitely won’t be disappointed.



So, a couple years ago, my client invited me to their event at Webster Hall and when I got there, they invited me backstage. On stage, there were some incredible acts.


There was someone juggling chainsaws, a motorcyclist who was also a flamethrower, and there was a knife thrower. While a lot of people were watching the stage, I was just fixed on the faces of the audience.

Have you ever been backstage and just looked at the audience?

 

I was obsessed. In that moment I couldn't believe what I was watching: the awe on their face, their looks of surprise, their brains were exploding, and you could just see it in their eyes.

 

It was at that moment, I just knew what I was going to do with my life. Some people create music, some people create movies, some people create fashion -- I wanted to create events. I wanted to create experiences. I wanted to get people to feel that surprise that I saw on their face.

 

The first thing I did was I started reading up on surprise, trying to understand it. Serendipitously, I had met someone who self-defined as a Surprisologist. This is somebody who studies surprise for their profession. Her name is Tania Luna. She is an absolute genius if you haven't checked out her TED talk, you got to go do it right now. She taught me a couple things:

‌• Before the event: we use these lists to promote the event, and fill the room with the right people.

 ‌• During the event: we use these lists to prioritize our time, to know how to engage with people, when to engage with them, and how much energy and effort we should spend with that person.

‌• After the event: we use these lists to hone and craft personalized messages to re-engage and drive value from these attendees.

To better understand this, what we did was we analyzed all of the lists, all of the classifications and buckets that event marketers are using across the slash system, and we started to look for commonalities and try to understand how people are organizing their lists.


We did find that many people are using about 9 different types of lists. So I wanna share that with you and walk through the nine types of lists that we most commonly see. Let's rattle them off together.

Surprise Delivers 4x the Level of Serotonin

comp ticket strategy

A surprise is like a mini fight-or-flight moment in our brains. Many people are living a life of the same old same old. Do A, we get B. A cause-and-effect autopilot experience.

 

When we experience a surprise, when we have a set of expectations and we get something else, our brain doesn't really know what to do with it -- as opposed to looking forward to the future plans or looking to the past memories, like what am I doing this weekend? What did I eat for lunch? What did my coworker tell me?

As opposed to that, a surprise kind of stops us in our tracks and makes us focus on The Right Now, and that is a very powerful experience. I just read in ink that a surprise can actually deliver 4x the level of serotonin.

comp ticket strategy

3-Step Reciprocity

I've developed a three-step process to use reciprocity to drive the RSVP to attendance ratio. The three steps are: (1) get that attendee to invest, (2) confirm that they've made a good decision, and (3) lock it in.

The “Er” Moment

whale bait attendees

 

Note: If you're interested and you're gonna be pitching for partnerships soon, I included some of my best templates as a downloadable in the article with this video. So feel free to go download that and use my one-sheet template. But this is the general outline of what I think makes the best one-sheets. The point of a one-sheet is to communicate visually how legit and real your event is.

whale bait attendees

The way that Tania describes it is pretty interesting. She taught me that a surprise is like an "er" moment. So if something is happy, but it comes with a surprise, it's going to be happier or if something is really sad, but you're surprised by it, that's sadder. If something that makes you really proud, but you get surprised by this, you're going to feel prouder.

Whatever emotion you're trying to impact, a surprise is going to make it "er." It's a very powerful tool, especially when you think about what we do as event marketers, and as event planners, as experience creators. When we think about using surprises, that is why we get out of bed.

Why Do We Throw Events?

If you're in this industry, if you've chosen this profession, I have to believe that you're not only brought into this, you've become obsessed with it. You've fallen in love with it like I have.

 

But the irony is: in today's day-and-age as I look at the global ecosystem of events, many of what we call special events aren't really that special anymore.

 

It could be for a lot of reasons. It could be because you're tied up in the minutia of the event, or you've got so many events you can't focus on this one. You don't feel like you have enough budget or enough resources to really execute on a surprising moment. It can be all of these things.


What I want to do is I want to recommit us. I want to remind us why we got into this. It's to get people to feel that expression that I saw when I was standing backstage. It’s to make people stop in their tracks and to forget the future and the past and think about where they are in that moment.


When we do that, we can do some very powerful things. We can get them to remember more. We can get them to feel more. We can get them to build deeper relationships.

event-marketing-psychology

So in some of the following episodes, we're going to talk about not just why surprises are so powerful, we're going to talk about how we can set, meet, and then beat expectations with every single action that we do.

 

We're going to talk about how we're going to use surprise before, during, and after the event. I believe that after a couple more conversations about this, you're going to buy-in like I have to the power of surprise and you're going to recommit like I have to "surprise."

What's Coming Up?

Thanks for listening in, I'm really excited to talk more about surprise in the future episodes. 

Promotion Timing

Something that I often will think about is what time to send the invitation. What our data showed was that the highest likelihood of purchase, when people purchase the most tickets is between the hours of 12PM and 1PM. So what does that say? What that says to me is that when your marketing team is ready to press and they're like, "Hey, are we ready to send this invitation now?" The only question you need to ask is, "Is it before noon or is it after noon?" Because if it's after noon, you've already missed that window. You might as well wait 'til the next day.

 

You really want to focus on getting your promotional material out before noon that day so you can take advantage of that high-buying window.

56% of Your Attendees Purchase on Mobile Devices

We know when to send it now, but now let's talk about where you're actually promoting to. You know, it really is important to take advantage of Google Analytics and look in your analytics tab and understand where your traffic is coming from.


What we have found is that, finally, mobile traffic, when it comes to ticket purchases, has crossed over 50%. Now it's 56% of your attendees purchasing on mobile. What that says to me is: you better be optimizing your mobile experience. Make sure it's seamless, make sure it's easy to buy.

The Power of Social Clout

Last but not least, we found across all of these events that we're analyzing, there was one common denominator for the events that actually sold out. The events that put the attendees on the page and put the speaker pictures on the page, really promoting via social clout, had a nearly two-times higher likelihood of selling out their events than those that did not show the attendees or the speakers that were at the event.


Social clout is a really powerful mechanism, and I would urge you to take advantage of it. You need a market through your attendees and market through your vendors, market through your speakers, market through your sponsors. It's really the best way to sell out your event.


I hope you find that useful. We've got some genius data scientists in the back running regression analyses.



Consider These 3 Things Before You Comp Tickets

 (1) Percentage of attendees-to-opportunities: Assume it is going to increase if you comp tickets. What I mean to say is, do you think you can fill the room with a better attendee list that are more likely to turn into actual revenue? If you think so, make an assumption. In this last formula, the scenario you saw, we assumed that it would jump from 10% to 25%. I'll leave it to you to determine what percentage you think you can drive it to, if you had higher quality attendees. 


(2) What is your ACV? In our scenario, we talked about a 25K ACV, that's great. That's a nice ACV. Candidly, if you've got that average contract value, you have to comp tickets. It’s a no brainer. If you've got $100,000 as an average contract value, it is really a no brainer. But what we have found is that, if your average contract value is about $15,000, it might not make sense. You really wanna be above $15,000 for comp tickets to make sense for you.


(3) What is your Sales Cycle? Ask yourself, are you willing to wait for a good amount of time to actually see that revenue recognized? We've been looking at our data, and especially for some of these larger user conferences, you can see a sale cycle be about a year. That means that, from the time that person became an opportunity to the day that that dollar is deposited in your bank account, it could be a full year, if not more. So you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to wait that long, as opposed to getting the little dollars in now, with the ticket revenue? Can you wait for a much larger contract in a year or more?


Increasing Your Budget

The next step to locking it in is to treat every partner really like a sponsor, like a paying sponsor. These people, whether or not they're adding value or they're giving you money, you need to treat them as if they have really paid to be part of this event. That means consistent follow-up emails. That means being attentive to their needs. That means sending them a really beautiful recap report after the event. I find that if I treat my partners like sponsors and I really put that in my brain and in the brains of the people on my team, I get a lot more out of that partnership. They end up coming to the table and really delivering the value that I originally expected.


Last but not least, own it. Own the entire process. I’ve found that the best way to really get the most out of a partnership is to put one person on your team on that partner. Make sure that reminder email goes out. Make sure they bring their brand VIPs. Make sure that they have strong collateral at the event, that their booth is set up on time. It's that type of stuff. Giving them a very clear and thoughtful Gantt chart, leading them through that process, that really squeezes all of the juice out of a potential partnership.

Want to figure out how many comp tickets make sense for your strategy? We got an easy formula for you to use.

 

Download the template now.

comp ticket strategy template
event partnership contract templates

Don't know where to start? 

 

Download the Partnership Agreement Template.

 

Download the Partner Pitch One Sheet Templates.

event partnership contract template

3. Show that people are attending your events.

Last but not least, people get people. If you can show that people are attending your event, and they're telling other people, you can display that. That's the type of stuff that actually drives attendance.


So, you're gonna want to show and get RSVPs early and often as you can. Then get those people to commit and tell their friends about it. We found that that is the number one way to drive RSVPs.

Invest, Confirm, Lock it In

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.


Best of luck with your events.

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.


Best of luck with your events.

Bring Out the Urgency

Urgency is one of the most powerful techniques that I've seen in terms of driving ticket sales. You can use urgency in things like "Early bird sales end soon," or you can say something like, "We're almost full," or "This is going to be a really important event for you to attend." Drive that point home with frequency and urgency, and make sure, in all your communications, to go through that checklist, G-I-V-E.

After you've outlined every single step in the process, your next step is to figure out who the major players are. This might be someone who's actually at your organization, or an agency, or even a freelancer. You're trying to figure out who's involved. I find that a really great framework for figuring this out and defining it in a very visible and transparent way is something called the RACI model. It's a great model that I see some of the top event planners that we work with use.

How RACI Works:

RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.

(1) Responsible is the person who ensures that the work gets done.
(2) Accountable is the person that actually executes the work. Who presses "play," clicks "go," presses "send."
(3) Consulted is the person who gives approval that this work has been completed.
(4) Informed is the person who's an FYI for that stage.

A quick example: during the promotional stage, the person who is responsible might be your demand gen person. This is somebody who has to make sure that the right people are invited and we get the right RSVPs. The person accountable is the person who actually presses "send." That might be your marketing ops person or a promoter that's involved in the event. Consulted, is a leader in the promotional stage or VP marketing or VP sales. This is somebody who needs to make sure the right guest list is being promoted.


Probably informed for the promotional stage is your CEO or a salesperson who just needs to know that we're sending out invitations, or your client's RSVP. That's how you RACI. And your job is to RACI each of these different segments. This process is something that we call roleing [SP] up, R-O-L-E, roleing up. I found that identifying who is involved and what they need to do at early, early stages in the process, is paramount to having a great event. You really want to understand the players and what they're supposed to do, and to communicate that early and often.

Rolling Out: Timelines and Deadlines

The next step in this process is called rolling out -- that's identifying when. We know who and we know what they need to do, but when do they need to do it?


As you can see, this rolling out process looks a lot like a Gantt chart. We've layered on top of themselves all of these different stages. You want the promotional phase and the creative phase to overlap because we're going to learn a lot in the very early stages of our promotions. We're going to know how we might need to tweak things, and you need that creative team involved in the process. You do want to create deadlines. Make sure that everything has a clear beginning and a clear end, otherwise, I found things just don't get done.

The Final Step: Pulling It All Together

1. Get everyone involved early

I can't tell you how often I see people overlook getting the entire team, or at least as many people who fall under the responsible category as possible involved in the process early and often. If you can, get everyone in the room during the ideation stage. If not the ideation stage, make sure they're in the creative stage. I love the old adage, "If they plan the fight, they won't fight the plan." So you wanna get them involved.


2. Use data

Use data. I like to use data at different stages of the process. You can use data and measurement as an energizing tool, as your energizing bunny. The best way to feed this bunny is with carrots. But, you might also use the stick. What I meant to say is you can use a dashboard to show people how many RSVPs somebody is driving and get them really excited, or you can show them where you're not hitting, what's not working for you as a way to get people onboard and focused on their goal. I do find that using data at every single stage helps you sprint this marathon that is an event.


3. Communicate a lot

Last but not least, you want to communicate. Communicate a lot. I always would say to my event planning team, "Our entire job, not just part of our job, our entire job is communication, both with our attendees externally and with our team internally." Setting up a communication cadence early in the process, makes this whole machine work.

That's our role up and roll out process that we've found work great for us. Have any extra tips we missed? Let us know how you run your events in the comments!

Here’s an example of how to build a pass-along story from events that I hosted a couple of months ago for some of our top clients. Our clients are some of the top event marketers in the world and we brought them all together in a cool venue here in New York.

 

I went with my team in advance to think about what emotion we wanted them to feel. The emotion that we came to after a lot of debate was them to feel love, and appreciation for their job and for themselves and for the craft that they do.

 

That's where we started, but how do we get them to feel love? We threw out a lot of ideas for storylines that they would take away. One of the most important things that we could focus on was the format of the event and how their experience would play out throughout the day.

 

Fast forward 'till after the event. I wanted to test this pass-along story and see how effective we were. I called up a lot of the different attendees and asked them, what was the story that you told when you got home? More than that, who did you tell it to? Retell me that story.

 

The stories, more often than not, weren't really about the content that they learned or a certain data point that they heard. Instead they started talking about what had happened. They spoke about somebody that they met at a cocktail hour or a piece of swag that they're really excited about. Or even a musical interlude that had happened right before a speaker such as the violinist and how amazing she was. That's what they focused on.

 

What was even better was that interwoven into each of those stories was the emotion, and they were using interesting adjectives. Over and over again, we started to hear words like excitement and appreciation and inclusion. It was those adjectives that we wrote down because that was our goal, and our focus.

 

Remember, it's not about how you communicate your content and what you say. Instead, it's really about what people are really going to remember inside of these stories and how they feel.

On top of getting help from the sales team in areas they know best in, you also want to be careful in how your offer up your own expertise to them. Don’t try to push decisions in any certain direction or take complete control of the event’s reins.


Instead, present to sales the options and ideas that you’ve seen work well. Sit down with them and provide guidance on the experience you think you should create based on the targets you want to show up.


As marketers today, one of our core responsibilities is to support our sales counterparts in their quest in drive revenue. When planning your next event, remember Craig’s rule: change your sales collaboration approach from “here’s a marketing event, I need your help with it,” to “marketing is going to help you throw a sales event.”


❤️  Special thanks to our Tech lead, Guillermo de la Puente, for his hard work on this project.

People may not remember what happened at your event, but they'll remember how you made them feel. Learn how to craft an event message that is thought-provoking and engaging.


author

Ben Hindman

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.

About the Author

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.

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