Got five minutes for five of the top event planning tips of 2023?

Seeing the end of the year coming up, we decided to look back through our blog and share the event marketing tips everyone seems to value the most.

So, here is your roundup of our most popular event management tips of 2023!

What can you do to encourage networking at your event, and leave everyone excited about returning next time? Turns out – a lot. From 1-to-1 appointments, paying attention to the introverts in the group, and connecting people online and in-person – strategic design of event networking is fascinating. Here’s a tip:

Plan for fun. Attendees will remember the fun and unconventional activities you created to get them connected. Facilitated games and events like these are a great way to stand out from the crowd.

Discover more about networking at events.

Event analytics provide you with actionable information and deep attendee insights about how your targeted and actual attendees are interacting with your marketing efforts. With so many new tech tools and sophisticated insights now available, event planners can be very strategic in increasing the R.O.I. from conferences, trade shows, and events. But accessing your event analytics doesn’t have to to be complicated or intimidating! Here’s a tip:

Your event website, online registration platform, and mobile event app will all provide you with important data regarding performance and visitor interactions. Event apps can help you track user behavior before, during and after your event. Evaluate the number of page views and impressions for your agenda, speakers and sponsors, to help determine attendee interest.

Read all about event analytics.

Event marketers love the opportunity to create their own event websites, and are surprised to see how easy-to-make and not boring they can be! So we showed you how to start start creating and publishing your own stellar event websites with minimal or no involvement of developers and designers. Here’s a tip:

Tweaking the speaker list? Adding sponsors? Last-minute changes in the event schedule? Any changes you make during your event-planning stage can automatically be reflected on your event website.

Check out more about creating event websites.

Speaking of awesome websites, we investigated what elements combined to create event websites that impact, engage, and convert attendees. What should you be doing? Display high-quality, authentic photography on your site. Use everyday language in your registration forms to ask questions and obtain information in a more conversational and engaging way. Make sure you embed videos of past events in your website. Here’s a tip:

Showcase speakers and keynotes on your event website, encouraging prospects to easily visualize the value they will receive by attending. Featuring a real-life recap of the previous event will manage attendee expectations, while piquing their interest for the upcoming event.

Learn more event website tips.

This infographic shows a 2023 snapshot of the need for and benefits of integrated event management platforms, helping you to juggle a BIG workload. Some of the stats were surprising, and show the gap event marketing tools can fill: 68% of event planners produce 13+ events annually; 72% produce the same event year after year; 62% of planners use 7 tech tools to plan one event; and less than 5% of an event planners’ tools are integrated. Here’s a tip:

We’re biased, but seriously – integrated event tech saves time, money, and major headaches for your team 🙂

Creating a fabulous event is not enough. Getting noticed by prospects, customers, sponsors, media – that’s the secret sauce. Turns out your network can be enlisted to help promote your events, in some surprising ways!

There’s nothing worse than that sinking feeling when registrations don’t meet expectations, so check out these event promotion ideas to ensure you cover every base, thanks to those people who are already involved. Make sure to include these when planning your event marketing efforts for your next event.

Your Speakers:

Speakers are usually happy to promote your event, but if they have to work too hard to help spread the word, it can fall to the bottom of their to-do list. Simplifying the process and providing your speakers with the right tools will not only boost exposure, but will help to fill seats – a mutually beneficial outcome for both the speakers and event organizers.

Try it:

Your Attendees:

If you’re working with recurring events, one of the best strategies is to keep in contact with past attendees throughout the year. Providing useful and relevant information related to their industry builds anticipation and keeps that connection going until next year’s event. As a bonus, the messages can be altered to recruit new attendees – but the content you create is useful for both targets.

Try it:

Your Net Promoters:

Enthusiastic Net Promoters are your next-level attendees. These are your loyal fans, who will sing your event’s praises to their friends and colleagues. Your NPS Score comes down to your customers answering one question – “How likely is it you would recommend us to a friend?”

Try it:

Your Charitable Partners:

If your event has a charitable component, make the most of the charities network to promote your event. Most charities have an upcoming events page on their websites and will share social call-outs on their channels. As with all partners, providing them with well-crafted messaging and images goes a long way to helping them share your event. They’ll appreciate the opportunity to promote their cause to your network too.

Try it:

Ready to learn more about delivering high quality event leads? Download our NEW whitepaper here.

Dwindling event budgets are one of the biggest challenges for corporate event marketers. Top brass expect events to bring higher ROI with less investment—and with no compromise in attendee experience. It’s a big ask for even the most inventive and resourceful event planner. So how can you survive in the world of shrinking budgets and still deliver unique, engaging events? Keep the following tips in mind and you’ll be well on your way to satisfying both your attendees and the executive suite.

The event venue inevitably eats up the largest chunk of your budget. The key to mitigating this expense is flexibility. Since weekends and holidays are expensive, be flexible with your dates and consider running events during the week or in the off-peak season; hotels typically offer specials in January and February. Keep in mind that non-hotel venues are often better value than hotels so be prepared to think outside the box for potential venues. And don’t be afraid to haggle to get the best price!

Printing brochures, conference guides, and promotional material is an expensive, and often unnecessary, endeavor. Embrace the online experience and save some trees while you’re at it. Consider an event management platform that hosts everything from your agenda and presentation documents to registration and attendee messaging apps. Your attendees can access everything they need for your event from their smartphone, tablet, or laptop. On the promotion front, social media and email marketing are effective paper-free tools.

Time is money. By automating routine event tasks, you can optimize the resources you spend on event management; you can focus on revenue-generating activities instead of wasting costly man-hours on repetitive admin tasks. Try integrating your event management software with your marketing stack to minimize the expense of copying and transferring lead data between applications—and accelerate the sales pipeline in the process.

Don’t waste money on goodie bags filled with miscellany that your attendees don’t really want. Does anyone really need another keychain or stress ball? Consider reallocating the swag line item of the budget to giveaways that actually improve the attendee experience, such as hearty snacks that can fuel attendees through a long day of meetings. Or just put the savings toward your bottom line.

There’s no need to spend a pile of money on advertising and promotion. Instead, leverage free or low-cost sources to promote your event. You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by the power of social media to spread the word. Try targeting industry influencers to encourage them to promote your event; influencers can accelerate word-of-mouth marketing through their large followings. Email marketing, networking, and SEO are all valuable promotional tools that are easy on your budget.

The event portfolio of a corporate event marketer contains multiple, repetitive events of all sizes and types, across different locations and groups within the organization (e.g., monthly training webinars, weekly sales meetings, annual user group conference). There’s no sense starting from square one for every event you run, especially when you’re on a tight budget. By cloning events and taking advantage of reusable widgets, website themes, and templates instead of building event sites from scratch, you can save an enormous amount of time, effort and resources—which translates into cost savings.

Working with a small budget doesn’t have to negatively impact your event portfolio. With a little creativity and ingenuity—and some technology tricks up your sleeve—you’ll be able to consistently plan and execute successful, ROI-positive events. 

Attendease is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for corporate event managers and teams. A modern, feature-rich event management software that enables the management of an entire range of events of all types and sizes.

When you’re planning an event, timelines are inevitably top of mind. With an event looming, there’s no pushing the deadline to next week, no asking your boss for an extension; event deadlines are always a hard stop. People will be walking through those doors on the given date—and they’ll be expecting a well-executed, engaging event.

In the past, event planners have relied on event management software to help organize their events and meet deadlines. But event management solutions fall short in fully optimizing time management, resource planning, and operational efficiency. To take event management to the next level, event planners are turning to event automation platforms to save time, scale events, and simplify processes and workflow.

Although a relatively new concept in event planning, automation tools have been actively adopted in the marketing world (e.g., Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot) with profitable results—and the event industry is starting to follow suit. Some forward-thinking organizations are even implementing an event automation platform in concert with their existing marketing automation tools to turbocharge the ROI of their events. The next generation of event management, event automation platforms enable a repeatable, scalable event planning and execution process.

Attendease is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for corporate event managers and teams. A modern, feature-rich event management software that enables the management of an entire range of events of all types and sizes.