7 Proven Ways To Increase Your Event Engagement

During a conference, the ideal is to have all eyes on the speaker and to have the participants be fully involved in the event, ensuring high event engagement. However, that is often far from the reality. You would count yourself lucky if you even manage to capture half of their attention.

What’s more, a MICE event often involves hundreds of participants, making it difficult to connect with every member in the audience. It might seem unimaginable to engage hundreds of participants at a go. No worries, we are here to help.

TL;DR

How To Increase Audience Engagement in An Event

1. Use electronic devices or event apps to keep attendees actively involved throughout the event, preventing boredom.
2. Keep attendees informed with a clear agenda accessible through their devices to maintain engagement and anticipation.
3. Understand your audience’s interests through pre-event surveys or tailor content that captures their attention.
4. Create stimulating presentation slides with videos, images, and interactive elements to enhance engagement.
5. Facilitate live Q&A and polling using an event app to encourage real-time interaction and participation.

How To Measure The Success Of Your Event Engagement Strategy

• Key Metrics: Track engagement data like session attendance, questions asked, and boost activity using platforms like Micepad.
• Analyzing Data: Dive into metrics to understand what resonated and what didn’t, allowing you to refine strategies for future events.
• Continuous Improvement: Use insights to enhance engagement strategies continually, aiming for higher attendee satisfaction and ROI.

What Is Event Engagement?

Event engagement means how much your attendees are interacting, participating, and connecting during your event. This could be through activities, brand activations, discussions, and much more. Essentially, it’s about keeping your audience involved and making sure they’re actively engaged.

When we talk about event engagement, we’re looking at how well your event grabs and holds the audience’s attention, and encourages full participation. The best events capture interest right from the start and keep everyone involved throughout.

You can’t have a successful or enjoyable event without genuine attendee engagement. One of the main goals for any event planner is to keep attendees engaged throughout the event. This means thinking about not just how many people show up to each session, but how attentive they are, how many visit exhibitor booths, and how many make meaningful connections during networking events.

In short, attendee engagement is about how actively participants engage with and benefit from the event. Whether you’re hosting an internal seminar or a large convention, the content you provide, how you deliver it, and the fun elements you incorporate are crucial for keeping your attendees engaged.

How To Increase Audience Engagement in An Event

There are several methods available to boost participant interaction during an event:

1. Make Your Presentation a Two-Way Street 

Before engaging the audience, there is a need to first capture their attention. The average attention span is limited to a range of five to seven minutes. This makes long conferences and meetings tedious for the audience to pay attention and retain information.

One way to resolve this issue is to give participants electronic devices to keep them constantly involved in the proceedings. The event’s devices help to prevent the usual problems of participants losing interest halfway during the meeting. You can even go further to get them to download an event app so that they can download the contents and use it to keep track of the meeting.

2. Keep Them Informed of the Agenda

Just the act of setting an agenda alone is able to increase meeting productivity. On top of that, your participants’ involvement rate goes up when they are informed of the agenda. This can be done by making the agenda easily accessible or by having the next item on the schedule pop up on the screens of their devices. With the program in mind, the participants would be more aware of what is happening and this also makes them anticipate the next item on the schedule. By keeping them on their toes, they become more alert and receptive to the event on-goings.

3. Know Your Audience

What topics are they interested in? Are they more interested in the current affairs or the industry news? Do a pre-event survey or a background research before the event to know what they are interested in listening to. When you talk about topics that they are concerned about, you stand a better chance of getting their attention. While the responses may be varied, it is easier to gain the majority’s attention when you target the popular topics.

4. Be Interesting

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But this is actually a lot more difficult than it sounds. Meetings and conferences are, unfortunately, deep in the boring zone. While there is a whole trove of workshops and how-to(s) to make your meeting more interesting, there are two key areas that might just pull your meeting out from the boring clutter.

Interactive Presentation Slides: The contents of the presentation is one of the main highlights of the conference—even, perhaps, their greatest takeaway. There is a need to ensure that the presentation slide are stimulating and easy to read. Intermittent videos, images and thought-provoking questions have been found to be one of the best ways to vary the presentation tempo and capture the audience’s attention.

Speak Well: Even the most well-done presentation slides can cause the presentation to flop if the public speaking skills are not on par. Encourage your speakers to rehearse in the event venue before the event so that the speaker can take in the vibes of the room and also look out for areas of the room that the participants might be neglected.

Getting an audience’s attention via speaking is not an easy task. An audience’s energy levels ebb and flow, making it difficult to ensure that their energy levels are always up. A good speaker is able to notice these fluctuations and can go a long way towards capturing and retaining their attention.

5. Live Q&A and Polling

Make your meeting go live with an event app and use it to engage your participants in the Q&A segment. The event app should be able to screen questions from the participants and provide a real-time response from the speakers. Knowing that their questions will be answered immediately makes the audience more interested in listening and participating during the Q&A.

6. Seating Arrangement

When it comes to seating at your event, how you set things up can really amp up engagement. Skip the solo seats and opt for arrangements that get people talking. Open seating gives guests the freedom to choose where to sit and who they sit with, perfect for mingling.

But if you want to mix it up and spark new connections, assigned seating could do the trick. The goal is to create an atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable chatting and networking, boosting the overall vibe of your event.

7. Informative Notifications and Email

Using notifications and emails effectively can greatly enhance engagement before and during your event. As the registration deadline approaches, consider sending out a countdown timer or a series of emails to build excitement.

Highlight the benefits of attending to create a sense of urgency and FOMO (fear of missing out). Share engaging content, sneak peeks, and valuable information that keeps your audience interested and looking forward to the event. Well-timed push notifications with relevant updates can also keep attendees informed and engaged as the event unfolds.

How To Measure The Success Of Your Event Engagement Strategy

To know if your event engagement strategy is hitting the mark, you’ve got to crunch some numbers and track the right metrics. Start by using robust event platforms like Micepad, which seamlessly collects engagement data. This means you can easily track stuff like who accepted invites, which sessions were hot tickets, the questions flying around, polls answered, and more. These insights tell you what resonated with your crowd and what fell flat, so you can fine-tune for the next event.

1. Key Metrics To Watch

Keep an eye on active participation—how much are your attendees getting involved and interacting meaningfully? Also, look at how your event buzzes on social media, through session feedback, and how well networking sessions fostered connections. These metrics give you a 360-view of engagement, from how sessions rated to how much people mingled and made lasting connections.

2. What To Do With All That Data

Once you’ve collected your data stash, dive in and analyze. See which sessions lit up the room and which ones snoozed. Spot trends like popular topics or activities that attendees loved. Making use of this source of truth to base your next moves on can be a real kickstart. Plus, it helps you craft events that not only wow your audience but also deliver solid ROI.

3. Keep Improving

Remember, it’s all about continuous improvement. Use what you’ve learned to tweak and upgrade your engagement strategy for the future. The goal? To keep raising the bar on attendee satisfaction and event success, one data-driven decision at a time.

Conclusion

With these steps, you’re set to measure and maximize the impact of your event engagement strategy like a pro. Picking the right event management app with features that streamline registration, boost attendee engagement, and provide robust analytics can leave a lasting impression to your audience.

From seamless check-ins to interactive sessions and detailed post-event insights, Micepad helps you deliver events that attendees rave about. Request a demo today and discover how Micepad can transform your event management game. Join our newsletter for tips, updates, and insights to take your events to the next level.