The idea of strategic meetings management has been around for more than 20 years, but it has lately evolved.
In the current digital era, you have the chance to assume a far more strategic role inside your company as an event planner. The days of merely organizing venues, catering, and administrative responsibilities are long gone.
You must adjust to new technologies that enable highly curated, customized interactions at each touchpoint along the attendee journey if you want to remain relevant. You may provide tailored material that motivates action and have a comprehensive understanding of your attendance by utilizing data and analytics.
In order to succeed professionally and in business, one must embrace this new era of insight-driven events, which has given rise to the position of strategic meetings management professional. You have the opportunity to make your company’s events a vital avenue for engaging customers if you have the correct attitude and skill set. Now is the moment to organize strategic meetings.
Strategic Meetings Management: What Is It?
The practice of coordinating your organization’s meetings and events with important business goals and strategies is known as strategic meetings management, or SMM.
In order to achieve quantifiable business objectives that are in line with the organization’s strategic goals and vision, as well as to provide value in the form of quantitative savings, risk mitigation, and service quality, the GBTA Global Business Travel Association developed the concept, which is defined as a disciplined approach to managing enterprise-wide meeting and event activities, processes, suppliers, and data.
Taking a comprehensive perspective to how meetings and events can produce business outcomes is what it means to be an event planner using a strategic meetings management methodology. Through strategic meetings and events, you work with internal stakeholders to identify the best way to accomplish corporate goals rather than planning alone.
The Development Of Programs For Strategic Meetings Management
Programs for managing strategic meetings have changed dramatically in the past ten years. Modern programs today highlight the strategic value that business meetings and events offer to firms, whereas earlier programs were mainly concerned with cost reductions and compliance.
The Program For Modern Strategic Meetings Management
Programs for managing strategic meetings today are integrated, data-driven endeavors that match important company goals and objectives with business gatherings and events. Through thorough reporting and analytics, they give stakeholders insight into how meetings and events affect business outcomes.
These days, omnichannel marketing initiatives are also strongly related to them. To improve the event experience and increase marketing personalization across channels, they make use of attendee data and insights. This all-encompassing strategy increases program success overall, sponsor and exhibitor participation, and event attendance.
Successful programs also include a great deal of teamwork. To create a common vision for meetings and events, they bring together stakeholders from all departments inside the company, such as executive leadership, product development, marketing, and sales. To maximize the impact of an event, cross-functional teams collaborate to create KPIs, collect information and insights, and make strategic decisions.
The strategic meetings management program of today has advanced significantly. A seat at the omnichannel table and a say in important business decisions are now provided by this integrated, data-driven, and cooperative effort. When implemented properly, these initiatives give businesses a competitive edge that boosts revenue, client loyalty, and expansion.
The Advantages Of Managing Strategic Meetings
Organizations can benefit greatly from strategic meeting management. You can do the following by organizing your meetings and events strategically and holistically:
Demonstrate Event ROI
To demonstrate how your events contribute to business outcomes, monitor key performance indicators. To demonstrate the worth of your events, track metrics like attendance, engagement, sponsor ROI, and sales.
Cut Down On Event Expenses
To maximize your event budget, adopt a data-driven strategy. Determine areas of waste and establish budgets for next events by analyzing the expenses of previous events. To cut costs, carefully choose suppliers and bargain over contracts.
Reduce The Risks
To prevent problems, identify and prepare for any possible hazards to your event. Make backup plans and take into account the risks associated with technology, logistics, sponsorship, and attendance. Event success can be ensured by adhering to best practices for risk management.
Enhance The Experience For Customers
Gain a thorough understanding of the requirements and preferences of your guests by using strategic meeting management. Create individualized event experiences according to lifecycle stage, involvement, and interests. To boost customer happiness and loyalty, provide a smooth experience across all platforms.
Boost Productivity
Simplify your procedures by managing meetings strategically. To maximize productivity, centralize data, automate tedious procedures, and integrate systems. Redundant work will be reduced by cross-functional cooperation and strategic alignment among teams.
You can obtain important insights and oversight into your events by putting strategic meetings management into practice. This enables you to maximize expenditure, lower risk, enhance the experience, demonstrate value, and boost productivity. Events will become a major factor in business performance if they are elevated to a strategic level.
Essential Elements Of A Contemporary Program For Strategic Meetings Management
A strategic meetings management program must include a number of crucial elements in order to be seated at the omnichannel table.
Create a governance model with distinct roles and duties first. Determine important stakeholders from sales, marketing, and finance to offer strategic direction, and choose a head of meetings and events to oversee the program.
Second, put in place a technology solution to manage events and meetings. Planning, registration, mobile event apps, and cross-channel reporting are all made easy with an end-to-end event platform. To maximize your events portfolio, it offers a single source of truth for all event data and analytics.
Third, create standard operating procedures to ensure that your event program is compliant and consistent. This covers guidelines for risk management, accessibility, sustainability, and obtaining clearances. Standardized procedures also make it easier to share knowledge and collaborate across functional boundaries.
Fourth, concentrate on making decisions based on evidence. Better decisions on meeting locations, formats, and content are influenced by strong reporting and analytics on key performance factors such as attendance, revenue, cost savings, and customer satisfaction ratings. Data also reveals ways to enhance the experience of attendees through trip mapping and customisation.
Lastly, offer continuing instruction and training. Your team will be equipped to improve your strategic meetings management program with ongoing learning opportunities on new technologies, virtual and hybrid meeting design, risk and compliance management, and emerging trends in the meetings sector.
You may position your meetings and events to serve as a strategic lever for accomplishing important business objectives by putting these crucial elements into practice. You acquire insightful knowledge to improve marketing tactics, foster client loyalty, and spur expansion. You gain a place at the omnichannel table, to put it briefly.
Present Your Case For Investing
Provide a business case that demonstrates the beneficial effects that strategic meetings management can have on profitability, customer satisfaction, and revenue. For instance, demonstrate how expenditures can be greatly decreased by combining unnecessary meetings or by utilizing virtual and hybrid meeting formats. Describe how gathering comprehensive guest information and input supports data-driven decision-making and helps to develop individualized experiences. To prove the worth of events, figure out the possible return on investment.
Identify the most important performance metrics. Establish metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in collaboration with leadership to gauge the effectiveness of your strategic meetings management program. Cost per lead, customer satisfaction ratings, meeting revenue, or the proportion of meetings that accomplish important goals are a few examples of this. Establish benchmarks to monitor development and make data-driven adjustments.
Connect With The Marketing Technology Stack
To find out how strategic meetings management solutions can work with current platforms like business intelligence dashboards, marketing automation tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, assess your marketing technology stack. Numerous strategic meetings management solutions may be directly integrated into tech stacks thanks to APIs and open architectures, allowing for smooth data flow and single sign-on experiences for participants.
Ongoing Optimization
Consider managing strategic meetings as a continuous process rather than a one-time event. To find areas for improvement, routinely examine omnichannel performance, attendee feedback, and KPIs and metrics. Update and modify your application gradually, obtaining additional resources and tools as required. Hold yearly stakeholder meetings to review priorities and make sure that management, marketing, and business objectives are all in line with strategy meetings.
You can establish a strong SMM program and take your place at the omnichannel table by securing leadership support, establishing KPIs, integrating with marketing technology, and engaging in continuous optimization.
Savings On Expenses
Through resource optimization and strategic planning, strategic meetings management assists businesses in cutting down on meeting and event expenses. Professionals can figure out how to reach goals more effectively by looking at past data. They find ways to reduce unnecessary expenses without sacrificing the quality of their encounters.
Data-Based Perspectives
Analytics are used in strategic meetings management to obtain useful information about meeting effectiveness and participant participation. Professionals may provide leadership with evidence-based suggestions on how to enhance next meetings when they have access to thorough data. Leadership will understand how crucial this type of event management is to the success of the company when data shows a definite return on investment.
Mitigation Of Risk
Budget, brand, and compliance risks are prevalent in meetings and events. By using meticulous planning and best practices for risk management, strategic meetings management assists in identifying and proactively addressing these risks. This kind of event management demonstrates its worth in preserving the company’s financial performance and reputation by protecting it from possible problems.
Enhancement Of Brands
By creating memorable and impactful meeting experiences, strategic meetings management improves brand perception. Strategically planned meetings and events can be an effective way to create buzz, educate attendance, and foster brand loyalty. Professionals in strategic meetings management are skilled in organizing memorable events that further brand goals.
Professionals must exhibit a thorough comprehension of how their work serves the firm in order to be granted a place at the omnichannel table. Strategic meetings management demonstrates its strategic value and establishes itself as a major force behind corporate success by cutting expenses, revealing data-driven insights, minimizing risks, and enhancing the brand. Event planners can influence meeting strategy and resources to make an even bigger impact by having a seat at the table.
Elevate The Management Of Strategic Meetings
Strategic meeting management has become crucial to succeed in a world where there are more opportunities to connect than ever before. It is your responsibility as an event planner to make sure that your events are incorporated into the entire customer experience across all platforms.