Could You Be Doing More to Maximize Online Event Creation Opportunities?​

Professional events aren't just about gathering the right people together at a given time and place. Your audiences, product showcases and venues are important, but without the printed marketing collateral to get your message out, they're fairly unproductive. Sadly, most online event creation websites limit you to merely scheduling gatherings, booking conference space and sending invites.To make the most of your online event creation opportunities, you'll need to adopt a more comprehensive approach. Here are some of the pros and cons of typical event creation platforms and ways you might do more with yours.

Why Pay for Third-Party Systems at All?

Handling all of your event creation tasks in-house or manually may seem like the obvious solution. Closer examination, however, quickly reveals why this strategy is ill-advised. Effective third-party systems provide numerous benefits, like giving you the ability to:

• Create events quickly and share information with other organizers,
• Populate invitee lists from existing contacts and other marketing data,
• Oversee resource usage and track budget expenses to optimize event ROI,
• Increase attendance for future events,
• Build better relationships with service providers, such as caterers and hospitality staff,
• Engage attendees via mobile apps and digital content, and
• Manage speakers, booking, itineraries, presenters, venues and check-ins.

Striving for the Event Creation Ideal

The preceding advantages are definitely useful. As you may have noticed, however, they completely fail to address printed marketing materials.Why are printed materials so essential to conferences, meetings, trade shows and other professional gatherings? In short, it's because these events depend on the rapid, clear dissemination of information. For instance, attendees need to know where they're going. While mobile event tools and directory apps are becoming more prevalent, you can't always rely on every single participant being on board with these options. From menus and schedule fliers to basic banners, printed materials are essential to making the best use of multipurpose spaces, directing traffic and keeping everything running smoothly.Flyers and event literature also help organizers. When you need to train venue workers and other support staff quickly, printed documents are a surefire solution.Whether you're running a conference as an impartial host or you're trying to push your brand, you need to drum up interest before you can begin the main event. Advance marketing is a great way to increase attendance, and letting your sponsors know that they can count on visual advertising, such as banners and signage, gives them more incentive to chip in. Printed materials make promotion and information sharing far easier and thus heighten success rates. The real trick lies in finding a third-party system that lets you manage marketing collateral in addition to the event itself.

Maximizing the Reach of Printed Event Materials

Comprehensive event generation tools that also integrate print media asset management aren't impossible to find. They're just extremely rare. Regardless which solution you finally settle on, it ought to incorporate: 

• Multiuser-capable, automatable workflows,
• Printed material design and creation tools,
• Marketing asset management and collaboration systems,
• Per-event marketing collateral customization options,
• Print production capabilities, and
• Complete asset warehousing and delivery.

Remember that these features are in addition to all of the other things you've already come to expect from a typical event management app. The major difference is that these add-ons give you the capability to do everything from one convenient location. Avoid out-of-the-box tools that actually make your work more complicated. For example, if your event creation website is good enough to schedule a conference and book a venue, it should also be smart enough to generate shipping information so that you don't have to mail the signage there yourself. Generic tools are prone to fall short of this comprehensive ideal.

Pay for What You Actually Use

One of the biggest failures of standard event creation options is that they take on overhead like leaky ships take on water. When you purchase a license for a generic event creation app, you're essentially footing the bill for all the widgets the developer spent time programming in. Even if you don't actually use these features, you pay for them. This partially explains the emergence of custom event management tools and the proliferation of software-as-a-service in general. Bespoke options let you pick and choose the features you want so that your event management expenditures generate value.Custom event software is also better suited to your budget requirements. Because it includes the print marketing features you need to actually get the event off the ground successfully, you'll find it easier to implement profitable workflows. In other words, you can pay for what you use and ensure that the money is well spent.

Perfecting an Ideal A-Z Event Creation Solution

It's easy to list the characteristics you think you might prefer in a comprehensive event management software solution. It's not as simple to find them all out in the wild. You need to work with a partner that has the experience to create a customized system that satisfies your requirements even as they evolve. If your event software is truly successful, this won't be the last of the gatherings you hold, so it must be robust enough to keep pace with progress.Why not build something that performs necessary tasks well while still allowing for future expansion? Ensure that you can create events, design and deliver printed marketing materials and use custom metrics to track your ROI gains. Discover what a perfect event creation website looks like, and make your next gathering more successful.  now to learn more.