You’ve come up with an amazing event idea and have sorted all the planning: everything from your venue to your suppliers are locked in. Now, you just need to get people to come.
This is where event marketing comes in. In essence, this is your game plan for how you’ll reach your target audience and what you’ll say to them to get them to RSVP. We recommend putting it together in advance so you’re not on the back foot when it comes time to start selling.
At Kindred, we’re thrown hundreds of sell-out events—so we know a thing or two about filling up a room. Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating the ultimate event marketing plan.
Contents
Setting your goals
Setting your budget
Knowing your audience
Choose your channels
Pin down your messaging
Execution plan
Your event listing: top tips
Post-event comms
Measuring success
Setting your goals
Whether you’re trying to sell hundreds of tickets or collect RSVPs from a smaller circle, every single event marketing plan starts with the same question: what does success look like for your event? These are your event objectives. We’ve covered how to set them in more detail here.
Your event objectives will inform what you need your marketing activities to achieve. Most of the time, this will be selling a certain amount of tickets: for example, your event objective might be to generate more profit from ticket sales than the previous event. Your marketing plan would then need to detail how you’d sell a particular amount of tickets while working to a specific budget. You could even break this down into a target cost per acquisition for each channel (more on this later).
Sometimes, you’ll have additional goals, like increasing traffic to your website or getting people to sign up for an email list. In each case, think about how your marketing activities can contribute to this. Pin these down into clear objectives: they should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
There’s no rule for how many marketing objectives you can have, but the fewer, the better. This ensures that your activities stay focused.
Here’s a few examples of event marketing objectives:
- Generate 25% more profit from ticket sales than your previous event, before the day of the event
- Get 50 signups to your email waitlist to try your new product by the end of the event
- Book 15 meetings with qualified leads following the event
Setting a budget
Next, you need to determine what sort of budget you’ve got to work with. Often, but not always, the marketing spend will already be set aside when you put together your event budget.
Your marketing budget should consider the costs of different activities and what you predict you’ll get out of each. Some channels are more expensive than others but could get you a better result, for instance. So, you may be able to justify a higher spend.
For example:
- Advertising. Most of the time, this means running ads on social media. These platforms allow you to forecast how many people you could reach when working to a certain budget
- PR. Engaging a PR agency is generally expensive but could get you a lot of exposure. This could be an option if you’re trying to reach a mass audience (& have a big budget!). Though you can try to generate some PR yourself—more on this below
- Partnerships. Like working with influencers, for example. This can be cheaper than the above and offer a more targeted approach. Though it’s hard to predict what sort of return you’ll get
- Paid media placements. You might pay to get featured in a relevant newsletter or publication. This tends to work better for events targeting a niche audience, but again, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a good response
You should also factor in any costs for creative. Unless you’ve got the resource in house, you’ll need to have someone make the creative assets you’ll use to promote your event—both on organic and paid channels. This could include graphics or videos, for instance.
It’s helpful to look at your previous campaigns to see what you’ve spent on different channels and what the outcomes were. It’s also a good idea to factor in a buffer of maybe 5-10%, in case you need to up your spend. Like if you need to do an extra sales push or if a particular ad is performing really well.
Be sure to factor in any promotions or tiered ticket pricing into your budget. Remember: promotions come at a cost to you, so they’d need to generate a certain amount of sales to be worthwhile.
Knowing your audience
Now comes the fun part: it’s time to pin down your strategy. How will you reach your audience and how will you get them to RSVP?
To figure that out, you first need to know exactly who you’re talking to. These insights should help you understand what they’re looking for in an event experience & how yours will bring them that value. You want to be able to answer the question: what’s in it for them?
This will help you to tailor your messaging and activities. Consider:
- Where does your audience live? London, or perhaps a certain part of London?
- How old (roughly) are they? Working with a range is fine
- What industry do they work in? What job titles would they have?
- What are their interests?
- What are their pain points? What problems or concerns do they have that are relevant to your event?
The more specific your insights are, the more focused you can make your strategy.
Choose your channels
You’ll then need to decide which marketing channels you’ll use. These will be a mixture of your owned channels (which you have control over, like your website) and those that you pay to use (like advertising).
The people you can reach through owned channels mostly already follow you—which makes them a warm audience. This means that it can be easier to sell to them. Plus, your owned channels don’t cost anything extra to use (aside from the time cost of resources within the team, of course). So, making the most of them to push your event is a no-brainer.
They can include:
- Your email newsletter
- Posting organically on your social media
- Publishing content on your website
- Event listings on third party websites, like Eventbrite
When choosing your paid channels, think critically about where your audience is likely to hang out online and which channels make the most sense for your event. For example:
- Instagram ads. This could be a place for advertising more general interest events, like live music or F&B
- LinkedIn ads. This would be a more obvious choice for a professional event targeting people within a certain industry. LinkedIn ads are generally more expensive than Instagram
- Sponsored media. Getting featured in a relevant newsletter or publication. As we’ve already mentioned, this can be a good option for events targeting a niche audience
- Influencers. Same as above: this can be a great way to reach a specific group of people. Fees and the sort of reach you can get will vary
- Direct mail & OOH. This will give you a wide reach but it’s hard to quantify how effective activities like this are. It could be a good option for local events, where you want to engage people who live in a specific area
- PR. Engaging a PR professional can certainly increase your visibility, though it’ll cost you. There are some PR activities you can do yourself, like writing a press release and sending it down a wire (sometimes there’s a small fee for this) or emailing journalists directly
More channels isn’t necessarily better when it comes to marketing strategy. Focus on a few and do them really well rather than spread yourself too thin.
Pin down your messaging
You know who you’re talking to and where you’ll reach them. Next, you need to figure out what you’ll say. You need to communicate why people should attend.
The best marketing messages are clear and simple. Try to break down the best bits about your event into succinct sentences, using the audience insights you’ve gathered to guide you. You don’t need to use fancy or complicated copy—being clear is the most important thing.
Consider as well how your image-based assets will help to communicate. For example, if you’ve got a photo of a people letting loose and dancing to live music, you’re letting the audience know that this is a night-out style event and that they’re going to have fun. Maybe you’d then use the copy to highlight another key selling point, like a drinks special.
Videos are great here because they can convey a lot of information in a short space of time.
Execution plan: your timeline
Now it’s time to make all of the above into a plan of action. This should communicate:
- What activities you will do on which channels
- How those activities will work together to get someone to book
- When you will do each of these activities
Think of each channel as a lever that works to reach your audience or get them a step closer to booking.
Let’s say you’re promoting a jazz night and are planning to run ads on Instagram to reach an audience local to your venue and who are interested in live music. You’ll also pay for listings within two popular newsletters about live music in your city. Plus, you’ll send out a few newsletters to your existing client list to let them know about the event.
But once they click on your ad, newsletter, or on the link in your sponsored listing, they’ll be sent to the listing on your website. This is what needs to finish the job in convincing them to book. Though you know that not everyone will book right away, so you also decide to retarget people who visit the listing with some more ads.
Or maybe they see your ad and go to your Instagram page. If they decide to follow you, your organic Instagram content needs to seal the deal. So, you’ll also need a schedule for organic content, too.
Your plan should outline a schedule of activities for each channel in the lead-up to the event. The general rule of thumb is to leave a minimum of 6-8 weeks for marketing ahead of the event, though each event is different.
Your event listing: top tips
This is the final part of the customer journey: the bit where people decide to book. So, your event listing needs to work as hard as possible to get them over the line. Here’s some of our top tips in putting together a strong event listing page:
- Clear, descriptive headline. You want to give people as much of a sense of what they’re getting into as possible while keeping it succinct
- Key event info easily visible. We put ours in a breakout box that’s a different colour to the rest of the page
- Clear links to book towards the top of the page
- Event copy that’s broken up into sections so it’s easily skimmable. Put the most important information at the top, like what to expect. Supplementary information, like a bio of the event partners or links to the menu, can be further down the page
Post-event comms
The work doesn’t end once the event is over (sorry!). Now’s your chance to re-engage people and draw them into your warm audience, so you can easily reach them next time you’ve got an event to push.
If you’ve collected your attendee’s email addresses, you could send them a thankyou email and then give them the option to join your regular mailing list.
You could also post some content from the event—like videos from performances or summaries of any interesting panel talks—on your socials to remind your new followers of the great time they had. This also helps to sell the event to your other followers, piquing their interest for next time.
Measuring success
You should be collecting data as you execute your marketing plan, like ticket sales and profit, and also metrics like click-through-rate. To gauge the success of your efforts, you need to look at the metrics that are relevant to your objectives.
This could look like:
- Revenue
- Profit
- Email signups
- Meetings booked
You also might want to do some analysis to see which channels and activities were most effective. Here, you can look at metrics like conversion rate and cost per acquisition (for paid channels). This is the total amount it costs you to get someone to book. You can work it out by dividing your total ad spend by the number of tickets you sold.
To return to our earlier example of promoting a jazz night via Instagram ads. Let’s say that Instagram has charged you £0.50-1.00 per click, and that 1,000 people clicked on your ad. Your total ad spend would be £500-1000. If you sold 20 tickets, your CPA would be £25-50. If you sold 50, it would be £10-20.
You can compare your CPA for different channels to see which performed better. This can help you streamline your future efforts.
Need help planning your next event?
Kindred is more than just a venue for hire. Our talented events team will work with you to make sure your event—whether it’s a big knees-up or more intimate affair—is one to remember. With an in-house restaurant, private bars, exclusive private dining menus, and integrated tech and AV, Kindred is one of the most coveted private hire venues in London.
For those short on time, we also offer a bespoke event curation service for as little as £300. This includes finding and booking performers for your event, designing/printing bespoke signage, and more.
