If your event doesn’t speak to people on an emotional level, it’ll fail to create buzz, let alone building a community.

So before you rent training room or rent classroom for your next event, take the time to create your true fans. Once you have a few hundred followers fired up for your next event, now you simply need to give them a platform to connect and interact.

That’s it. You now have an active community doing the marketing for you. And guess what! It’s free. In an earlier article, we’ve already shared some ideas, but here are some more tips for building your event community.

1. Involve your attendees

When people actively participate in something, they own it. Here’s an example. If your attendees work with you from the planning phase of your event, they’ll feel more connected to your cause. Your job is to find a way to involve them. For instance, you can crowd-source the event idea and structure. Encourage your attendees to take part in the event design. Allow them to come up with topic ideas and program structure. That way, you can involve your attendees and give them a sense of community.

2. Bring in influencers

Once build an audience, you should then organize pre-event meet-ups and invite your industry experts to those meetings. The location of these meetings plays a major role in their success. So make sure you choose a good location. If you rent training room for the purpose, make sure the room has enough space and sitting capacity for your community members.

3. Organize online sessions

If you think it’s not possible to organize your pre and post-event meet-ups in a physical location, you can go online. For instance, you can have your influencers go live on Facebook and connect them with your audience. Another good idea would be organizing webinars.