Satellite Events: Increase Your Event’s Impact

Satellite events, also known as micro events, have been a big trend for 2024 and will continue to be a great audience engagement strategy. Event expertJulius Solaris predicts, “Huge events will grow a satellite of smaller events to offer intimate opportunities to sponsors and attendees.”

If your main goal from any event is to drive engagement and create niche experiences for your audiences, you need more than just a flagship event—you need impact. Take a moment and think about what you want to achieve from your event. Do you want to leave your attendees impressed by the event’s sheer size? Or do you want to actually impact how they think about a particular idea or how they can implement real change in their lives? 

It is remarkable to see how smaller events can supercharge attendees’ impact and act as touchpoints for your audience throughout the year. When you’re hosting an event to open up new horizons of opportunities and discourse, size doesn’t matter.

What are Satellite Events/Micro Events?

Satellite events are small events, often linked together, that you can host throughout the year as a part of your events strategy. Satellite events are often curated explicitly for a segment of your audience and thus result in better resonance of your event’s key messaging. They are a testament to how bigger isn’t always better.

Satellite events are a relatively new concept and were primarily virtual when they started. However, with the latest advancements in event management technology, they can be hosted in many different ways. A micro event could be a simple conference, a wedding, a music festival, an internal company event, or even a single-employer job fair.

Different Ways of Hosting a Satellite Event

The strategy behind hosting a satellite meeting or event can depend on what you want to achieve out of your event. There can be different end games and, thus, different strategies to lead you to your goals. However, there are two main ways organizations tend to host micro-events.

1. Breaking Up Larger Events

You can either host one big conference with hundreds of sessions or break it up into smaller conferences with a handful of webinar sessions each. Planning a bigger event means you will need more money, resources, and time. It can be challenging to ask attendees to spend multiple days at a conference and take time out of their busy schedules.

Breaking up your more significant event into smaller chunks can work in several ways. Satellite events like these can help you follow the same theme over several different events, which means less time and financial investment overall. Moreover, you also demand less commitment from attendees who are interested in joining you. They get the information gradually, and you reduce the chances of overwhelming them.

2. Hosting Individually Scheduled Events

Your satellite events don’t need to be connected. They can each have a different set of target audiences and other goals. You can pick up a few topics for your satellite events and individually schedule them monthly or quarterly. This can be a fantastic way to widen your reach as you can tailor each event for a specific audience segment. 

11 Satellite Events  Examples

Satellite events can be categorized into a few different types, each being different in their mode of delivery and the event goal. 

1. Monthly Meetings

Once a month, your company can hold pulse check-ins for its employees, HR meetings, or company-wide town halls. Satellite meetings can also include marketing events, outreach programs, or networking gatherings.

2. Customer Dinners

Many organizations host occasional customer dinners to network with them in a more casual setting and reinstate any lost connections. These can be a great way to make your customers feel more valued and unique. Moreover, such intimate events can also help solicit feedback from important customers. 

3. Product Launches

Whenever you want to talk about a new product or even a product update, you can host a micro event to let your customers know about it. Product launch events can be virtual or hybrid, depending on your target reach.

4. Internal Training

Employers often need to host training sessions for their employees to enhance their professional skills or familiarize them with company policies. 

5. Employee Onboarding

When you hire a new resource, a fair bit of training is required to familiarize them with the new company and its processes. Onboarding events can be as small as you want and are a great way to make sure all your new hires are set up for success. 

6. Customer Outreach & Appreciation Events

Many organizations host frequent customer outreach events to stay connected with their audience. They can be fun events like the Eventeer Awards at vFairs where we honor the epic events our customers have hosted with us. They can also be remarkable learning experiences like DiscoverNext where we invite everyone to discuss the future of events with us. 

7. Seasonal Celebrations

You can add a festive touch to your events calendar with seasonal celebratory events like Christmas parties, Halloween-themed events, or Eid festivals. They are both fun and can promote multiculturalism in your organization.  

8. Open Houses

These can be a great way to unite your community and showcase your product, venue, or services to them. Event organizers often host open houses for businesses that want to grow their audience and invest in brand awareness.

9. Informative Webinars

A webinar could be about any topic under the sun. You can invite prospects, customers, or the general public to join you through a webinar hosting platform. A webinar often has one or multiple speakers who share their insights and subject matter experience with the attendees, followed by a Q&A session.

10. Creative Workshops

Artists and creators often come together to brainstorm their ideas and share constructive critiques of each other’s work through workshops. They are very collaborative and can help facilitate the creative process.

11. Networking Events

A professional networking event brings together a niche group of people who have similar interests or belong to the same industry. Attendees can talk to industry professionals, experts, keynote speakers, or other attendees at a networking event and share insights. You can also use networking events to garner a loyal customer base, raise public and brand awareness, or exchange ideas.

These are only a handful of micro event types, and you can host all kinds of events on a smaller scale, including satellite seminar, satellite conferences, etc., by tailoring the experience to your attendees and keeping your event goal in mind while planning.  

8 Benefits of Hosting Micro Events

1. Reduced Costs

You can maximize your event budget and increase your ROI with micro-events. They are much smaller, and event organizers can save much money on hosting and planning expenses. For instance, you won’t need as many hands on deck, thus saving on labor costs, and you can make do with a much smaller venue as well. 

2. Create Higher Demand with FOMO 

Fear of missing out (FOMO) can be one of the biggest reasons people may sign up for your event. Micro-events make creating that mystery and excitement around your event more accessible. You can efficiently market the “limited seats” as exclusivity and make it work in your favor. The more urgency you create in your event marketing, the more interest you can develop. 

3. Build Stronger Connections 

Satellite events can help you get increased audience interaction and participation because of how intimate they are. As the events are targeted at a smaller number of people, there are better chances for attendees to network and make connections.  

4. Organize Tailored Experiences

satellite events are often tailored for a specific audience segment. This means you can create a personalized and immersive experience for your audience and speak to their needs.

5. Focused Messaging

As the events are more minor and curated for a niche audience, you can work with a particular message for your audience. Event organizers can promote a niche product or talk about topics that aren’t interesting to the masses. This is hard to achieve for an event with a global reach and a diverse audience. 

6. Easier Follow-Up Communication

Satellite events are not known for the number of people that attend them. The people who connect with you through a micro event are likely to have a strong interest in your business. Therefore, they are important to generate quality leads through the event. Since there won’t be too many irrelevant or cold lead captures, it will be easy to follow up with leads and collect genuine audience feedback.

7. Increase Brand Awareness

Many event marketers can use micro-events for event marketing and branding as well. They can be fantastic for creating more brand awareness and getting the eyes on your business. You can use satellite events to generate interest, build rapport, or showcase the latest happenings at your organization as well.

8. Easier Compliance with Local Laws 

Since satellite events are smaller, they can be much easier to manage. Event organizers don’t have to worry about managing a big physical venue or compliance with local laws for venue size, attendee management, parking, etc. They reduce the hassle of event planning without compromising on event impact.

Leveraging All-In-One Event Management Tech to Host Satellite Events  

Micro event management can come with its fair share of challenges as well. However, an event management platform should cover all your bases. Scalability goes in both directions and the ideal event management tech should also facilitate you to scale down your event size. You should look for a platform that can help you host online, through a hybrid format, or even in person.