If you’re clicking around on our blog, there is a high probability that corporate events are relevant to your interests. But if you’re a novice in the field who needs more details–or a professional who’s familiar with corporate events but never put one on–or even an experienced hand looking to scale up your corporate events and adapt to the new, more virtual world–we offer this article as a guide.
Jump to:
- What Are Corporate Events?
- Types of corporate events
- Ideas for your next corporate event
- How to plan a corporate event from scratch
- Consider hiring an event agency
- How to select a corporate events platform
- How to market a corporate event
- Kaltura corporate events platform
- Final Thoughts
What Are Corporate Events?
Corporate events are events that are sponsored by a company, usually focusing on the company’s employees or clients. They are usually an effective way for companies to engage with customers and employees and can come in many varieties and with many purposes.
A memorable corporate event for employees can be both fun and informative and give a boost to employee morale while also providing an opportunity for relationship- and team building. Similarly, corporate events focused outward at customers or the general public will build awareness and buzz around your brand, provide valuable information for customers, and provide opportunities for building lasting relationships that can thrive.
Types of corporate events
The primary distinction to be conscious of is that certain types of events happen inside the company, and other types of events are intended to be customer- or client-facing and have an external focus.
Types of corporate events may include:
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- Encouraging networking and collaboration between employees and different areas of the company; or between customers with each other and with your business or brand.
- Motivating employees and rewarding them for their work.
- Educating employees or the public, particularly for concepts promoted by your business or organization.
- Marking organizational change within your company.
- Celebrating important milestones with employees or your client/customer base (or both!)
We’ll put some extra emphasis here on employee-oriented corporate events as employees are always your most important resource, and events are a fantastic way to reward your employees and make them feel valued within your organization.
However, public-facing events such as trade shows, product launches, and client appreciation events can be the “meat and potatoes” of many companies’ event strategies and are the types of things many people think of when referring to “corporate events.” Don’t neglect a public-facing event strategy, while they provide specific sets of challenges in planning and execution, they can also provide real benefits to your business and brand.
Ideas for your next corporate event
Regardless of whether you’re looking to boost morale or boost brand awareness, you might need a prompt toward a type of corporate event to organize. Any of the following are tried and true strategies, so consider them for further exploration.
Internally focused events might include:
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- Team building activities
- Appreciation ceremonies
- Board or shareholder meetings
Externally-focused corporate events encompass such activities as:
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- Conferences
- Product launches
- Trade shows
- Company milestones
- Awards shows
How to plan a corporate event from scratch
There are a few main points to putting together a corporate event, whether it’s internal or external, virtual or in-person. Here’s a quick guide to the main stages in the life of a corporate event, and your objectives at each stage.
Planning
This first stage of putting together a corporate event is neglected or overlooked at your own risk! Much of the event’s success on the day will be contingent on setting yourself up to succeed.
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- Understand your objectives: Even if the point of the event is “have fun and boost employee morale” you have to have a solid grasp going in so you can plan accordingly and have a metric for success.
- Create an Event Plan: Make sure to create a brief event plan that outlines the most important information and communicates the big picture. Your plan should detail
- Type of event (Conference, Employee Activity, internal vs. external focus, etc.). Will this be an in-person or virtual event?
- Budget
- Location
- Important guests and speculated attendance size
- Create a Schedule: Both for WHEN your event is going to happen, to set clear deadlines, and also a draft schedule of how things will go on the event day.
- Structure: While it’s not always important to have a complex, hierarchical team structure, at least establish responsibilities clearly and define who has the last word on issues relating to the event. Everybody needs to know where the buck stops!
- Event promotion: Whether focusing on employees or customers, make sure your target audience is aware of the event happening!
During
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- Be prepared to remain flexible: Everyone might have to wear multiple hats in planning and especially on the event day. Unless a task has to be highly specialized, everyone should be ready to pitch in where needed.
- Encourage Participation: Engagement will make your event a success, so work on creating an exciting event where participants can have some fun. Make sure attendees aren’t feeling left out.Also if it’s an external event, remember to keep your marketing effort rolling while the corporate event is happening! Social media output will stir up interest and you might gain added participants (if that can work for your event) or attract interest for the next.
After
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- Follow-Ups: “Remember to follow up” is the name of the game post-event. Having an after-event strategy is often overlooked. Whether you’ve put on an inward- or outward-facing corporate event, survey your attendees to find out what worked and what didn’t. If your participants are customers, you can use follow-ups to establish a longer-term relationship.
Consider hiring an event agency
Occasionally, there are things best left to professionals, and an agency can give you a higher level of professional service than you might be able to “wing” on your own. Or perhaps you’re putting on a very large event, and there are certain areas it would help to delegate out to reliable hands.
For a lot of corporate events, professional corporate event planners can be an excellent choice. They’ll be bringing in years of prior experience and awareness of obstacles that can come up during event planning and execution. When working with corporate event planning professionals, they’ve likely already established a list of vetted vendor partners and other teams they can bring in to get the job done. Agencies and corporate event planning specialists will also have a better ability to control quality, costs, and timelines, and offer extensive knowledge of the latest trends, newest venues and virtual options, budgeting secrets, and other details you may not yet have mastered.
How to select a corporate events platform
As we’ve pointed out elsewhere, if you go virtual for your corporate event, your choice of event platform will have a huge impact. Selecting an event platform is a serious consideration, so clicking through for a closer look is recommended. To lay it out in broad strokes, though, your foremost considerations are making sure the event platform comes equipped with the type of features best suited to your event and can fit within your budget.
How to market a corporate event
Your marketing will hinge on whether your event is internally-focused or externally-focused. The good news is that internal events are generally a snap; you’ll be pitching to the people you already see day-to-day over familiar channels! Just make sure your promotion is clear, engaging, and gives everyone all the necessary details. For externally-focused events, it will be more of a concentrated effort. We’ve covered some of this elsewhere and encourage taking a deeper dive. As a broad overview, you’ll be well served by looking at the three phases of the corporate event as we’ve outlined above (planning, during, after) and tying your marketing strategies to each phase.
Kaltura corporate events platform
Kaltura Events is an excellent choice when your events lean into virtual or hybrid! We’re fully featured to help your virtual or hybrid corporate events through the planning stages into execution and follow-ups. We want to make sure all your events can be simple to create and execute so everything feels on-brand and like nothing less than a full effort.
While in the planning and setup stages, you can take advantage of our agenda-building capabilities as well as fully customizable landing pages and preset event templates. Our templates have robust features for individualized modification and are intended for individualized branding, as well as making it possible to extend your reach by scaling up and adding tracks and content.
Our 5 basic event templates can be implemented as-is as well as reused or reworked: Interactive Webinar, Town Hall and Large Broadcast, Single Track, Multi-Day Multi-Track, and Flagship Event. “Flagship Events” is particularly geared toward those “Once-a-year and one-of-a-kind” corporate events and comes with the full advantages of our platform as well as excellent production support from our teams.
Additionally, we enable hyper-personalization for all attendees, including personalized agendas, selecting topics of interest during registration to content recommendations, customizable layouts, personal media collections, and other options to significantly individualize any digital events experience.
Finally, we also feature out-of-the-box integrations as a modular framework for your SaaS tools including conferencing clients, marketing automation platforms, and data analytics. Marketing automation features in particular empower your event to create personalized, customized, and automated live marketing that puts you on track for follow-up campaigns. We hope to be able to be your platform of choice in the virtual corporate event realm.
Final Thoughts
Stay creative, organized, and innovative while planning your corporate event and whatever the goals, you are more likely to come out on top. Remember to take care in your choice of physical venue, or virtual event platform, and make sure that your first step is a clear roadmap to get you to event day. We hope this post has illustrated how to get your process started and proves a helpful guide on your way to many successful corporate events yet to come.
