Why would someone take time away from running their business to attend your event?
While this question sounds confrontational at first, it’s a useful question to ask before choosing a venue or putting together the first promotional post.
Creating opportunities for face-to-face meetings is useful for most B2B audiences, and especially for decision makers who prefer more traditional ways of finding new products and services like F&B and retail leaders in Singapore.
Through supporting recurring business community initiatives for our clients, we’ve seen how useful it can be to bring customers, prospects and industry practitioners together. People get to meet peers, exchange experiences and discuss problems they are working through.
But the community and what value your events provide them have to come first.
Matching Your Audience With What They Value
The goal of any marketing campaign is to deliver the right message to the right people through the right channels. Some audiences, such as food and beverage and retail leaders in some Southeast Asian countries that we mentioned are harder to reach through digital means, and more inclined towards word-of-mouth recommendations. In their case, tried and tested methods like community events continue to be a great channel to create these natural conversations.
These events need to be clear on three things: who the target audience is, what they value, and how you design your community events around delivering that value. In Singapore, Enterprise Singapore hosts its annual Singapore Week of Innovation & Technology (SWITCH) to showcase Singapore’s startups to a wider global audience while helping global business and government attendees discover breakthrough technologies, exchange ideas, and forge new business partnerships.
For a more personal example, one of our clients targets F&B entrepreneurs and HR leaders by organising community events to discuss hot topics in the industry from recruitment tips to tech adoption and even how to scale and expand operations.
Feedback and questions asked during questions and answer sessions also provide fuel for more specific and relevant future topics. For example, discussions about scaling one’s business could lead to more specific sessions around managing staffing costs - ensuring that the topics for future events stay fresh and valuable.
Leaders frequently show up to share learnings with one another and form new connections, giving them reasons they value coming for. But whatever the topic, there should be value for the participant independent of whether they ever buy from the organiser.
Choose a Format and Partners That Support the Promise
Community events should adjust their activities and scale according to the target audience and the value you want to provide them with.
If you’re looking for more in-depth discussions, more private, closed discussions might be a good fit. We’ve personally seen our clients organise a range of different activities over separate events based on what they want to achieve. Large gatherings could have a panel or fireside chat with a valuable topic for people to focus their discussions on. If you want to provide your community with ice breaking or general networking, informal activities like social sports gatherings could be another possibility. One of our clients regularly hosts fireside chats for F&B HR leaders for example:
This also goes with the choice of partners and speakers too. How are these partners, sponsors, or speakers involved? What relevant experience do they bring? How will their involvement improve the discussion or help us reach the intended audience?
HubSpot’s annual UNBOUND event for example is a massive event with a range of formats all in one place. They regularly feature conference talks and panels across different themed stages such as innovation, tech stack showcases and the main stage. There are also meetups that are focused more on open discussions to expand your network.
HubSpot regularly invites premier speakers that match the communities they want to build around HubSpots’ clientele, ranging from leading Chief Branding Officers for marketing keynotes to representatives from Anthropic to discuss how tech is changing the face of business today.
Planning for the right experiences and scale for your objectives and audience is where experienced strategic planners can help. Our veteran Nila Studios team helps businesses work through their audience, programme, and sponsorship approach together, enabling these choices to support a clear purpose for your event.
Make the Value Clear in The Marketing
With that foundation in place, your team can now start marketing the event to attendees. The invitation needs to communicate the who this is for and give them good reasons to attend:
- Who is this for?
- What will we discuss?
- Who will participants meet or hear from?
- Who will participants meet or hear from?
- What business value could they take away from this event?
These can be turned into various formats, both online and offline to help attendees know what to expect. Event announcement campaigns can be shared through social media, web or email. Short videos on your website, YouTube channel or social media can offer useful perspectives on the topic while sharing other key details like time and venue. If relevant material from an earlier event is available, this content can be repurposed into ‘what you can expect’ types of content. Referral campaigns to turn existing attendees into sources of new participants can also be considered.
Nila’s marketing expertise helps to bring these pieces together from static campaign material like banners and digital fliers to short videos for paid and organic social media campaigns. Each piece will be coordinated to help your target audience learn of your event’s value and sign up for your event.
Build Something Worth Gathering Around
The biggest lesson we’ve learned from these business communities is that their value goes beyond hosting another event or producing another batch of content. When done well, they create a space where customers, prospects and industry peers can meet one another, exchange useful knowledge and talk openly about the problems they are facing.
But all of this depends on getting the community part right first. If people find the discussions useful, enjoy meeting one another and feel comfortable coming back, the content and marketing opportunities will naturally have much more to work with.
In short: focus on what our community values and they’ll keep coming back.
