When it comes to hosting or organizing events, improving audience engagement should be one of your top priorities. Events are much more than a matter of show and tell; they’re also a way for you to connect with your loyal customers and bridge the gap between your brand and their needs. What better way to achieve this than to make the event interactive, fun, and engaging?

The Importance of Attendee Engagement 

 Attendee engagement should be your driving force when planning events. The interests and needs of the audience should be integrated into every aspect of your program. Besides inspiring and retaining interest, however, you may be wondering: why is attendee engagement so critical?

Build Longer-Lasting Relationships 

Traditionally, events have been one-sided. That is, the event planner is the giver, and the audience is the receiver. However, with the evolution of technology and innovation, events have become more interactive, allowing audience members to be more involved throughout the process.

They can share their thoughts, take part in activities, and get to know the brand a little better. Likewise, you — as the brand — can create a unique experience for your audience that fosters loyalty and longer-lasting relationships.

Much like every other relationship, events must also be a give-and-take. In addition to featuring presenters and specific brand segments, you should also open the floor to Q&As, demos, and other engagement ideas to make your audience feel heard and understood.

Drive Leads

Once your audience understands that they are not just spectators but change-makers involved in the growth and expansion of your brand, they are more likely to remain loyal to you. With loyalty comes leads.

Even long after the event, provided it’s successful, your attendees will continue to support your products and services because you’ve already established a relationship with them. So, every time you launch a new product, introduce a new influencer or expand your service, you can rest assured that your consumers will support it.

Create Memorable Experiences

Ultimately, you want to create an experience that extends beyond the four walls of your venue. You want to ensure that you leave a lasting impression that will have people talking for weeks or even months after the event.

One way to achieve this goal is to create a unique and engaging event that people want to share on social media. In addition to on-ground entertainment, consider creating an online counterpart that people can continue to participate in. Anything that encourages people to stay, engage in conversation, and enjoy themselves is a great way to enhance attendee engagement at events.

One idea to get you started is to explore custom applications (apps) that push attendee engagement to new levels. Amplify your event experience by offering a personalized mobile app and create lasting memories for your guests.

How Mobile Apps Improve Attendee Engagement  

If you are unfamiliar with mobile apps or have never had the opportunity to integrate them into your events thus far, now’s the perfect time to learn more about them. Mobile apps can give your event a competitive edge, empowering you with customizable features that can significantly enhance engagement.

Mobile apps can give your event an added edge. Apps have customizable features that can help you improve engagement. Gamification, in-app messaging, push notifications, personalized content, and networking opportunities can all allow your guests to participate in your events like never before.

If you’re expecting a large number of attendees, leveraging mobile apps to ensure that your guests get the most out of your event is essential. Through this, they can interact with fellow attendees, learn more about the brand, and stay up-to-date with the latest updates. All of this can be conveniently accomplished through their phones, making every aspect of your show accessible and hassle-free.

Conversely, investing in a mobile app can also benefit you greatly as an event organizer. With this tool, you can enhance your logistics, stay on top of your tasks, and ensure a smooth and seamless event for all attendees.

Overall, mobile apps add more value and character to your efforts. From how people interact with your brand to how you manage your show from start to finish, everything can be covered with the help of a simple app, giving you the confidence that your event will be a success.

App Features for Attendee Engagement  

The success of your event hinges on two key parameters: audience engagement and return on investment (ROI).

Although developing a marketing strategy, selecting a venue, and setting up a registration page are all essential steps when it comes to organizing an event, they are not enough to retain your attendees’ attention and boost your ROI. To achieve this, you need the help of a mobile app that contains features to increase engagement rates and push your ROI while saving you time and money.

Push Notifications

As an event organizer, you don’t want your attendees to miss out on segments within the program, especially when they’re mingling or engaging in other activities. You’ll want to give them a heads-up about what’s coming next so they can participate. That’s where push notifications come into play.

With this feature, you can keep your audience informed about all the activities that take place during your event. You can even take this feature to the next level by customizing your push notifications to cater to a specific group of people.

Targeting your push notifications allows you to further personalize their event experience, remind them of program timings, update them on last-minute changes, and encourage them to participate throughout the event. It’s one of the most effective tools to have if you want to know how to increase engagement.

Personalized Agenda

Gone are the days when you needed to create an agenda document, print and distribute it to your attendees, only for it to get lost or misplaced. Not only is this method not eco-friendly or cost-friendly, but it’s also such a hassle. A better alternative is to make the agenda available to audiences through a mobile app.

Besides getting the best experience out of the event, attendees nowadays prioritize convenience. Carrying papers filled with detailed information about the event is not convenient. Instead, create a digitally streamlined version of your program, upload it to the app, and utilize push notifications to keep your guests informed.

You can even elevate the agenda and make it interactive, allowing your guests to chat with one another, ask questions, seek clarifications, and gain a deeper understanding of the presentations. This is simply the beginning. There are numerous other ways a personalized digital agenda can enhance your event, making it more engaging.

Networking Opportunities

If you’re hosting a conference or business meeting with thousands of expected attendees, having a networking feature that enables guests to connect is a necessity. It is an excellent way to help them make valuable connections and meet the right people.

With our networking feature, your audience can enjoy tools such as messaging, virtual meetings, and one-on-one interactions. All of this is protected via a permission-based system where attendees have complete control over who engages with them before, during, and after the conference.

Surveys and Polls

Surveys and polls are among the most effective ways to boost audience engagement, which means integrating live surveys and polls throughout the event is crucial.

Apart from encouraging engagement, these features are also an excellent way for you to collect vital data and feedback from your attendees. By distributing surveys and polls at the end of a speaker’s presentation, for example, you can gauge the speaker’s success and identify areas that need improvement.

Then, at the end of the event, you can provide another survey that allows your audience to rate their overall satisfaction with the experience. Utilizing this as a potential resource can give you a competitive advantage as an event organizer, enabling you to enhance your sessions and create something truly memorable.

Gamification

Speaking of memorable events, you can never go wrong with games. Gamification in events has taken on a new role as one of the most effective ways to maximize participation and increase ROI. From encouraging audiences to network with each other to incentivizing them to stay and participate, games have a way of keeping people engaged — and entertaining!

To make your events even more fun and thrilling, consider setting up a leaderboard, awarding badges and points to your attendees, and letting them win prizes. Prizes such as branded merchandise, sponsor goodies, coupons, gift cards, or cash are a great way to motivate your audience, create buzz, and keep them engaged during the event.

Virtual Booths

Consider this: if you have a well-organized setup consisting of several exhibits or sponsor booths, your venue will likely be crowded with attendees standing in long lines. 

Spending time lining up at different booths to see the brand is not ideal for audience engagement. If you want to give your audience an up-close and personal look at the individual booths, setting up a virtual alternative is your solution.

Virtual exhibitor booths enhance the value of your event by allowing sponsors to showcase their products and services online. They can upload a gallery or a live video demo to give the attendees an unobstructed view of what they have to offer. Additionally, if viewers have any questions about specific products, they can connect with the exhibitors digitally and resolve their concerns.

If the exhibitors want to enhance their audience’s experience of the brand, they can also incorporate online and on-site gamification. 

Speaker Profiles

There’s only so much information an on-site event blurb can contain regarding your speakers. If you want your audience to get to know your keynote presenters, you can set up speaker profiles on our mobile app, providing a more in-depth overview of who your guest speakers will be.

Apart from a brief biography highlighting their area of specialization, you can enhance the information on your speaker profiles by adding their social media handles (if available), contact details, and even their LinkedIn profiles.

If the speaker has any additional resources they would like to share with your audience, they can also provide these on their overview page. There’s so much information you can include in speaker profiles that will allow your audience to connect more deeply with them and even extend their networking opportunities beyond the event’s scope.

Venue Maps

Event signage is necessary for every venue, but sometimes, it cannot guide your attendees to the correct destination on time. To solve this issue, our app features a unique venue maps that present a venue layout to help your guests easily navigate their way around the event floors.

Venue maps can provide clear directions to where your attendees need or want to go, from the different session rooms and sponsor hubs to the food court and help desk.  Our app can display the best-path routes, allowing guests to arrive at their desired location on time.

With this feature, you don’t need to worry about them getting lost and being late for a meeting or speaker session.

On-Demand Videos

Suppose your attendees miss a live session due to an early departure, other engagements, or any other reason. In that case, you can offer on-demand videos, similar to YouTube, to enable your guests to catch up on the sessions they have missed.

Additionally, if there are segments that your attendees want to review, this feature enables them to do so. They can rewatch and take down notes on different parts of the event even after it has finished.

The idea of making content available to them days and weeks following an event’s completion is an excellent engagement strategy that will help you keep your event relevant for the foreseeable future.

Event Analytics and Reporting

Since audience engagement is often a subjective and personal experience, it can be hard to measure on-site. Fortunately, with these features, you can collect and analyze data to determine the success of your event. From surveys and polls to gamification aspects and everything in between, your mobile app is your number one solution for gaining a more concrete and comprehensive view of your audience engagement.

Based on your findings and analysis, you can retain strong points and tweak weaker ones to create a more unforgettable event in the future.

Don’t forget to utilize an app that can ensure a private and secure platform, allowing you to maintain confidentiality between your brand and attendees.

Tips and Best Practices 

Is this your first time exploring the world of event mobile apps? If you answer yes, here are some tips and best practices you can try that will help ease the transition for you.

• Understand your audience when building your app.  
  • First things first, you need to know your audience. What are their online behaviors? Are they tech-savvy? Do they know how to navigate a new app? Asking these questions is essential because they can help you obtain in-depth knowledge of what your audience wants from your app. In doing so, you can customize your app to suit their needs.
• Recognize the importance of customer feedback.
  • Remember that you might not get it perfect the first time, and that’s fine. Setting up an app has its trial-and-error phase. Identifying what works and what needs improvement based on customer feedback is what will enable you to do better next time. So, always be open to what your attendees have to say.
• Keep the app simple and accessible. 
  • It can be easy to get carried away with digital apps, but it’s always important to remember that less is more. The simpler and more streamlined your app is, the better the experience will be for your audience. That’s because having too many features can be overwhelming, especially for first-timers. The last thing you want is to distract them with pop-ups and widgets that will only confuse them.