The Hubb team flew down to sunny Newport Beach earlier this week to attend the CEMA (Corporate Event Marketing Association) Summit. The annual CEMA Summit is an opportunity for corporate event marketers and suppliers to gather for two days of education, engagement and connections. We attended the sessions and gathered all the best content, so that you too can stay in the know on the latest event marketing trends without leaving your desk.

Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not Like You

Providing a great customer experience is not just the right thing to do, it also makes smart, strategic business sense. Kelly McDonald, president of McDonald Marketing, gave us some valuable ways to delight and engage your customers. Here are five tips from Kelly:

• Figure out and market your benefits (don’t just list features!).
• Talk to the people on the floor or on the phone, who are in direct contact with customer’s on a daily basis. They can give you the real scoop.
• Identify the real pain points your customers experience and work to resolve them.
• Customization is key! Explore ways to customize your product or service.
• Use your social media platforms to educate customers, and encourage them to share.

Real Time Event Marketing

Marketing and PR guru David Meerman Scott shared some valuable insights on incorporating real-time marketing into your corporate event marketing plans. The #1 insight for us: don’t be afraid to share! How can you make everything you do at an event sharable?

• Ask your speakers to make a quick video about their presentation at your event and post it to their social networks.
• Post where your audience hangs out, including under-utilized networks like Snapchat and Instagram.
• Encourage attendees to share photos and videos using the event hashtag.
• Provide content that educates, informs and entertains (not sells!). These are the types of things people will want to share.

Want more? Get our downloadable guide to event marketing!

The Art of Storytelling

We all know content is king, but how do we make good content that people want to read and share? By telling a story, of course! Jim Spellos, President of Meeting U and one of our 12 Essential #eventprofs to Follow on Twitter, provides some great advice on how to create a compelling story.

• Ask yourself, in only six words, what is your event story? Can you then shorten that story to only four words?
• Be ready to tell the story that is relevant right now. How can you insert your story into a larger drama unfolding the in the world?
• Look to other industries for inspiration. What are they doing that might work in the event space?
• Create sharable content (Video! Video! Video!).

Your Digital Event Assistant

Hubb's own Josh Vande Krol  broke down the hundreds of hours and thousands of emails required to coordinate with your speakers and build your conference schedule. He then presented ways that corporate event marketers can save a TON of time and reduce human errors through the power of automation.

• What if you could automate the majority of speaker emails (accepts, declines, requests for info, reminders, etc)?
• How about building a workflow to track the approval process of your presentations?
• Publishing all your content from a single location out to your event website, mobile app and digital signage?

Pretty cool, right? Learn more about how Hubb helps meeting managers:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See how Hubb can help your organization; reach out for a demo.