35% of event attendees are now Millennials. This percentage is slowly increasing, so it’s more important than ever to ensure that your events cater to their needs. Your aim should be to create better experiences, ensure maximum enjoyment, and generate sharing momentum from each event.
Establishing who your market is and designing your event to cater to those most prominent at your event can be a challenge. However, it’s more than likely going to be an increasing amount of millennials as more and more of this generation enters the working world.
So how do we appeal to them enough to ensure a successful event?
Our starting point is to look at what has framed the existence and perspectives of millennials. This is a mix of rapid technological advancements and change, a highly competitive job market, a touch of various global recessions and a drastically changing workplace structure. Superficially, this doesn’t reveal much, but we delved deeper and considered some research done on what millennials value most. Our key conclusions are:
- They value unique and engaging experiences.
- Events that add tangible value and are tailored to the guest experiencing them, are definitely favoured.
- They want to share the event online, so it must be share-worthy.
- They are more willing to travel than previous generations, and see great value in face-to-face meetings.
All the above points are changing the events industry, and here’s how you can capture that audience:
Create a personalised event agenda where attendees can see the itinerary, but then add their pertinent items to their own calendars. The event could have a fluid schedule with a variety of activities and niche parallel sessions so attendees can pick and choose the sessions they want to go to. This will ensure more engagement and excitement.
Guests enjoy when meetings have a purpose, a conclusion, a debate, and some sort of way forward as opposed to simply having a meeting for the sake of it. This is applicable to one-on-one meetings where networking tools can bring individuals together easily via their event apps. It’s also important for event organisers to keep in mind for the sessions that fill up the event agenda.
Allow for live stream attendance at events – even though millennials do understand the value of face-to-face contact, live streaming must be an option (a potentially paid for option), so people can attend the event remotely and gain as much value as possible. This can be done through our Mobile Event app, so you can introduce this to your events straight away.
Millennials form part of a large sharing community, and though they will share for different reasons, it makes it easier to open the social media floodgates when there are engaging sessions, speakers, and social-media-worthy talking points throughout your event. Of course, you will also have to include some photo opportunities. By concentrating on this, you will be encouraging guests to create momentum to boost current and future events.
Event technology has become non-negotiable. Event planners are required to plan more events more frequently, and guests are using their event apps more religiously for all event information. The Flock Eventing Platform is one that caters to both the event planner and the guest with its user-friendly backend for event planners, and the mobile app for guests with any device. Get in touch for a demo or get a quote on your next event.