The Science Behind Amazing Events

As an event organizer, your top priority is to provide the best experience for attendees. So, you spend time and resources developing and adding features to make a memorable event.

However, even after putting in such effort and organizing arguably the best event on paper, the attendance may still be low. 

If so, you're likely wondering what it takes to get people to attend your events. Unfortunately, as with many other event organizers, you're making a critical mistake, assuming that a great product will automatically attract your target attendees. Sadly, that's not the case.

This is where event psychology comes into play. It involves understanding the behaviors of your target audience and their perception of your event and using this insight to increase attendance. Event psychology features elements of sociology, psychology, and neuroscience to make events more successful.

While event psychology is a relatively new field, it's proving to be an invaluable asset for event organizers. 

Read on to learn about event psychology strategies you can use to attract more attendees.

1. Gamification

Human beings are competitive by nature. This is why gamification is a simple yet ingenious way of increasing event attendance. Event gamification is the incorporation of game mechanics to offer unique and engaging event experiences. 

While you may not know it, it's likely that you've already gamified an event without realizing it. It involves using game principles like points, goals, and leaderboards. Doing so encourages attendees to participate in activities and solve challenges, enhancing event engagement. 

Beyond the fun of play, event gamification offers numerous benefits. They include:

• It encourages event attendance and participation, allowing attendees to connect with your event
• It serves as a great ice breaker to help attendees relax and enjoy the event
• It gives you insight into how and why attendees react to certain events for retargeting
• Turns events into personalized experiences
• Strengthens your relationship with participants
• Encourages collaboration and social sharing

How to Apply Gamification at Your Next Event

Now that you know how gamification can enhance event success, it's important to know how to get the most out of it.

Know Your Goals

Your choice of event game will have a huge impact on whether you reach your goals. So, before you choose the games, identify the specific goals for the event. Depending on your event, your goals may be:

• Boosting engagement and interaction among organizers and participants
• Creating shareable content that participants will share on social media or among themselves
• Create new assets for sponsorship activation

Pick the Right Goals 

Choosing the right game for your event goes beyond the game itself. You need to adjust it depending on the size, duration, and the attendees for the event. As such, you need to consider:

• The number of challenges sufficient for the event
• If the game will run for a specific period or the entirety of the event
• Whether you have sufficient games to maintain the excitement

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Unlike one-off events, you need to be very strategic when choosing games for long and regular occurring events. Change the games with each event or tweak key elements to introduce unexpected twists. This way, attendees can be sure of a new and engaging experience with each event. 

Superevent has a comprehensive gamification feature that allows you to add some excitement to your events. For example, you can place QR codes at specific points during the event for which users earn points for scanning them to rank high on the leaderboards. More importantly, Superevent's gamification feature enables you to build games that suit your particular needs. 

Find Appropriate Prizes

The goal of competing is to win. However, there must be a worthwhile reward for participants to look forward to winning. In this regard, there are different ways to incentivize your events, such as medals, gift cards, and even recognition at the event.

With Superevent, it'll be easy to collect data on the participant's performance and a leaderboard to track it and determine winners. 

Promote the Game

Now that you have the perfect game for your attendees, it's time to use it to increase attendance and participation. Incorporate details about the game and rewards for winners on the event website and app. Follow this by promoting it on social media before and during the event.

2. Herd Behavior

Despite being intellectual and holding independent opinions, people are highly susceptible to herd mentality. This refers to the tendency for people's behaviors to align with those of their group. Essentially, this means that attendance and participation during your event may not be due to its merits or demerits but rather how the collective views it.

The good thing with herd mentality is that you can shape it to suit your needs. Some of the steps you can take to do this and increase engagement include:

• Involve the attendees in the creation of the event
• Ensure the event offers a lot of value to participants
• Incentivize attendance
• Develop unique brand experiences
• Use post-event brand engagement

If used wisely, herd mentality can significantly impact event attendance and performance. However, make sure your efforts are geared towards creating a positive perception of the event. In so doing, it'll not be a question of whether participants want to attend but rather if they can afford to miss.

3. Shared Values

When defining your target attendees, demographics play a key role. However, it should not be the only barometer you use. With many challenges facing the world today, society has become highly value-driven.

This has paved the way for valuegraphics as a key element for marketing events. While demographics describe people based on what they are, valuegraphics group people based on what they stand for. If you can determine their values, you'll know what influences their decision-making. 

Once you determine their values, package your event as a champion for the same. With shared values, your target attendees will be more receptive to your event. 

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This begs the question, how do you determine your attendees' value? Here are some steps you can follow:

• Identify five to ten values among the most common ones that you can align your brand with such as family, financial security, health, environmental sustainability, etc.
• Come up with a list of questions or different surveys to determine which one your target attendees best relates to
• Position your brand as a champion for that value
• Engage your attendees with content relating to the value

Superevent can help with determining and building shared values. It has multiple features that enables you to interact with participants. 

4. Involvement

With each event you organize, it's important that it appeals to your target attendees and offers meaningful value. Traditionally, event planners carry the burden of ideating, designing, and bringing the events to life.

This approach is not ideal as modern consumers have highly specific and diverse interests nowadays. Therefore, while you may have a good concept, it may not be as appealing as you think. So, as you plan for your next event, engage your attendees to find out what they'd like it to feature.

Try and involve them as much as possible as you develop the event concept and content. As you do this, they'll own the event and become more engaged.

Some of the steps you can take to increase involvement include:

• Enquire which topics your attendees would like the event to cover
• Ask them to nominate potential speakers with expertise on chosen topics
• Incorporate their ideas and try to bring on board preferred speakers
• Ask your attendees to share event details on social media

If you want to enhance attendees engagement, there's no better solution than Superevent. Its design revolves around attendees engagement before, during, and after the event. 

5. Make the Registration Process Seamless

Today, even marketing largely takes place online as it's easier and more effective. As such, you should keep in mind that the attention span of online users has been declining over the past two decades. At present, the attention span of a human is only 8 seconds, only a second longer than a goldfish. 

This means that your ads and promotion channels need to capture viewers' attention and get them to act quickly. But, this is only the first hurdle. 

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Once they visit your site to register for the event, everything needs to be seamless. Make sure your site is optimized, and pages load quickly. More importantly, make the registration process straightforward. The last thing you want is churn caused by unnecessary steps and delays.

Some of the measures you can take to simplify registration include:

• Offer multiple payment options- Allow users to pay with their preferred payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, etc.
• Allow group registration- This means that one person can register and pay for colleagues in one go.
• Be mobile-friendly- Ensure that your site is optimized for mobile devices to accommodate all users.
• Keep participants on your site- All aspects of the registration process, especially payment, should take place on your site to avoid unnecessary mistrust.
• Use automated pricing- Depending on the time of registration and other factors, registrants may be eligible for discounts. Such pricing differences should reflect automatically during registration.
• Keep registration short- Only include essential pages and steps in the registration process. Ideally, it should only include the name, contact information, and billing details. If you include any other page, let it come after.

A Solution You Can Count On

There are a lot of things that influence the success of an event. However, they all have a common denominator; human behavior. Therefore, it's important to use a scientific approach to improve outcomes as you plan events. 

Superevent is an event platform designed to enhance your event planning capacity. It has a host of features that allow you to understand your participants better and increase engagement. Book a demo today to find out how we can take your event planning business to the next level.