Everything You Need To Know About Working With Journalists As An Event Planner

As an event management professional, you’re eventually going to have to work with the press. Whether they’re covering your entire conference or simply showing up to report on a particularly poignant keynote, journalists are an important component of every event bar. It’s important that you know precisely how to communicate with them – and how to deal with them. Journalists play an incredibly important role in event management, like it or not. Depending on your relationship with the press, it can either be one of the most powerful publicity tools in your arsenal, or one of the most damaging threats […]

What To Look For In A PR Firm

In the business world, communication is everything – and the value of being able to communicate effectively cannot be understated. There’s a reason public relations is so valued in enterprise, after all. PR professionals are communicators by trade; they know exactly how to establish a rapport with their audience, and precisely how to handle a given situation, whether it’s a crisis or simply an outreach campaign. Of course, they don’t often come cheap. Hiring a PR firm is usually a pretty hefty investment, so it sort of goes without saying that you want to make sure you aren’t just throwing […]

PR: How Much Do You Know?

As we all know, PR is so important for both your event firm as well as for the individual events that you throw. It may seem simple from a distance, but once you really get to the details, it can be quite a tedious task. What it really comes down to is who you know and how well you really know them. We broke down different parts of how to get the perfect PR team or even do it yourself if you are ready to get to work and have the right contacts. We will be covering the following topics: […]

Seven Steps For The Perfect Event Logo

Your logo says a lot about your event. It’s the first thing any of your guests see, and the first thing they engage with. It’s more than just a pretty picture you can slap on to conference bags, brochures, and your website; it’s the visual representation of your event. The better it looks, the better people are going to feel about attending. If you want your logo to look like anything more than clipart, then the design process is going to be long, involved, and demanding. The reward, however, is more than worth it. If you put in the necessary work […]

Tips for Relating To Clients

I’ve said on several occasions that event planners need to be natural storytellers, but there’s a bit more to it than that. An event manager needs to be able to engage their audience on a personal and human level, but at the same time, they need to be able to present themselves as professionals. It can be a difficult balance to maintain, and in unskilled hands, relatability and professionalism tend to be mutually exclusive. In short, simply being able to tell a story isn’t enough – it’s how you tell the story that really counts. It wasn’t always this way: […]

How to Run an Effective Social Media Contest

Are you looking for a creative way to boost event registration numbers? Are you hoping to get your audience excited about an upcoming event? While there are many ways to make this happen, here is one that you may have overlooked: a social media contest. Social media is hot. Just how hot, you wonder? Here is what Social Times has to say: “Did you know that there are more than two billion active social media users worldwide, representing a global penetration rate of 28 percent?” This statistic alone proves that you are missing the boat if you aren’t using social media to […]

What The Late Steve Jobs Can Teach Us About Guest Speaking

Whatever else you might say about Steve Jobs, the man knew how to work a crowd. He was probably one of the most brilliant speakers of our time; his charisma was so powerful that one software engineer at Apple even described it as a “reality distortion field,” adding that Jobs could “convince anyone of practically anything.” Taking that into account, it sort of goes without saying that any guest speaker who wants to perfect their craft should study how Jobs conducted himself – there’s a lot of valuable stuff to be learned from him, after all. That’s what we’re here […]

How To Host An Awesome Product Launch

Whether you love Apple or hate it, you have to admit one thing – Steve Jobs knew how to get people hyped for his products. The man had a way with words and a gift for the stage, such that he was able to host some of the world’s most memorable product launches and announcements with little more than a stage, a microphone, and his trademark black turtleneck.  While you probably won’t be able to get people as hyped as Mr. Jobs could, there’s no reason you can’t still host a few awesome product launches of your own. See, most […]

Cold Calling 101 – How To Get A Sponsor On Board For Your Events

In the past, I’ve often instructed you to contact various individuals for your events – be they sponsors, vendors, or guest speakers. I’ve not really gone into any detail on exactly how you should go about doing that. I’ve basically just told you to do a bunch of cold calling, without actually giving you any advice on how to do that. After all, you can’t simply call someone and blurt out the details of your event and expect them to jump on board – nor can you email someone a bullet list and assume they’re going to read it. If […]

Reasons to Use Social Media to Engage Conference Attendees

As an event planner, it is typical to have a one track mind. Upfront, you may care about one detail more than the rest: getting people through the door. Of course, meeting your attendance goals is only half the battle. From there, it is your job, along with the help of your team, to ensure that every attendee is treated well and getting what they want from the event. There are many things you can do to engage with conference attendees, with the use of social media at the top of the list. Here is something to chew on: even […]

How to Promote Social Media Use During an Event

The growth of social media is astonishing. Starting with Live Journal and MySpace, this trend began to pick up steam 15 years ago. In today’s world, social media is all the rage, with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, among others, leading the way. Consider this excerpt from a SocialTimes article published in 2014: “Since 2004, the growth of social media has been near exponential. Back in those days, Facebook — arguably the most mature of the top social networks — only had about 1 million users. By 2011 the network had grown so large, its population was being compared to that […]

How To Have Social Media Work For You

Social media, we all love it but are not always sure of the best way to use it to our advantage. This week we are going to really dive into it and take a closer look at how you can use the latest techniques and platforms to really work for you. As with any social media advice, you need to focus on what really works for your audience as well as brand. We are going to offer lots of tips and tricks that you can use to engage & get more followers and use social media to your advantage. Try them […]

How You Can Use Eventbrite To Supercharge Your Events

Today, we’re going to be putting together a tutorial for Eventbrite, one of the most powerful ticketing and registration management applications in the world. By using it, you can essentially make event registration a cakewalk for your guests from beginning to end – in addition to getting an awesome-looking event page and formidable marketing campaign on its feet. Let’s dive right in – how can you use Eventbrite to make your events better than ever? The Setup Process One of the greatest things about Eventbrite – and perhaps the thing that’s made it so popular as an event management tool […]

How Much Should You Spend On Event Marketing, Really?

We all know that it’s extremely important to market your events effectively. If you don’t get the word out, you don’t sell tickets. If you don’t sell tickets, you don’t meet your budget projections. And if you don’t meet your projections… Yeah, you get the idea. What I’d like to discuss today – aside from how to market, we’ve already talked extensively about that – is how much of your event budget you should allocate to marketing. This doesn’t just apply to event management, of course. The question of how to know when one’s spending their marketing budget effectively is […]

Marketing Statistics Every Event Manager Could Use

As an event manager, you will have a lot on your plate. From setting and following a budget to selecting guest speakers, there won’t be much time to sit back and relax. Your marketing strategy can make or break the success of your event. Take the right steps upfront and it will continue to pay off well after the event comes to an end. But make too many mistakes along the way, and you could soon find yourself wondering what went wrong. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to guarantee marketing success. A big part of this is tracking […]

Social Marketing versus Public Relations: What’s The Difference, Really?

There was a time not so long ago when marketing and public relations were two very distinct – if closely-related – fields. The former was primarily concerned with selling the products and services of a brand; the latter was entirely focused on maintaining relationships. Then social media came along, and thoroughly muddied the waters. With the advent of social media, an entirely new marketing paradigm was born – relationship marketing. “The days of traditional marketing, such as running ads, commercials, and other one-way forms of promotion are rapidly fading because the rise of relationship marketing is taking a front seat,” […]

Analytics Isn’t Just A Buzzword: Organizing And Understanding Your Event Data

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem. We’re generating too much data, and no one seems entirely sure what to do with it. Oh, sure, there’s a field called analytics that purports analyze, arrange, and manage all the information; but does it actually help all that much? Actually, yes. The problem with analytics from the perspective of an outsider is that it seems a whole lot more complicated than it is. That perception isn’t exactly helped along by a lot of the buzzword-heavy coverage on the topic by the media – far too often, people’ve got a tendency to wax […]

Why Big Data Analytics Plays A Role In Event Management

What’s the big deal about big data? If you’ve been paying even passing attention to the world of analytics (and if you’re an event manager, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be), then I’m sure you’ve heard the term at least once. Those who don’t fully understand what it is have talked it up to be some sort of Holy Grail; a tool you can use to fulfill all your business-related dreams. While that’s certainly an exaggeration, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of big data – or its value for your events. Now, as is the case with most buzz-phrases, […]

What Is Data Exhaust – And Why Should Event Planners Care About It

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard people talking about The Internet of Things. In brief, this is a trend that involves equipping previously ‘dumb’ devices – engines, watches, clothing; you name it – with Internet-enabled sensor technology. This, in turn, allows businesses to tap into something known as “data exhaust.” Let’s back up a bit. In order to understand data exhaust – and indeed, the Internet of Things as a whole – we’re first going to need to take a closer look at big data. The three concepts are, after all, inextricably linked; an understanding of […]

20 Things Every Event Planner Should Include On Their Website

Today, we’re going to try something a little different. See, I’d like to think we’ve already driven home the importance of having a website – or at least some sort of online presence – as an event management professional.  While it’s certainly possible to get by without a website, I wouldn’t advise it. After all, why miss out on an entire market of potential clients? Now, not all websites are created equal. There are certain elements which make one website more successful than another. If you really want to see a return on the effort you put into your site, […]