When it comes down to it, the success of your event is directly tied to the people in the room.
In this chapter, we focus on:
1. How to Determine Your Target Audience
2. How to Manage and Organize Your Guest List
3. VIP Strategies
Depending on your business, industry, and event goal (we told you it’d be important!), you might be looking to target a certain type of guest, company, account, partner, etc. to invite to your event. If you’re struggling to figure out who your target audience is, we recommend you start by thinking about your goal.
For example:
Remember: while events are expensive, they are also very effective. Don't waste an invite — take the time to figure out who you should have on your list.
When you're a B2B company (or you're a B2C company with a sales team), ensuring you’re getting the right people in the room and driving them through the funnel requires the help of your sales and customer teams. They’re the ones with the insights you need to plan a successful event: what types of events will resonate with their contacts, where and when to host these events, and who we can expect to actually show up.
After all, while you’re the event expert, you’re not the “sales” expert. Get the sales team to close those deals and reach out to their contacts for you.
Need some tips? Our CEO Ben talks with B2B expert, Craig Rosenberg, Founder of TOPO, on how to get sales involved in your events. See the video below or get more in-depth in the blogpost.
As an event organizer, very often you have one system or technology that houses your guest list (if you don’t have an event technology for this, bless your heart). But like anything, in order to make the most of it, it needs to be well-organized — especially if you have a bigger event program.
The most important thing to remember is that organizing and growing your audience lists takes time. It might take a few events before you even have some of this data to segment around, and you should always be maintaining your lists to keep them accurate and up-to-date.
There are a lot of ways to segment your guest list. We've laid out the 9 different ways we've seen it done effectively:
This one is pretty self-explanatory — lists based off of guests’ location. When you throw an event, you can also tag guests who attend with the city where the event is taking place. That way, you’ll automatically have segmented lists by location set up.
This is usually lists categorized by annual tentpole events, for example people from CES or Dreamforce. This can also be organized by event types (i.e. people who have gone to a lot of educational events).
(See below for more information about partners): If you have a partner for an event and give them a unique tracking link to invite people with, you can begin building audience segments around that, and oftentimes gain a lot of net-new names to your database.
Another way to think about organizing your guest list is with VIPs. If you’re throwing a major event (hint: it costs a lot of money!), you’ll want to make sure you’re focusing your attention on the right people and that your team is aligned on who these people are (i.e. a top clients or even a celebrity).
Make sure you label your VIPs in your guest list (do this in Splash easily) and that your team who’s running the door knows who your VIPs are.
How do you manage VIP lines when you’re running the door? See our expert door tips (or jump to Chapter 7 for more on-site best practices).
See our VIP playbook for leveraging VIP wristbands for an exclusive event to book more meetings leading up to your next trade show.
Don’t forget to integrate your guest data to your “system of record,” so you can sync and update statuses in real-time. This could be your CRM (Customer Relationship Management), MAP (Marketing Automation Platform), and/or POS (Point of Sales).
Did you know Guest List is our Client Education Director, Zach’s favorite Splash feature? See how Splash can help you organize (and integrate) your guest list like a pro.
