You’ve put a huge amount of effort into making sure that your business event went off without a hitch. But the work doesn’t end there. In fact – your business event is just the start of the journey.

After you’ve succeeded in grabbing people’s attention with your fantastic show of what you can offer them, how do you make sure that you hold on to it? Read on to find out how you can grow your community afterwards!

Plan how you will follow up

With a huge amount of people passing through the doors, each of them has a significant amount of potential to become a part of your community afterwards. But first, you’ll need to make sure you have their information.

So how will you capture their details? Depending on your event, you could take your pick from a range of options – from manually entering in information, to scanning ID badges or using QR codes. 

Start building relationships

To nurture your customer base after an event, you’ll need to reach out and follow up. But don’t necessarily expect them to remember you – if they’ve met dozens of others, a cursory email or message will not mean that much to them.

Instead, give them a memory hook, to get their attention back on you again. An email that mentions where you met, and perhaps a few of the things that you talked about during your conversation will help them to recall who you are – and can set the foundation for a strong, future relationship.

Connect on social media

The immediate nature of social media is perfect for following up on the momentum of your event. Share the best parts of the day – videos and imagery will remind people of what happened – and it’ll also help you connect with those who might have missed your actual event.

Use the timely nature of social media to your advantage, by getting your new community involved straight after it’s over. Ask people to share what they thought, their personal highlights and suggestions.

Share engaging content

Strengthen your ties with your audience by showing them what you’ve got to offer. But this doesn’t mean taking the post-event momentum as an opportunity to move in for the hard sell.

Instead, take advantage of your newfound larger community by sharing valuable and useful content with them. It’s a great chance to share something helpful – a blog post from an interesting site that relates to something they’ve mentioned, for instance, or your own educational materials, such as a tutorial video or online guide.

Announce the next one!

Lastly – you can remind people what a brilliant time they had – by scheduling in your next event! Following up with news of your next date is a fantastic way to encourage people to keep engaging with your brand, and start building a lasting connection with you.

What are your favourite ways to follow up after an event? We’d love to know – share them with us in the comments!