Client Event Planning 2025: Essential Do’s and Don’ts for a Successful Event

My colleague Katie McGovern, recently wrote about maximizing your ROI this event season to make the most of industry conferences. In that same vein, organizations often host events such as openings, product launches, or annual user conferences. With significant time and capital invested, it’s crucial to maximize event impact across all marketing channels.

Several clients in the enterprise portfolio have tackled these types of events and have learnings on the back of them. We want to share those do’s and don’ts to factor into any 2025 plans in progress.

Top Do’s for Successful Event Planning:

• Integrate a virtual component to enable reporters, influencers, and customers to participate remotely, accessing content in real-time according to their convenience.
• Record sessions, presentations, media tours, etc. – even if your event is an unveiling and it seems difficult to record, consider recording the tour, the media conversation – for splicing and dicing across channels. 
• Consider packaging up materials ahead of the event to offer under embargo or exclusively if you want coverage during the sessions or occurrence. This gives media enough time to prepare and an exclusive quote or insider tip (like an upcoming funding round) sweetens the deal for them. Also, the more obvious point, update your media kit and ensure it has new materials after the event is over, like headshots or photos of the event as media almost always ask for those to include in their pieces.
• Invite media and other key stakeholders to participate. Recently, DataBank unveiled several new DataCenter campuses and invited Josh Saul from Bloomberg, Belle Lin from Wall Street Journal and Mike Duboski, ABC News –  who toured the facility which allowed us to cultivate media relations that paid dividends down the road including coverage in the last four weeks.
• Plan for the longtail or pair the event with a large launch. Sonatype issued its 10th Annual State of Software Supply Chain Report at its annual conference ADDO, allowing presenters and execs the ability to unveil findings that corresponded with their talks. We could use the talks/post-event conversations as additional fodder to earn more interest for their report and ADDO. 
• Connect stakeholders and key targets together. Kayleigh Jones, Senior Account Director attended IFS’s Unleashed this year and heard feedback from Jim O’Donnel and others that they’re best takeaways occur when customers are involved.

Don’ts and Common Mistakes to Avoid:

• Assume media will travel for your event unless you’ve truly built a relationship with them and they know the potential outcome. Even offering to pay for room and board, which seems like a no-brainer yes, these types of interactions could actually violate ethics or terms. So while they may want to attend, they can’t due to the guardrails of their role.
• Bet on the fact your influencers, media, and stakeholders will want to join a live interaction or can fit the timing into their schedule (which is why you should always have post-event round-ups and insights packed up and ready to share). In a recent media AMA with freelancer Cheryl Winokur Munk (contributor to NYT, CNBC and WSJ), she said that she values the insights spawned by these events. And while she likely won’t attend a live session (virtual or not), she welcomes the packaged up info to support pieces she has in the works. 
• Give up if media can’t attend – if your c-suit is willing and able you could recommend a post-event tour visiting target cities like San Francisco, New York, Boston or other key demographics according to priority territories. For example, IFS holds Unleashed and welcomes boots on the ground coverage from influencers, reporters and analysts. While we found bloggers and reporters with nurtured relationships most likely to attend, we received feedback from our top targets that they’d appreciate a desk-side meeting post-event in order to reap the benefits of those cultivated, industry-driving conversations occurring at the event.   
• Pay an arm and a leg for an experience that doesn’t drive value. While air balloons and athletic events are fun and create a networking opportunity, if there isn’t a tie back the experience is just that – an experience that won’t go further. Sometimes, creating a quiet room or breakout area where you offer food, a charging station, coffee, etc. can be what people really need and find it’s a better investment in the long run. 
• Forget to write content during the event. Whether you’re at someone else’s or your own, write key takeaways each day that can then be leveraged across earned and owned channels for additional coverage.

Owned Events are tricky but well worth it, especially if you can exhaust your assets and make each moment work harder for you. Let me know if you have a great tip or trick I missed listing above via hello@sourcecodecomms.com as I’m always eager to learn more!