How to create unforgettable events for your business | The 6-step formula you can use to deliver impactful event experiences

Are you experiencing the slow-drip anxiety of having an impending business event to plan without a clue of how to make it impactful? We invite you to banish that feeling to the shadowrealm by using our 6-step formula for creating unforgettable experiences.

You see, whether it’s launching a product, or marking a milestone, you really need to find a way to justify occupying people’s time. Deliver a dud, and people will not only not attend subsequent events, they’ll talk, and this will reflect poorly on whatever the event was in service of.

Whether you’re selling a service or products, the biggest crime a brand can commit on their event-side is being dull. What was the point of doing all the hard work if what was supposed to be your celebration of all that hard work renders it null and void?

1. Really know what the aim of your event is

This might sound too obvious to even write down, but it’s actually often overlooked.

Before you start planning, you need to define the purpose of your event clearly. Are you launching a new product? Yes? Okay, how does this particular event support your product? If your event didn’t happen, what would you not achieve? You need a rock solid “Why?” that holds up to scrutiny.

Ultimately, the real filling of the sandwich comes down to knowing your audience. You need to have an audience profile, probably even profiles, and then you can envision a sample size of target attendees to help guide your planning. You need to consider what you want them to take away from the experience, and make sure you’re creating the conditions for that to occur.

For example, if you’re a high end fashion brand and you’re inviting a load of influencers to an exclusive event, and you’re wanting them all to do posts about an exciting new line, you need to make sure the lighting and staging conditions are optimal for them to work in. Are there interesting focal points for them to create worthy content around and showcase your product?

If you’re running a recruitment event, is the infrastructure and the flow of the space optimal to let attendees move around the different booths. Are there suitable facilities and assets to enable people from your company to have meaningful conversations with guests and identify strong candidates?

Pro tip: Leave no stone unturned. Once you know what you as a business want out of the event, and what you want your guests to take away from it, you can basically reverse engineer the experience you need to create. You should also define key performance indicators (KPIs) at this point so you can determine whether or not your event has been a success at the end.

2. Craft a story and an experience around your event

Stories have stuck with people since they were communicated through cave paintings. The methods of delivery may have become more sophisticated, but fundamentally, human beings still can’t resist a well-spun yarn.

By making your attendees the heroes of the event, you can give them a memorable experience they’ll want to share.

Pro tip: The way to give your guests agency in the narrative of your event is through gamification – applying game mechanics to tasks and objectives to improve user engagement..

For example, by creating a Dynamic Path™ on the Drimify gamification platform, you can create a multi-level playable experience, and have each level of the game unlocked through passwords around your event space. This could involve asking players to solve riddles which will encourage them to move to different booths or attractions at your event and interact with them to advance.

3. An event experience is a product, so test the UX of that product

Treat your event experience as a product, and like any product, it needs to deliver a great user experience (UX) to be effective.

Test every aspect: registration, navigation, sessions, interactions, etc. etc. This is where you can iron out the creases: eliminate pinch points, make edits, make additions, etc.

If you’re using gamification in your event, make sure you test whatever you create (or is created for you). Test it on the terminals and screens it will be used on if applicable, or test it on a range of mobile devices if participants are to use their phones and access the games through QR codes.

4. Use gamification to meaningfully redirect event traffic to your desired location

Whether your main channel to sell your products and services is on a website, in a bricks and mortar store, or even if it’s a food festival and your restaurant has a stall, gamification is a great way of redirecting the temporary audience of the event to your normal place of business.

Utilising a highly visual instant win mechanic like a Spin the Wheel can be a great way to create excitement and distribute promotional codes and prizes that can then be redeemed or collected via the channel of your choice.

5. Seek feedback from attendees

Running events isn’t easy. Inevitably, you’ll learn things from one event to the next that will help you fine-tune your approach over time. Regardless of the aim of your event, it’s important to bring this aspect back to the most important element: your guests.

After the event, ask your attendees how they found it. Did you achieve your aims? Were the desired takeaways taken away? Did everyone have a good time? Did they observe any areas for improvement?

Pro tip: When you get a terrible haircut and the hairdresser asks you how it is, you nearly always say, “Yeah, great, love it.” When you eat a bad meal and the really friendly server asks how everything is, you nearly always say, “Yeah, everything was great.” The odds are, your guests will be too polite to give useful face-to-face feedback too.

You can easily customise Surveys on modern gamification platforms like Drimify to ask whatever questions with whatever answer formats will best serve your organisational needs, be that open for suggestions, or ratings or values that you deem most conducive.

Even when you test out an event, or think you’ve thought through every eventuality, it’s no substitute for how a real guest or punter, coming into your event cold for the first time, will find and experience it. For this reason, offering them an opportunity to provide anonymous feedback can help you time travel to being a much better event planner.

6. Calculate ROI and use everything you’ve learned to make your next event even better

When your event is over, you need to measure the return on investment (ROI) it delivered by analysing the impact it had on your goals.

Depending on the nature of your event, this could have been an initial spike in sales, a number of promotional codes used, or a number of vacancies filled, or even relate to social media metrics over a period of time. Whatever KPIs you defined in step 1 will play massively into how you calculate the event’s ROI, as can audience feedback in step 4 depending on how quantitative your Survey results are.

Pro tip: Gamified event experiences give more statistics. Every interaction on a game created produces data, giving you hard engagement measures to analyse and learn from.

Key takeaway

The success of a business event is greatly amplified when engaging storytelling is seamlessly integrated with digital strategies like gamification, elevating the guest experience by giving them agency and making them a participating character, as opposed to a passive witness.

Event organisers can elevate an ordinary gathering into an extraordinary and immersive experience. This powerful combination not only deeply engages participants, but can also be used to generate valuable insights and feedback, ensuring that each event is not just memorable, but also a strategic tool for achieving business objectives.