If you're in the events industry, working as an events planner or venue manager, you'll be keen to always remain competitive, to gain and maintain an edge upon other venues in your region, if you can. Keeping your finger on the pulse of emerging live performance venue technology can be essential in helping you to do that. Attracting regular customers, and engendering loyalty towards your venue amongst them, can be pivotal in reaching (or even exceeding) revenue targets each year. But the public can be fickle. If they discover that another venue in their region offers a better customer experience — with all the very latest in venue technology — they will inevitably make a switch.
It's not just about individual consumers. Companies and organisations may also make up your customer base, particularly if you own or manage a conference center, auditorium or other types of premises designed to host corporate events, seminars and the like. Organizations will also have high expectations when it comes to venue technology. What's more, to uphold their reputation for being forward-thinking market leaders, businesses may feel it important for their brand to be associated with the most 'teched-up' venues, to help retain clients, and attract new ones, whilst simultaneously keeping hold of staff. The best talent always wants to work at the best company, after all.
How do independent event planners select venues?
Think about the types of frustrations event planners commonly have. What snags and barriers keep cropping up? What frequently hampers them in their efforts to realise their innovative event designs? What specific restrictions at venues are creating this sometimes maddening, dissatisfaction?
Well, great AV (Audio Visual) is a must-include, as is Wi-Fi that's fast, reliable and free. Equally impressive staging, with easily changeable backdrops, must also be a given. If you can provide a choice of microphones and changeable lighting, event planners will love you for it. Large screens for projections, charging stations, reliable air con and heating, dedicated AV technicians, awesome catering and so on. Offer all that and you're well on your way to being the venue that event planners all scramble to book up. Add superb seating to that, and you've got a venue to die for.
Superb seating is all about flexibility. Why? Because seating system flexibility is the key to venue versatility. And versatility usually results in boosted revenue. Opening up floor space fast can be made easy, thanks to some of the fantastic seating system innovations available these days. As well as being tailored at design stage to perfectly complement a particular venue's design theme, some seating systems can be set up in several configurations, and can be entirely closed up and wheeled away from a hall. Simply storing the stand in another area until you need it again.
Automated systems (and by this, we mean stages as well as seating) take the stress and strain out of reconfiguring venue layouts, and the controls are easy to use. Even more impressive, taking the tech onto the stage, a self-lifting stage can be perfectly integrated into the floor of a hall!
It's Not Just About The Remote Control!
Awesome technology doesn't just end with remote control and the automatic travelling of seating systems; fully automated opening and closing of auditorium stands and chairs by remote control, as well as automatic longitudinal, sideways and rotational movement of the stand. With some systems, sound technology can also be built into seating as another marvellously inventive feature.
Making the most of innovative new features in modern seating design can mean that venue revenue is maximised with minimum fuss, and event planners can widen their scope when it comes to the size and types of events that they put on.