When you start thinking about planning an event for your organization or affiliated entity, the first thing that comes to mind is how to make the event a success. What are the important elements that must be present to ensure the launch of a distinctive event that achieves its goals?

In recent times, the term "visitor experience" has become popular in the events industry, and the importance of this experience for the event is well known. But let's ask ourselves, how can the visitor experience affect the trajectory and goals of the entire event?

Can the visitor experience control the factors that contribute to the success of the event? What makes a difference between an event that is easy to forget and another event that remains engraved in people's memories?

Visitor experience is defined as all the mental and material stages that guests go through during the event, regardless of their category, whether they are guests, speakers, visitors, participants, and so on. It represents the steps of feeling, journey, places, and various activities.

The concept of visitor experience differs from the concept of visitor journey, where the visitor journey refers to the tangible stages and stations that the visitor goes through, starting from registration to attend the event, reception, passing through the event's activities and events, hospitality, and many others until the end of his journey by leaving the event and then thanking him for his visit and participation in the success of the event, without delving into the mental or emotional elements of the visitor. Therefore, the visitor journey is part of the overall visitor experience with the event.

Elements of Visitor Experience

Below are the 7 essential elements that make up and affect the visitor experience:

Reach: By reach, we mean the ease and possibility of accessing the event, and providing all the useful information and facilities that visitors may need, such as clear directions to the event site, electronic registration, easy access to booking sites and event venues, invitation sending mechanism, and communication with attendees and invitees of different categories.

For example, if you want to attend an entertainment event held in Diriyah, you first need to know more comprehensive details about the event, ease of access to the ticket booking site, responsiveness of the event organizers when sending inquiries, ease of access to the event site, and whether the road is not unpaved or closed, and whether there are visitor transportation parking spots to the event site. 

All these steps certainly have a positive or negative impact on your experience with the event.

Feel:

Events are primarily based on the human element, people's communication and meetings at the event site, so when talking about any event, the impact of feeling on the visitor experience cannot be ignored. Here, the focus is on perception of how each aspect of the event interacts with the visitor's senses.

The mix of visual elements and brand colors, even the nature of the content and communication messages with the audience, all have an impact.

What would you feel when glimpsing the visual identity of the event? When seeing the aesthetic appearances, like the organizers, can you feel the desired atmosphere of the event? For example, if the event is entertainment, can you feel the excitement from the atmosphere?

If the event is cultural and artistic, can you feel the beauty of the details, the paintings around you, the quiet and expressive stage lighting? If the event is sports-related, where is the spirit of the active supporter inside you? All these big and small details affect your feelings and your response to the event.

Care:

Refers to the attention and care given to all the details of serving attendees in their different categories, organization, cooperation, guidance, and smooth responsiveness from the organizing teams towards visitors. This includes applying the protocol of dealing, receiving and hosting VIP visitors, princes, ministers, public figures, celebrities, media personalities, and others.

In addition to implementing all security and safety protocols, precautionary measures at the event site to ensure the safety of visitors.

Enjoy:

The element of enjoyment is applied through the principle of participation, where inclusivity and participation are essential for a successful event. If visitors cannot interact, join, and communicate with the event's atmosphere, they may lose interest entirely. Visitors want to feel appreciated and cared for.

Therefore, we ensure that attendees and participants enjoy all the events and accompanying activities on-site and outside activities, such as the schedule of historical, cultural, and entertainment visits to the Kingdom's landmarks, such as planning an external visit for guests, such as visiting Al-Ula, Diriyah, King Abdullah Financial City, and so on. In addition to providing all means of enjoyment for all participants and attendees.

Connect:

An important element of the visitor experience is providing a common space for communication between attendees to exchange ideas and opinions. For example, in events specializing in innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, the first thing visitors may want is to meet participating creators, entrepreneurs, and startups to learn about new ideas and meet with talented and enthusiastic young people.

Memory:

After the event is over, what will the attendees remember about you? The happy memories and positive atmosphere they experienced during the event. That's why we make sure to create lasting memories in the minds of the attendees during and after the event by paying attention to all the elements of the event, as well as incorporating activities and activations to enhance the happy memories.

For example, a schedule of exceptional trips and accompanying activities, documentation related to the event's atmosphere, photo booths and walls, etc. It becomes difficult to forget the event.

Smell:

Smell can create memories. It shapes images, refreshes emotions and senses, and can make you feel happy, beautiful, excited, refreshed, prepared, and belong. Since the visitor's experience cannot be limited to just attending the event and enjoying the accompanying activities, we recommend paying attention to an element that may be overlooked when planning the visitor's experience - smell.

To complete the unique experience at the event site, we choose suitable scents that reflect the event's atmosphere and give a distinctive smell to the place. We distribute them thoughtfully in indoor and outdoor event spaces to create a unique mental image of the event in the minds of the attendees.

Read More: How to Organize a Successful Conference in 7 Steps

Visitor Experience Evaluation Mechanism

To comprehensively evaluate the visitor experience, all elements of the experience are monitored and subjected to analysis and evaluation.

Here, evaluation is based on the behavior and interaction of visitors, how the event makes them behave? How does the audience respond and what are their reactions to all activities and appearances? How do they talk about the event? This behavior can take several forms.

It could be something as simple as talking about the event with friends and family or on social media. And it can be wearing a piece of clothing with the visual identity logo, for example.

Regardless of the form the visitor's behavior takes, it is often the most important indicator of the strength of the impact.

To be able to evaluate behavior, we must coordinate with all the organizing teams and committees at the event to analyze the reports issued by them, for example, the report of the organizing committees, the report of the security committees, the report of the marketing team, the report of the media team, and so on. After that, monitoring and analysis are carried out, and a final evaluation of the visitor experience is issued.

WOTN for Event Management

There is no doubt that planning a comprehensive visitor experience is exciting, but it may be full of details and implementation plans, so it is essential to choose the right partner to manage and organize the event and build an integrated visitor experience. This is what we strive to provide at WOTN through our work and organization team, starting from the idea to production.

We begin by studying and analyzing the event, defining the scope of work, planning and creativity, building the visitor's experience and journey, construction and execution, operation and logistics, marketing, media coverage, and advertising, until we reach the evaluation and reporting stage to ensure exceptional performance.