People across organizations, especially in marketing plan and attend events and trade shows. Trade shows are a great way to generate demand for your products or services. However, planning and executing a successful event requires considerable effort. There are many tasks ranging from small to large that are required to be managed and executed by several internal and external parties to make the event successful. In order to do that you need one location to collaborate, coordinate, and execute strategies, plus obtain instant access to team members for status and feedback.

Microsoft Teams is a great way to manage event planning.

A successful Trade show planning often requires the following activities:

Define tradeshow objectives

Plan Booth

Identify tradeshow participants

Identify tasks that need to be performed for the tradeshow

Develop tradeshow content

Develop tradeshow demos

Develop tradeshow visual artifacts such as graphics, images, rollups, banners, posters

Create the outreach plan for the event to notify attendees

Finalize giveaways

Finalize raffle plans and giveaway

Post event follow up plan with the leads

Microsoft Teams can be used to do all annual corporate events in a single Teams area or separate Teams can be used for each event. There is no one right answer. It depends on

Nature of the event

How departments collaborate internally

Number of regions involved

Involvement of Internal and / or external users

Here’s a step by step guide to manage marketing event planning using Teams in a way that fosters teamwork, streamlines effort and replicates success for future events. In this blog, I am using the Microsoft Ignite event that my company participates in.

Create a team

Request Support to create a team or if your company permits to create team yourself, go ahead and create

Team name: EXT – Ignite Event Planning 2019

Modify team settings

Upload a team picture

Modify member permissions

Add members to the team

Create Channels

Create channels based on how the work needs to be performed

This is one way to create the team and its channels (By event)

General Channel

The general channel is a default channel that gets created when a team is created. Below are some characteristics of the channel: This channel cannot be removed or renamed

This channel can be used for general dialogs and discussions about the event. Any topic specific conversation can be done in the appropriate channel’s conversation tab

You can perform the following actions on the channel:

Rename the Wiki tab to Instructions and add instructions to the Wiki about the purpose of this team

Add a Planner that allows you to manage the tasks for the event planning

Event Planning Channel

This channel can be used to manage the assets related to event planning. Below is a sample list of assets that can be managed in the channel:

PPT outlining the strategy for the event

Budget spreadsheet for the event

List of attendees for the event

Third party companies that we will use for the event

Following additional actions can be taken on the channel to assist with the work:

Add a link to the event website for easy access

Add a link to the marketing Planner that was created in the general channel for easy access

Event Content and Assets

This channel is used to build the marketing collateral for the event. Below is a sample list of assets that can be created:

Flyers

Banners

Blogs

Posters

Logos

All conversations around the assets can be done in the conversation tab of this channel.

One can also remove this channel and consolidate this work with one of the other channels, but it really depends on the nature of collaboration to determine if one or more channels will be needed for this work.

Event Outreach

This channel is used to develop event outreach strategy for the event. Below is a sample list of assets that can be created:

Add Social strategy documents

Add twitter messages that are planned to be posted

Add LinkedIn messages that are planned to be posted

Add Facebook messages that are planned to be posted

All conversations around Social Media planning occurs in the conversation tab of this channel

In addition, different groups of people are involved in different parts of the process, so Teams channel can be leveraged to make sure the right audience is getting the right message.

Giveaways

This channel is used to build giveaway program for the event. Below is a sample list of assets that can be created:

Add links to external purchases

Converse around your raffle, giveaway planning

Finalize the costs to roll up into the budget

Conclusion