How Much of Your Budget to Save for Marketing

As an event management professional, budgeting can be one of the most difficult tasks you’ll ever do. Sadly, it’s also the most important – failure to set a proper budget for an event makes it infinitely more likely that you’re going to end up with a catastrophe on your hands further down the line. For that reason, it’s imperative that you get your budget figured out before launching into the planning phase. Now, every event is different; no two events will have a budget that looks entirely identical. There are still some rules and guidelines you can follow to ensure…

Getting Your Attendees More Invested In Your Events

It sort of goes without saying that you want people to remember the events you put on. You want them to talk about your firm and your brand for months afterwards; to wait with bated breath for your next convention. Naturally, the best way to do that is to give them exactly what they want. Now, here’s where things get a little complicated – information and entertainment are only part of the equation. These days, it’s not necessarily enough for people to go to a conference and passively absorb information, or attend a convention where they wander aimlessly around the…

Marketing: Everything An Event Planner Needs To Know

In our last series we focused on tips & tricks for an event planner; ways for you to be more successful and make your job easier. The next few weeks we are going to switch our focus to marketing. This week we will focus on marketing your events. After that, the next two weeks will focus on personally using social media to advance your personal brand as well as that of your firm’s. Each day we will present you with a new post diving deeper into how you can be more successful all around, often by just doing little things that…

How To Handle A Client Who Cancels On You

No matter how good an event manager you are, you’re probably going to have a client bail out on you at some point. Mishandling this unfortunate event could be absolutely catastrophic for your reputation as an event management professional, and as such it’s imperative that you know what to do. Today, we’re going to discuss a few general guidelines and rules of conduct that every event management professional should follow when dealing with a client cancellation. Make Sure You Have A Good Cancellation Policy This is more of a pre-emptive step, but make sure that before taking on any clients, you’ve plotted…

What’s Involved In Starting Your Own Event Management Firm?

So you want to start an event management firm, do you? That’s an admirable undertaking, for sure – but also an incredibly difficult one. You’re combining the difficulties commonly associated with event planning with the challenge of starting your own business venture. What that means is that if you don’t go in prepared, you could very easily find yourself completely overwhelmed. Don’t worry. As an event management professional, you’re actually uniquely equipped to be a business owner. You’ve already got all the people skills you’ll need to manage a team; all you need now is a bit of knowledge to…

Five Promising Emerging Markets in the Event Industry

If you’re looking to spice up your events, why not consider hosting it internationally? The thing about major, well-established markets is that everyone tends to flock to them. Instead, if you’re really looking to give your event a unique touch, it might be worthwhile to have a look at a few emerging markets and economies. Today, we’re going to have a look at some of the most promising up-and-coming markets for event planners. Though most of these regions aren’t terribly well-established on the global stage, they’ve all got great facilities at competitive rates. If you’re looking for something a little…

Tips For Fixing Your Firm’s Bad Reputation

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how you can nurture a good relationship between your event firm and its clients. We’ve examined marketing techniques, methods for handling any event management catastrophe that gets thrown at you, and how you should approach the matter of social media. Amongst all that talk, there’s one thing we haven’t really addressed to any satisfactory degree – negative publicity. What can you do if – in spite if your best efforts – your event management firm’s managed to foster a bad reputation? Poor publicity’s sort of like a nasty cold. No one actually…

How To Deal With Equipment Theft

It’s an inconvenient fact about the world we live in – some people are no good, and will always try to get something for nothing. In the world of event management, that translates to theft of some pretty valuable equipment. See, that’s the problem with event planning: whenever enough people collect in a single area, there’s almost guaranteed to be a few bad eggs. As an event management professional, it falls to you to make sure those bad eggs can do as little damage to you and your guests as possible. Today, we’re going to go over some of the…

How Many Events Per Year Should You Run?

I’ve mentioned before that the ability to plan out a successful event has become an integral skill for any marketing professional worth their salt. With the birth of social media and new methods of communication, consumers are demanding that brands interact with them in entirely new and personal ways. Events and conferences are an ideal means of accomplishing this. Organizations are able to connect with both other personalities in the industry as well as their consumers; a good event can do almost as much for a brand as a successful viral campaign. But is there such a thing as going…

Five Client-Related Event Management Woes

Not every event management pitfall you’ll encounter is the result of a bad vendor, a shifty partner, failing equipment, or a lazy volunteer. Sometimes, the problem isn’t with you or the event at all – it’s with the person who’s hired you. Everyone is going to deal with a difficult client at some point in their career, and it’s important that you be prepared for some of the issues you may encounter. Here are a few of the biggest client-side problems you’ll run into in the event management field, and how you can deal with them. Make sure you familiarize…

Everything You Need To Know About Legal Liability At Your Event: Part Two

If something goes wrong at one of your events – which will happen eventually, no matter how skilled a planner you are – you need to make sure that you’ve got your legal bases covered. The first step in doing so is putting together an expansive, exhaustive contract which leaves no doubts as to liability. That’s only going to take you so far, however. In order to truly protect yourself (and whoever you’ve partnered with for an event), you’re going to have to fully account for both statute liability (the law as written) and tort liability (responsibility in the event…

Everything You Need To Know About Legal Liability At Your Event: Part One

One of the more irksome sides of event planning involves the sorting out of legal details. If someone gets injured, who foots the bill? If the venue ends up being damaged, who’s responsible for repairing it? None of this stuff is particularly exciting or pleasant, but it needs to be done. Liability – particularly in the case of accident or injury – is something that should be a concern of every event management professional and supplier in the industry. With any event, there are three types of liability with which you’ll have to be concerned. The first of these is…

Five Questions Every Client Asks Themself Before Hiring An Event Manager

If an organization is looking to run an event on which the reputation of its brand could very well rest, it’s not terribly surprising that they’d want to be as thorough as possible regarding who they hire. After all, if they make a bad choice, they could see their organization’s reputation dragged through the mud; if their event truly goes south, they might even see people take legal action against them. As an event planner, you should thus be prepared to answer questions as part of the hiring process. Naturally, that process will go a whole lot smoother if you know…

Advice Every Event Manager Should Follow

In any career, there are certain best practices which you should stick to, and event management is no exception to that rule. The pieces of advice I’m about to impart to you are things many novice event managers wished they knew when first starting out. Maybe you already know everything here, but in the event that you don’t, maybe I’ll have made your life – and your career – just a little bit easier. Establish A “Concrete Date” When Planning An Event And Stick To It At All Costs When you’re planning an event, start by establishing a concrete date…

The Do’s And Dont’s Of Running A Secret Event

I did a piece awhile back that made reference to a party hosted by Bud Light in Crested Butte, Colorado. It was a secret event for 1,000 lucky fans of the brand; the culmination of one of Bud Light’s most successful marketing campaigns ever. It also made residents of Crested Butte very, very angry. “Most residents in the town itself didn’t know [about the event],” notes adweek. “After word leaked out, many of them were exceedingly perturbed.” The end result of that perturbation was that Bud Light ended up having to pay double what they’d originally agreed upon with the town,…

The KISS Principle In Event Management

There’s this little thing known as the KISS principle – I’m sure I’ve made reference to it before. It’s an abbreviation for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Today, I’d like to spend a bit of time looking in-depth at how it applies to event planning. Because like it or not, it most definitely does – particularly where event marketing is concerned. That’s where we’re going to start our discussion, by the way. It seems as good a springboard as any, no? So. Simplicity in marketing. Let’s talk about that. The modern world is a pretty chaotic place if you stop to…

Event Management Tips & Tricks

As you are well aware, there is quite a bit that goes into being a successful event professional. We’ve touched on many of the topics before on our blog, however over the next two weeks we are going to focus on the main event management tips and tricks to help you be successful so that you can continue to throw amazing events that will keep your clients hiring you for more events and recommend your services to all of their event manager friends. This series will hopefully either teach you something new, or be a refresher course to keep you…

What The Electronic Entertainment Expo Can Teach Us About Event Management

Every year in June, game development studios from all over the world gather for an event known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’s one of the largest conferences of its kind, and people from all over the world tune in every year to watch and listen for the latest and greatest innovations and developments in video games. Suffice it to say, a savvy event manager can learn a great deal from such a successful conference. Here are a few pieces of insight I’ve picked up by watching the annual show: Even The Right Topic Can Be Bust With The Wrong…

Optimizing the Look and Feel of Your Event

As an event management professional, you know full well that presentation is everything. I’m not just talking about appearance, either. I’m talking about everything from layout to décor to what sort of tech you’re using for audio and video. If you don’t put any work into these things, it shows – and your guests are bound to get bored. Pay close attention to the look and feel of your event. The trick is to draw the eyes of your guests where you want them to look. Who Are You Running The Event For? The first, most important question you need…

The All Inclusive Guide To Perfecting Your Event Budget

As an event management professional, you need to take a ‘master of all trades’ approach to your job. You’ve got to be creative, artistic, and passionate in order to transform your clients ideas from conceptual to concrete; at the same time, you need to be analytical, logical, and disciplined in order to lay the groundwork to bring your events to life. One of the first steps in laying that groundwork – and consequently, one of the greatest challenges in event management – is budgeting. Though we’ve touched a bit on event budgeting in the past, this piece is going to…

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