7 Tips on How to Organize Awesome Tech Events in 2024: Insights from Industry Experts
July 3, 2024 • 3 min read • By Anto Pranjic, Growth Marketing Manager
An in-depth look at how you can organize successful tech events.
7 Tips on How to Organize Awesome Tech Events in 2024: Insights from Industry Experts
An in-depth look at how you can organize successful tech events.
Organizing tech events can be a massive challenge, but it’s also one of the most rewarding achievements one can achieve both in the tech industry and in event management. From attracting hundreds or even thousands of attendees to welcoming top-notch speakers and creating win-win partnerships, it’s hard to tell the best part of organizing IT conferences.
Here’s an in-depth look at how you can organize successful tech events. Before we start, you can find additional insights in our recent webinar, “How to Organize Awesome Tech Events” with Aurelien Clere from Power Platform French Summit.
1 - Clear Focus on Topics and Trends
First things first. In 2024, tech and IT audiences look for specialized content. Instead of broad and generic themes, narrow down your focus to emerging technologies and niche trends. For example, programming conferences can dedicate a stage or two to topics such as Quantum Computing, Web3, or Industry 4.0. This way, you position yourself at the forefront of the tech industry events, attracting a highly engaged audience deeply interested in these topics.
💡 Pro Tip: Social media posts and polls can help you identify the hottest topics your target audience wants to learn about. Read more about using social media for event organizing here.
2 - Create Immersive and Engaging Experiences
Just having good topics isn’t enough, though. The tech audience is looking for more than just sitting through lectures. During your conference, you can engage them with immersive experiences like interactive demos, AR product showcases, hackathons, challenges, or anything else outside the “box”.
Additionally, you don’t have to wait for your event to start to begin engaging with and engaging your audience. A great way to activate your audience already before the event starts is through marketing promotion and influencer campaigns. When I say influencer campaigns, I don’t mean YouTube stars, although they absolutely can help – I’m talking about turning your attendees, speakers, and sponsors into influencers within their communities.
At run.events, we found a perfect solution for this. Using the run.events’ Influencer Marketing module, speakers, sponsors, and attendees can easily share the news about attending or participating in an event. This simplifies your event marketing efforts in multiple ways:
- Easy Sharing: We provide templates and default texts for social media posts, but we encourage writing your own.
- Two-Click Engagement: Sharing your provided templates requires minimal effort for your target group with only two clicks.
- Measurable ROI: Finally, we provide data and analytics to track your ticket sales directly attributable to the campaigns.
The influencer campaigns module is brand new. Our ECS team behind the European Collaboration and European Cloud Summits already saw great results of over 100 tickets sold for ECS and European Cloud Summit via influencer marketing. At a conference this size, run.events essentially pays for itself.
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Even the best-organized events can only be successful if there are enough attendees. run.events doesn't only help you plan and deliver your event; we also provide a powerful toolset to sell tickets, drive registrations, and measure results.
Boost Event Marketing and Increase Registration Numbers3 - Be Community-Driven
Community is everything, as simple as that. Community is such an essential factor of a successful event that it seems like every event on the market uses the word “community” today. However, before you claim you are indeed a community-driven conference, here is a quick checklist:
- Create an inclusive event by inviting the suppressed parts of the tech community. For example, this can be done by openly supporting the underrepresented groups, offering special tickets or discounts, or doing anything else that spotlights the connection between you and your community.
- Give your audience a sense of ownership and ensure a diverse lineup of speakers and topics. This seems needless to say, yet many conferences overlook this part. An eclectic lineup of not just topics and speakers is an absolute must. The tech community is a virtual community with a global audience. Use that to your advantage and embrace the diversity to create an innovative event.
- Communicate with your community through channels such as social media and newsletters. Talk and listen to your audience and use the feedback for future business decisions. This dialog can serve as a great source of information about the latest trends and buzzwords from insiders.
Pro Tip: Leverage your community to vote for the sessions they want to see and shape the agenda accordingly. You can do this in run.events too.
Community is such an essential factor of a successful event that it seems like every event on the market uses the word community today. However, there is a certain effort to build the event community.
What it takes to build an event community?4 - Secure the Best Speakers
Just keep in mind that best most famous. Aurélien Clere, the brain behind the French Summit, emphasizes diversity in speaker selection and content quality. His strategy includes:
- A bilingual focus on French-speaking attendees.
- Balancing new and established speakers.
- Carefully curating topics with a strong emphasis on session categorization.
You want speakers tailored to be the best choice for your event. Sure, you could invite a famous pop star to your event and use their fame to market your conference and drive ticket sales. However, if they have little or nothing to say about your themes and topics, your audience will feel deceived and most likely won’t come back next year. The key point, again, is to listen to your community and bring the best possible speakers they can learn from and leave your event satisfied and happy they learned something new. This is not an easy task, considering all the previous prerequisites, but community dialog and diversity inclusion are your friends here.
Communicating with your speakers can be demanding sometimes, here's how to master it with ease.
How to communicate with event speakers?5 - Personalize the Attendee Journey
Tech event attendees expect a tailored experience. Use an event management software that allows you to recommend sessions based on their interests and past behavior. Push personalized notifications about networking opportunities, upcoming sessions, or product demos. Enable your attendees to create their own personal agendas, communicate and network with other attendees, and provide feedback on the sessions and talks. Your attendees join your event for an experience, so do your best to make that personal experience remarkable.
6 - Build Sponsorship Synergy
When it comes to sponsors, the general rule is to continuously work on building long-lasting partnerships. Just like your community, sponsors are looking for relationships and feelings of satisfaction. Listen to their needs and try to provide ideas and advice on making their presence at your conference noticeable and profitable. After all, that’s what they expect from you as an event organizer.
Something we like to do at ecs.events is to encourage our sponsors to bring different goodies and gadgets such as foosball, photo booths, polling stations, and whatever else will make them stand out in the crowd (as long as it obliges with the venue security rules). We do this because we care about our sponsors just as much as we care about our speakers and attendees who are the lifeblood of our summit.
As sponsors and exhibitors, we attend events to gain leads, expand networks, and boost brand awareness. Event organizers can greatly aid these business goals. Your efforts to ensure we feel respected and welcome directly influence our decision to return. Unfortunately, not all events prioritize this experience.
Dear event organizers, here is what event sponsors and exhibitors expect from you7 - Post-event activities: Measure, Analyze, and Improve
You would expect all these tips to be prior to the event matter. Event organization and event management is a continuous effort. You learn as you grow. That’s why it’s so important to gather and analyze as much feedback and data as possible to identify areas of improvement for your future endeavors. Monitor session attendance, engagement levels, and sponsor satisfaction. Use this data to refine your strategies and continue improving.
Pro Tip: Automate post-event surveys and reward participants with discounts for future events.*
Recap
Crafting a tech event that resonates with your audience in 2024 requires a thoughtful approach and a focus on innovation. By focusing on niche topics, fostering community engagement, prioritizing diverse speakers, and personalizing the attendee experience, organizers can create events that resonate with the tech-savvy audience. Moreover, building strong sponsor relationships, providing immersive experiences, and utilizing data-driven insights are crucial to ensuring the long-term success and growth of tech events. These comprehensive tips and insights will help you elevate your events and contribute to the ever-evolving landscape of technology conferences.