A conference offers you an opportunity to build a community around your business or brand. They’ll be hundreds, maybe even thousands of people in attendance.
Building a community creates engagement between members and fosters a sense of belonging, leading to social bonding and establishing new relationships.
Conferences offer businesses and brands social, economic, and cultural benefits, bringing together people from a specific industry with like-minded ideals and beliefs. Learning how to create a community lets you leverage these relationships to further your business interests.
Here are a few tips on how to build a community at a conference.
How Do You Build a Community at a Conference?
Research Your Community
The first step in building a community is identifying attendees interested in your business or brand. Many marketers overlook this aspect of community-building when planning their goals for event outcomes.
You can identify your community members through social media surveys on pages promoting your event. Use statistical data on previous conferences to determine how many people might attend and leverage engagement on social platforms to stir up interest before the day arrives.
Create An Interactive Experience
All successful conferences rely on getting as many people through the doors as possible to create engagement and awareness of businesses, brands, and concepts. Marketers and event hosts should consider their event objectives during planning sessions to maximize the experience.
Making the event interactive by involving the attendees is the best way to foster engagement on the day and capture attention and awareness in our prospective community.
Group classes teaching new skills, device integrations requiring attendee involvement, and activities creating a shared emotional connection between attendees go a long way to building relationships and a community.
Band People Together with Custom T-Shirts
Communities create a sense of belonging that attracts new members. One of the best methods for drawing people into a community is through creating custom t-shirts and handing them out to community members.
Choose designs and colors that attract attention and get attendees curious about what’s happening around them at the conference. The T-shirt acts as a symbol of community, inspiring people to take action and join to receive a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves.
Let People Connect Pre-Event
The work involved with building a community at your event starts long before the day arrives. We’ve already discussed the importance of identifying your community through social channels.
You can leverage these same channels to get people excited about attending and participating in your conference before you open the doors to the event.
Create a Facebook group promoting the conference, and start a Twitter thread. These platforms allow for attendee engagement, stirring up excitement and participation.
Run a Conference Worth Building a Community Around
Building a community around a conference that offers nothing to the attendee is challenging. Regardless of how hard you try to foster engagement, if it’s not worth sticking around, the participants won’t engage, and they leave.
Instead of creating the concept and following it up with obsessing about how to build a community, focus on designing a conference theme to thrill attendees.
Retro Shirtz Custom Bulk T-Shirts Printing near Regency inside Westroads Mall in Omaha
At Retro Shirtz we understand the importance of logo design. So we provide free graphic design, including free logo design with all standard custom shirt orders.
Our free graphic design services include:
- suggesting and implementing fonts
- changing the colors and layout of the fonts, and our team’s excellent skills at creating custom image assets.