Customer hospitality events are events that a company offers to their clients or prospects to entertain and “dine” them, to establish or nurture relationships. These events are typically centered around some sort of entertainment, such as concerts, sporting events, or high-end dinners.
Clients who host these types of events understand that the way to host a successful customer hospitality event is to truly focus on relationship building. They use this time to step away from the typical sales-heavy lunch and learns or conferences and instead, focus on developing a relationship with their customers and partners. It’s a great opportunity to get to know their customers and partners on a more personal level in a more relaxed atmosphere.
The typical audience depends on the type of event being hosted and who within the organization is hosting the event. But the one commonality is that the invited are almost always the decision-makers. For example, sales representatives usually want to invite the decision-makers they can sell to or they want to invite their decision-maker clients whose relationships are important to them for a continuous partnership. For a partner-focused company whose main goal is building partner relationships, they want to bring in C-level or higher (company owners, CEO, Presidents, etc) to gain interest in creating or building a partnership.
When building the program and deciding who your audience is, it’s also then important to consider the type of event you are hosting to cater to that audience. This is where things get stereotypical. You’ll need to consider the demographics and then build around that. Is your attendee base mostly men or women? Are they a younger audience or older? Are they techy? What is the general interest of your audience?
The biggest budget driver for most customer hospitality events is typically ticket costs, since a lot of customer hospitality events revolve around concerts and sporting events. Because it’s usually the biggest expense, tickets are the first thing you should start sourcing. Sourcing tickets for events can be tricky. If you work with a client who knows 3-6 months in advance the event dates, times, shows, artists, game, etc, you can save exponentially by going directly to the venues and stadiums. Otherwise, your best bet will be working with a ticketing agency. Having an established marketing calendar with events and dates keeps program updates and promotions from being too frequent and pesky, or worse, not seen enough to stay relevant. If possible, have your events planned out early to avoid the fees associated with ticketing agencies. You also may receive additional perks by going direct (VIP access, after-parties, etc).
When your customer hospitality events are culinary events and dinners, there are a different set of expenses that drive the budget. Typically, when hosting a dinner event, clients want to source a 4-5 star restaurant, offer steak and lobster with a premium open bar. Depending on the size of your event, you’re looking at per person rates around $90-100 or buyout rates and room rental rates at $5,000. They may not sound too terribly high, but the expectation is that marketing dollars are less invested in the dinners compared to concerts and sporting events. So $5,000 may already eat up half your budget right there.
Client’s typically face challenges during the planning phase of the event. While they want to invite as many people as possible, they must also keep budget in mind. Every additional person added to the list is $$$ affecting the budget. It takes balancing a lot of variables when deciding how many people, which event, location of tickets, what type of venue, how much food, etc.
Are you ready to plan your customer hospitality event? Or take your existing customer hospitality events to the next level? Brightspot can take you there with its lean, mean, logistics machine, specializing in planning events and closely monitoring your budget. Brightspot is prepared to amplify your event with creative design ideas, audiovisual, theming, and branding.
For the tech-savvy events, Brightspot creates and manages a mobile event app dedicated to your group. The app could help you go paperless for your event, increase attendee engagement, maximize network capabilities, and more.
Brightspot is here to take all of the logistics of planning the customer hospitality event off of your plate. This allows you more dedicated time to focus on content creation, strategies, and networking. Drop us a line, and let’s start thinking up bright ideas!
