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The meme of a ‘meeting that should have been an email’ is widespread. Employees everywhere joke and complain about the amount of time wasted in these gatherings. Research has found that employees attend an average of 62 meetings each month, but only find value in about half of them.
However, as any manager knows, meetings also play an important role in keeping teams focused and working together. The key lies in optimizing your events. You want to make the most of your time spent dealing with all gatherings, from planning them to executing them. Strategic meetings management (SMM) is the solution.
Strategic meetings management gives you the framework to organize your meetings and your resources so that you optimize your operations. It can transform not only your internal meetings, but also your conferences and client-facing opportunities.
If you have not used this solution before, read on to discover what you need to know to make this method work for you.
Strategic meetings management provides a defined system of tracking all the information involved in events and your organization. It offers you a strategy and singular place for all the information related to vendors, venues, how you organize gatherings, and data about the success of your past events.
When you have the information at your fingertips, it makes planning your events significantly easier. Let's explore more about the value this system can offer your business.
A strategic meetings management system will make your events significantly more oriented toward your overall business goals. Rather than waste time with different parts of the planning process, such as finding vendors, your information is centralized and easy to access.
You will find that overall, having a central location for all information and procedures related to conferences and meetings will help you save on costs related to hosting events as well as reduce your risk. You will also enjoy a higher degree of control over the process of planning and contracting out parts of the planning process.
Using strategic management within your organization will specifically help you across multiple areas of planning important occasions for your business.
When you specifically look at the financial components, you will find that having all your sources in a single place will help you evaluate vendors, venus, and other expenditures more efficiently. You can compare the different options effectively and have a few options highlighted that your business likes to use for the combination of quality and cost.
Hosting an event requires you to take on a certain degree of risk as you host a variety of people. By bringing together your data related to all your different attendees, vendors, and venues, you can quickly look at all the information and evaluate the risk involved. You will have information that helps you better negotiate contracts with different event partners. You will also have information readily available you can provide your attendees about the risk assumed by attending your event to ensure that you do your due diligence.
When considering the importance of hosting events that align with your business needs and goals, it becomes clear why you want to maintain control over the planning process of the event. With SMM, you can create a centralized source of information about company policies and regulations surrounding event planning. This keeps everything operating effectively.
You will have a centralized source of information about how your past events have gone, whether it was a virtual conference or an in-person meeting. You can use this insight to keep the event planning process smooth. You can foresee different pitfalls you have encountered in the past and how you can avoid them now.
Now that you can see the importance of an effective strategic meetings management program, it is time to go into the different components you want to have in your system.
Your SMM will have a few major components to help your system operate effectively. Each of these components plays an important role in keeping you organized and focused on your goals in the meetings you host.
Your program should include information about how you set up registration or invitations for the events.
Record also how you promote your event. Consider email marketing strategies, SEO, PPC ads, and other strategies you use to attract attention to your coming occasion.
All businesses need to have a methodology that dictates their approval process. This process needs to keep your business in compliance with a variety of governmental regulations as well as industry standards. You will also likely have internal company regulations about allocating expenses and running events. Your program should outline the process for getting different parts of the event approved.
Includes information about how your organization finds vendors and providers for different parts of the events. This should also include information about your favorite vendors and why so that planners can easily access this critical information.
Detail also the process committees or departments at your organization will go through when planning an event. You might consider how you develop the theme and goal for an event as well as how you set the agenda.
Include in your program information about how you track expenses for events and then balance those expenses with the budgets for the different departments.
Data from past meetings and occasions provide valuable insight for the future. Have analytics from your past gatherings readily accessible to guide your decisions. Also, note the type of data you should collect from future events to continue improving this data set. This information makes it easier for you to understand the parts of your event that were the greatest success and where you need to optimize procedures.
Using this type of planning system can help you anytime you want to plan an event or meeting, from small internal conferences to large meetings with attendees flying in from all over the country. Seeing an example of how these strategies can help businesses in different situations can help you start to apply the principles to your own work environment and grasp the benefits of strategic meetings management.
Another common occasion for an event is some type of nationwide conference you want to host. These types of conferences can offer your business tremendous benefits as you build your brand reputation and reach. However, they have a number of potential moving parts that you need to organize and manage correctly.
With strategic meetings management, you can quickly access information about vendors and venues from past large events that you have hosted. You can look at your promotional strategies for getting information about the conference in front of your most interested audience members. You will also have easy access to safety information from past events, helping you quickly distribute it to your attendees, reducing the risk you have to take when hosting an event.
can allow you to discuss important information, such as data for a research report you want to compile. You can use your SMM program to quickly determine the best way to let people know about your targeted activities and set the agenda. The data from past similar meetings can provide insight into what worked well in the past and how to engage your desired target customers again successfully.
One of the most common times you will need to organize an event is if you have an internal meeting among team members from different departments. Learning how to run the meeting more efficiently is key to success with internal events. It will help you get everyone back to their jobs as quickly as possible so you do not waste their time while still accomplishing your goals.
With the data and information in your SMM, you can set an agenda that has been optimized based on past experiences. You can also select the time for the meeting based on data surrounding meetings in the past. Internal meetings often have to work to combat distractions in attendees. More than 75% of participants in one survey reported that they do not pay attention during their meetings. Optimizing the time spent in the meeting can keep everyone on task.
Hosting events and meetings plays an important role in your business growth. They can offer the chance to engage and connect with people from customers to employees. Events can also offer opportunities to welcome a large audience to build your brand reach. In any form they take, these occasions play an important role in business development.
To optimize the potential for these gatherings, strategic meetings management brings together all the information you need, so the process goes smoothly and helps you control costs. By incorporating strategic meetings management (SMM) practices, you can end pointless meetings and make your gatherings more purposeful.
Take advantage of Hubilo's event management platform to elevate the effectiveness and productivity of your meetings. Hubilo offers a comprehensive event management platform that can take your meetings and events - whether virtual, hybrid, or in-person to new heights. With its advanced features and intuitive interface, Hubilo empowers you to create immersive and impactful experiences for your attendees. From seamless event registrations to interactive networking opportunities, Hubilo ensures that every aspect of your meeting is handled efficiently. Request a demo today to learn more about how Hubilo can revolutionize your meetings and events. Our team will guide you through the platform's features and show you firsthand how Hubilo can streamline your event management process and maximize your meeting's potential.
Hubilo is the webinar platform built for marketers that helps you 2X your pipeline. Founded in 2015, Hubilo's powerful engagement features, dedicated client experience team, and custom branding tools have helped create over 12K virtual events & webinars, creating hundreds of millions of minutes of high-engagement experiences and counting. Headquartered in Bengaluru and San Francisco, Hubilo's 200+ employees are dedicated to enabling webinars & virtual events that convert.
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