Kyrah Howell is the Marketing Coordinator at Events 720, innovative exhibition suppliers in Australia. She is a recent communications graduate navigating the exciting world of events and expos. Alongside full marketing duties, she is also studying a master of marketing communication at the University of Melbourne. You can follow her work on the Events 720 blog and her LinkedIn.
Ravi Chalaka is the CMO of Jifflenow, and a marketing and business development expert who creates and executes business strategies, generating demand and raising brand/product awareness in competitive markets. As VP of Marketing at both large and small technology companies, Ravi built strong teams and brands and enabled faster revenue growth for a wide range of solutions based on Big Data, SaaS, AI and IoT software, HCI, SAN, NAS.
Steve Markman is the Founder and President of Markman Speaker Management, a full-service speaker agency established in 1994 with a Speakers Bureau division used internationally by associations, companies, non-profit organizations and colleges and universities. Steve has more than 30 years of experience in the conference and speaker business.
Edward Byers operates the website Meeting Protocol. He has more than 15 years of experience working in corporate and special events, including two Olympic Games, the Special Olympics, incentives and not-for-profits.
This is how to create attendee personas for events.
We will review:
• What are personas?
• Why do you need attendee personas?
• How do you start creating personas?
• How do you refine these personas?
• And where do you utilize attendee personas?
What are attendee personas?
While other industries focus on buyer personas, the live events industry is focused on those who consume experiences – attendees.
Our jobs as event professionals is to design experiences that meet stakeholder goals of changing behaviors of the different types of attendees who will be participating in the event.
In order to do that, we have to understand who is attending our events.
Personas are avatars that represent a number of different people lumped together based on their behaviors.
Now, this is different than what Seth Godin would call Tribes.
Tribes have a hierarchy, leadership, and the person themselves self-identifies as a member of this group. For example, association membership.
Personas are not that. They are created by an organization, internally.
You usually don’t know the persona that an organization has classified you into.
The goal is to put people with similar traits together in order to have a deeper understanding of them and how to communicate with them.
PSAV is known by many planners as the in-house or preferred audio-visual provider at leading venues across the nation. In fact, PSAV has a presence in nearly 1,600 locations within 10 different countries. The production, creative, technology and staging services company was acquired by investment firm Blackstone in August 2018 and will soon become even larger with the acquisition of Encore Event Technologies.
