Event management technology_for_dummies_cvent_special_edition_9781119516781

Event
Management
Technology

Event
Management
Technology
Cvent Special Edition

Event Management Technology For Dummies®
, Cvent Special Edition
Published by
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Contents at a Glance
Introduction........................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1: Learning About Event Management Technology................................. 3
CHAPTER 2: Developing Your Event Strategy............................................................11
CHAPTER 3: Managing Your Budget...........................................................................17
CHAPTER 4: Securing the Best Venues.......................................................................25
CHAPTER 5: Executing a Winning Event Marketing Strategy..................................33
CHAPTER 6: Building Your Event Website..................................................................43
CHAPTER 7: Mastering the Onsite Experience..........................................................51
CHAPTER 8: Engaging Your Attendees.......................................................................55
CHAPTER 9: Improving, and Proving, Event Impact.................................................61
CHAPTER 10: Ten Questions to Ask an Event Management
Technology Partner.................................................................................69

Table of Contents vii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 2
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 2
CHAPTER 1: Learning About Event Management
Technology......................................................................................... 3
Managing Events the Old-school Way................................................ 4
Leaving the Past Behind....................................................................... 4
Using tech before your event......................................................... 6
Using tech during your event......................................................... 6
Using tech after your event............................................................ 7
Making the Planner’s Job Easier.......................................................... 7
Doing what you do, better.............................................................. 7
Saving time and money................................................................... 7
Delivering a great experience......................................................... 8
Understanding Customers’ Needs...................................................... 9
Improving the Bottom Line.................................................................. 9
CHAPTER 2: Developing Your Event Strategy.....................................11
Optimizing Events to Grow Your Business.......................................12
Adding events to the marketing mix...........................................12
Planning events with a purpose...................................................13
Defining success............................................................................14
Building an Event Program................................................................15
Thinking about audience, content, location, and timing...........15
Maintaining cross-event and cross-channel visibility................16
CHAPTER 3: Managing Your Budget..........................................................17
Building a Budget................................................................................17
Setting your goals..........................................................................17
Categorizing costs..........................................................................18
Offsetting Costs...................................................................................19
Finding sponsors............................................................................19
Selling exhibit space......................................................................20
Pricing approaches........................................................................20
Cost avoidance...............................................................................20
Getting Your Budget Approved.........................................................21

viii Event Management Technology For Dummies, Cvent Special Edition
Talking to stakeholders.................................................................21
Convincing the C-suite...................................................................23
Demonstrating ROI........................................................................23
CHAPTER 4: Securing the Best Venues....................................................25
Reviewing the Basics...........................................................................25
Finding the Perfect Destination in a Flash........................................26
Writing an Electronic RFP...................................................................27
Telling your story...........................................................................27
Defining your purpose..................................................................28
Evaluating Venue Proposals...............................................................28
Creating an assessment criteria spreadsheet............................29
Qualitative factors..........................................................................29
Meeting rooms matter..................................................................29
Building supportive relationships................................................29
Making the Most of Your Site Visit....................................................30
Negotiating with the Venue...............................................................31
CHAPTER 5: Executing a Winning Event Marketing
Strategy..............................................................................................33
Facing Today’s Event Marketing Challenges....................................34
Creating Your Marketing Strategy.....................................................34
Answering the 5 Ws.......................................................................35
Aligning event and brand..............................................................35
Reaching Your Known Audience........................................................36
Personalizing email at every touchpoint.....................................37
Timing your communications.......................................................38
Reaching Your Potential Audience....................................................38
Organic and paid search...............................................................38
Using social media.........................................................................38
Enlisting your sales team..............................................................39
Marketing During Your Event............................................................39
Going mobile..................................................................................39
Amplifying your message through attendees............................40
Keeping the Conversation Going.......................................................40
Following up after the event.........................................................40
Extending your event online.........................................................41
CHAPTER 6: Building Your Event Website.............................................43
Choosing the Type of Website You Need.........................................43
Choosing a Hosting Provider.............................................................44

Table of Contents ix
Including Key Elements.......................................................................45
Aligning company and event brand.............................................45
Providing relevant information....................................................45
Making it easy to use.....................................................................46
Designing a Marketing Website.........................................................46
Building the Registration Process.....................................................49
Automating and personalizing the experience..........................49
Processing payments securely.....................................................50
Managing housing and travel.......................................................50
Fine-Tuning Your Website..................................................................50
CHAPTER 7: Mastering the Onsite Experience..................................51
Getting the First Impression Right....................................................51
Tracking the Attendee Journey..........................................................52
Making it unobtrusive...................................................................53
Capturing attendee information..................................................53
Using the data................................................................................53
Delivering Value to Exhibitors and Sponsors...................................54
CHAPTER 8: Engaging Your Attendees.....................................................55
Understanding the Attendee’s Needs...............................................55
Capitalizing on mobile devices.....................................................56
Keeping attendees on track..........................................................57
Keeping attendees engaged.........................................................57
Keeping Attendees Informed.............................................................58
Dealing with last-minute changes................................................58
Helping attendees navigate your event......................................58
Providing interactive tools............................................................59
Inspiring Attendees to Connect.........................................................59
Using Real-Time Metrics.....................................................................60
CHAPTER 9: Improving, and Proving, Event Impact.....................61
Remembering What You Set Out to Do............................................61
Reviewing Event Data and Attendee Feedback...............................62
Reporting basics.............................................................................63
Better understanding your attendees.........................................63
Assessing value for exhibitors and sponsors.............................64
Integrating Event Data with Sales and Marketing Systems............65
Proving the Impact of Your Event......................................................66
Using Data to Improve Future Events...............................................66
CHAPTER 10: Ten Questions to Ask an Event Management
Technology Partner..................................................................69

x Event Management Technology For Dummies, Cvent Special Edition

Introduction 1
Introduction
Y
ou might have noticed that meetings and events look much
different today than they did just a few years ago. Like
other industries, technology can affect all areas of event
planning and execution. This book seeks to share best practices
for outstanding event planning and execution and demystify
event technology by showing how it naturally fits into every stage
of the event lifecycle.
Event technology simplifies, integrates, and automates many
manual processes and disparate point solutions, so you can more
efficiently execute every aspect of your events. Technology also
enables you to better engage attendees, offer more benefits to
exhibitors and sponsors, manage costs, and prove event return on
investment (ROI). Technology lets you collect data at every atten-
dee touchpoint and puts that data at your fingertips, allowing you
to make more informed and scientific decisions about your event
strategy than ever before. Data can now be analyzed to measure
the success of events. The days of guesswork are in the past.
Due in part to these technological changes, attendees’ expecta-
tions for events have also evolved. Today’s attendees are growing
accustomed to modern and seamless experiences before, during,
and after your event. The event landscape has radically changed,
and event organizers who keep up with event technology will be
poised for long-term growth and success.
Organizations use event technology to organize their events
program, leverage email marketing to recruit attendees, create
customized and dynamic registration processes, set up secure
payment processing, build and launch branded event websites,
connect to social media channels, and collect onsite data about
everything from how many people attended the opening ses-
sion to how many gallons of coffee were consumed — all from a
central platform.
According to a Frost & Sullivan report, “Event technology can
help increase event attendance 20%, increase productivity 27%,
and decrease costs 20-30%.” If that doesn’t convince you to con-
sider adding event technology to your event planning toolbox,
nothing will!

2 Event Management Technology For Dummies, Cvent Special Edition
About This Book
Event Management Technology For Dummies, Cvent Special Edition,
gives you a resource for successful event planning. It shares event
planning and execution best practices and shows you how to use
event management technology throughout the event lifecycle.
You’ll learn how technology can automate many of the processes
and tasks you do manually, saving you time and money and
increasing overall event quality. It gives you insight to how event
technology makes the whole event experience easier for your
attendees, leading to higher engagement. Lastly, it explains how
you can use measurement and metrics to demonstrate the return
on investment your event delivers to your organization. The
book is your one-stop source for how event technology can help
you and your organization more efficiently and cost-effectively
manage all aspects of the event lifecycle.
Icons Used in This Book
As you read this book, you’ll notice icons in the margins that
indicate material of special interest. Here’s what the icons mean:
The information marked by this icon is important and therefore
repeated for emphasis. This way, you can easily spot noteworthy
information when you refer to the book later.
This icon marks places where technical matters, especially more
detailed information about event technology, are discussed.
Tips offer ideas to save you time or offer suggestions for improv-
ing the event experience; they don’t necessarily involve event
technology.
Paragraphs marked with the Warning icon call attention to
common pitfalls or risky situations that you may encounter.

CHAPTER 1 Learning About Event Management Technology 3
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Seeing into the future
»» Using technology in all phases of your
event
»» Making your life easier
»» Elevating your events program
Learning About
Event Management
Technology
W
hether you’re a full-time event planner, a marketer
who uses events as a marketing tactic, or a human
resources professional who develops training seminars
for employees, chances are you’re doing a lot of your event plan-
ning and execution tasks manually — a spreadsheet to track
expenses and attendees, hand-written or pre-printed badges, or
maybe you’re even licking stamps! You may find yourself think-
ing, “there’s got to be a better way.” Well, there is . . . it’s called
event management technology.
In the past few years, technology has transformed the way events
get planned, executed, and measured. The era of event manage-
ment technology is here and increasingly becoming a core com-
petence for event professionals.

Managing Events the Old-school Way
Let’s take a look at how events used to be run — or maybe still
are for you. The VP of Sales knocks on your cubicle wall and says,
“Hey, can you put together a seminar for our key clients? We want
to roll out our product’s new features to them before launching to
the public.”
As soon as he leaves, you start jotting down notes and sending
emails, Googling and calling potential venues, and opening a
spreadsheet to create a budget. You know the routine. Even with
shared documents, email, and the Internet, you still have manual
processes to track and manage each stage of the event lifecycle —
inviting attendees, managing their RSVPs, checking them in
onsite, and ultimately understanding whether it was all worth it!
Many organizations run their internal events the same way. A
department head might ask you to set up a three-day training
event for 100 employees. The event won’t generate revenue but is
still critical to the business. You begin the familiar routine of bud-
geting, finding a venue, and inviting the employees. Eventually
the big day arrives and you’re busy with registration, nametags,
and handouts.
Despite your hard work, you likely don’t have total control over
the event. You may ask your IT department to create an online
registration form, or you may need your marketing team to create
and send emails to drive attendance. You’re responsible for a suc-
cessful event, but you’re dependent on others and don’t have full
oversight over planning or execution.
Leaving the Past Behind
There’s a better way to navigate and manage the entire event life-
cycle. Think about event management as a pyramid, as shown in
Figure 1-1. At the wide, bottom of the pyramid are all the logistics
that have to happen to get to the day of the event. You likely spend
far too much time worrying about — and executing — logistics at
this level. These are the important, but often repetitive, tasks that
go into creating and marketing the event. Here, event technology
automates and simplifies these manual tasks, lowering the risk of
errors and freeing you to focus on the elements of your event that
drive greater value.

In the middle where the pyramid narrows, the event has arrived.
This is why you have the event in the first place! Chances are you
spend less energy than you should on the implementation effort
needed onsite. This is where value is created — and captured —
for your attendees, you, and your exhibitors (if you have them).
Here, technology helps you engage and better understand your
attendees while they’re onsite. As a planner or marketer, you
capture their “physical footprint,” that trail of information and
interest they generate as they attend sessions, answer surveys,
tweet or post, and visit exhibitor booths.
When you reach the top of the pyramid, your attendee has gone
home. Your attention turns to preparing and sharing results and
identifying areas for improvement. You’ve probably captured tons
of data points, but it’s scattered and too hard to put together,
let alone make sense of, meaning you can’t demonstrate tangible
value for all the effort you’ve spent at the first two levels. Event
management technology helps you analyze and make sense of all
that data, put it to good use to stay in touch with your attendee,
and make improvements to your next event.
Sometimes you invite other audiences to participate, like spon-
sors and exhibitors. Event management technology adds value for
those sponsors and exhibitors by
»» Giving them more visibility into event attendees
»» Facilitating meetings between them and attendees, which
can lead to potential leads and buyers
»» Giving them tools to efficiently and effectively capture
information about the leads they meet onsite
FIGURE 1-1: Navigating the event lifecycle.

Today, best-in-class event management technology combines
software for venue selection, registration, marketing, and mobile
event apps to automate your tasks throughout the event lifecycle.
Event management technology saves you time and money and
frees you up to think about the big picture rather than the minu-
tiae. The next section looks at the tasks that can be automated if
you harness the power of technology.
Using tech before your event
From the moment the idea for an event crosses your mind — or
your desk — there are tools that help you automate and simplify
your tasks. Before your event, event management technology
helps
»» Create a budget
»» Find, compare, and select the best venue
»» Find and coordinate content and speakers
»» Create a promotional website for your event
»» Promote your event to attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors
»» Manage registration and process payments
»» Manage attendees’ housing and travel needs
Using tech during your event
Once your event is underway, there are powerful tools to engage
your attendees, while giving you invaluable insights into attend-
ees’ interests and preferences. Onsite, event management tech-
nology helps you deliver a better attendee and sponsor experience
with tools that
»» Automate and speed up the check-in and badging process
»» Encourage and facilitate networking
»» Use mobile event apps to engage with attendees and
connect them to important event information and content
»» Offer more visibility through sponsorship opportunities
»» Help connect exhibitors with qualified buyers
»» Collect valuable attendee feedback and other data

Using tech after your event
The value of tech doesn’t end when your event is over. There are
tools that let you view and analyze attendee data to understand
their interests, needs, and preferences; improve your events year
after year; and prove their value to your stakeholders. After-event
technology can help you
»» Share attendee data with sales and marketing teams to
better target follow-up and grow revenue
»» Share attendee data with sponsors and exhibitors so they
will come back next time
»» Learn and analyze what worked and what didn’t so you can
deliver a better attendee experience
»» Measure the success and ROI so you can prove your
event’s — and your — value to your stakeholders
Making the Planner’s Job Easier
Event technology allows you to standardize your processes and
run a multi-event strategy. You save time because the solutions
enable you to scale your event planning and execution and create
“muscle memory” around event best practices that you can lev-
erage going forward.
Doing what you do, better
You have multiple stakeholders. You may collaborate with the sales
team to offer events to existing and prospective clients, the execu-
tive staff to identify events that will help the organization meet
its goals, and human resources to plan employee events. You also
serve the attendees, the speakers, and sponsors or exhibitors. And,
you maintain good relationships with venues and service providers.
Event technology gives you access to key information and reports
so you can answer questions from your all of your key stakeholders.
Saving time and money
Collectively, these tools streamline your tasks and enable you to
efficiently and effectively run your events. And, when you up your
event planning skills with technology, you become almost indis-
pensable to your company or your stakeholders.

For example, when you need to find a venue for your event, you
likely send an email to some venues you’ve worked with in the
past or, if the event is to be held in an unfamiliar location, you
search the Internet for a venue, probably tumbling down a rabbit
hole of websites. It can take several days, even weeks, to narrow
your search, and you haven’t even begun to build and send RFPs
or plan site visits.
With event management technology, you have a venue-finding
magic wand. You enter your requisites, and matching venues are
automatically identified. You then write an electronic RFP using
an existing template and tap “Send” to place your request. Ven-
ues respond with bids, and the responses are presented in a way
that allows you to make an educated bid comparison — apples
to apples instead of pears to oranges. That’s just one way event
technology saves you time!
Delivering a great experience
You may wonder what event management technology looks like
for the attendee throughout the event lifecycle. Here’s a sample
of how streamlined and consistent the attendee experience can
be with technology compared to how events were run in the past.
The attendee
1. Receives a personalized email that invites her to participate
2. Clicks a link to visit the website and finds everything she
wants to know about the event
3. Registers after receiving an early-bird discount reminder —
automatically generated by the tech solution
4. Receives regular, relevant information leading up to the event
so she can maximize her time at the event
5. Downloads the mobile event app a few weeks before the
event to begin networking
6. Checks in seamlessly when she arrives
7. Picks up her on-demand badge and goes to her first session
8. Sets up appointments with peers and exhibitors through the
mobile event app
9. Sees a photo of herself on the event’s social media page

Understanding Customers’ Needs
Because you’re collecting data about your prospects and attendees
throughout the event lifecycle, you have information that helps
you craft the event they want. When you promote your events,
you gain insight about which email campaign was most success-
ful, where a visitor abandons your event website and why, which
sessions were most popular, and what attendees would like to see.
Improving the Bottom Line
As Chapter 9 discusses in more detail, event and attendee data
collection is the key ingredient in creating and proving the finan-
cial value of your event. But the data you collect can be used to
prove ROI that goes beyond financial ROI. Getting a positive return
on investment can also mean a positive impact on your organi-
zation’s brand, customer retention, and attendees who perceive
great value from your event.
Finally, event management technology can offer opportunities to
generate new revenue streams of its own through elements like
»» Increased attendance and registration fees
»» New opportunities to promote sponsors and exhibitors
»» Customer upsells
»» Lead generation
»» Sales acceleration
»» Closed business

CHAPTER 2 Developing Your Event Strategy 11
Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Using events to meet your organization’s
objectives
»» Understanding what success looks like
to you
»» Thinking about different kinds of events
»» Planning an event program
Developing Your
Event Strategy
A
ccording to Forrester Research, trade shows and events are
the most effective tactic in the marketing mix, after the
company’s website. So it’s no surprise that your event
strategy should be carefully planned and executed to support
your organization’s objectives — for example, new customer
acquisition, customer satisfaction and education, increased mem-
ber enrollment, or even employee morale. When you think about
events, there are two ways to think about your events strategy:
»» The overall strategy of your events program, which uses
different types of events and tactics to meet organizational
objectives for growth, revenue, education, and brand
awareness
»» The strategy for each single event. The single event strategy
folds into the overall event strategy.
Whether you’re the executive thinking about how to drive your
organization’s growth, the marketer thinking about delivering
sales and amplifying your brand, or the event planner trying to
deliver a great attendee experience and just get more done, event
management technology can help you plan, execute, and measure
all the meetings and events across your organization.

Optimizing Events to Grow Your Business
It’s important to design an overall event program that addresses
the specific goals of your organization because it’s difficult to
accomplish all your goals with a single event. Ideally, you’ll have
many events during the course of a year and you’ll plan different
types of events ranging from user conferences and roadshows to
connect with your customers and members, to attending trade
shows and other industry events to reach new audiences.
Adding events to the marketing mix
On average, 25-33 percent of the marketing budget is spent on
events. What’s more, 74 percent of attendees have a more posi-
tive perception of an organization after having attended an event
(source: EventTrack, Event Marketing Institute).
Today’s event toolbox consists of many types of events, from
events you host to events you attend. Even digital events like
webcasts are becoming more prevalent. It’s important to pick the
event types that best meets your organization’s goals. Putting
together the right event program — and measuring effectiveness
across all of it — can make all the difference.
When matching your event to your goals, think about the two
main event categories:
»» Events you host: Hosted events, such as user conferences,
roadshows, executive dinners, webinars, fundraisers, or
trade shows, help you meet a variety of objectives. For
example, you may plan user conferences and roadshows to
connect with your customers and drive new sales, seminars
to educate members, and free events to give existing
customers a sneak peek at a new product or offering. You
may host internal events that range from onboarding
training courses to employee appreciation and recognition
events. Events you host have several advantages. You have
complete control of the audience (invite whomever you
want) and message. You educate and engage your audience
on your terms (even determining where, and with whom,
they sit for dinner!). With total control over the experience,
you can focus and measure attendee behavior. You can
amplify and reinforce your brand.

»» Events you attend: Attending key events in your industry
and trade shows is part of building and extending brand
awareness to new target audiences, procuring new leads,
obtaining competitive intelligence, conducting market
research, and even opportunistically staying in touch with
your customers who may also be in attendance. Look for
hosting opportunities at events you attend, such as sponsor-
ships, dinners, or receptions that increase your onsite
visibility. This is a great way to make your presence known.
Just about anything you can do offline, you can now do online.
Here are some of the benefits to holding online events:
»» Expanding your reach beyond those able to travel to your
physical location
»» Providing great content that can be re-used throughout
the year
»» Offering incremental sources of registration or sponsorship
revenue
Your events are a big investment . . . in time and money. You need
to measure and optimize your live events just as you do with your
other marketing channels such as your website. Event manage-
ment technology allows you to do that, both at a single event and
across all your events.
Planning events with a purpose
Match your event type to the objectives you’re trying to meet.
Some of the most common goals for an event are
»» Building awareness: People can’t consider you if they
don’t know you. Building positive awareness is often one of
the first objectives of an organization’s event strategy. The
purpose of these events is reaching a new audience and
garnering new customer or member leads. Choose
industry trade shows carefully based on the presence of
your target audience, and be sure that your messaging
reflects their interests.

»» Engaging customers and members: Make sure you
engage — and impress — your customers or members.
A hosted event can help you continue conversations with
customers and start new ones, and accelerate and close
deals, so be sure your invite list includes your key
opportunities . . . and then treat them like VIPs!
»» Increasing lifetime value: It costs far less to retain an
existing customer than acquire a new one, and events are a
great way to show your customers or members that your
organization has the vision and capabilities for the long
haul . . . and that they made (or will make) the right decision
by partnering with you.
»» Training and inspiring staff: Not all events are about the
bottom line. Happy, motivated employees lead to happy,
long-term customers. Part of your event strategy should
include internal events such as sales training, product
training, and motivational events.
Defining success
What will success of your event look like to you? The term defining
success has become a buzzword, yet, it’s key to define what suc-
cess looks like for each event and the total event program. Other-
wise, how will you know if your event was worth the time, effort,
and cost? Know what value you were looking for to determine
your event’s ROI. Here are some of the benefits of measuring your
event’s ROI:
»» Understand which type of events you should do more of,
and which events you should do less of.
»» Right-size the human and capital investments in your event
program.
»» Communicate the value of your events and your efforts.
»» Make better, more informed, decisions overall.
The question then, is how to measure event ROI. It starts with
accurately capturing event spend — the “I” in “investment” —
and doing it across all your events. The “return” is the value
you needed to get out of the event, often expressed in atten-
dance numbers, attendee satisfaction, and so on. Increasingly,
though, the return must be expressed in dollars. That requires

deeply understanding what is happening with your attendees and
tracing that directly to revenue.
Events no longer need to be an “offline” activity. Using an event
management platform that integrates event and attendee data
makes it easier to analyze data — and prove ROI — because the
information is captured and stored in a single system.
You need to coordinate your events across the company, making
a plan for the next year and beyond. Event technology’s strong
reporting capabilities enable you to deeply understand all your
events; the data is consolidated, complete, and easy to analyze and
report on. You can see how each individual event performs and get
cross-event reporting. You know if you’re meeting your KPIs and
can find ways to continually improve your event strategy.
Building an Event Program
After you’ve identified the purpose and type of event, you can
build the specific program. Event management technology can
help you make better decisions and plan the details of your events,
because often you will be planning and executing several events
simultaneously.
Thinking about audience, content,
location, and timing
Just like a well-written composition paper, you want to think
about the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of your event and
link it back to the purpose of your event and how this event fits
into the overall event strategy of your organization. Consider the
following:
»» Who: Your audience. Will your attendees be new potential
leads, qualified prospects, existing customers, or employees?
How many attendees do you anticipate?
»» What: Your content. What message do you want to convey
to your audience? What call to action would you like them to
respond to during or after the event? How do you want them
to feel about your organization when the event ends?

»» When: The timing. Is your event tied to a season, a product
announcement, another event? What date will cause the
least amount of friction with your attendees’ schedules?
»» Where: The location. How much meeting space do you
need? What city will help you drive attendance? Is the venue
easily accessible from the local airport?
»» Why: Your purpose. What ROI do you want to achieve?
What will success for this event look like? How does this
event fit into the organization’s overall event strategy?
Maintaining cross-event and
cross-channel visibility
Because each single event is part of the overall event strategy, no
event should be an island. As you build the overall plan of many
different types of events, look for opportunities for cross-event
and cross-channel promotions. Which attendees will come to
multiple events? And how will you know unless you can “follow”
their presence and interests across your events?
Event management technology captures all of an attendee’s inter-
actions with you and your events in near-real time. This wealth of
attendee data — integrated with modern marketing automation
systems — means you can send personalized communications
about additional events they’d be interested in and drop them into
the right marketing campaigns.
Integration with your customer relationship management (CRM)
system also means your sales team will be armed with better
information about attendees. They can have more productive
conversations with their prospects and customers, and you can
see exactly the impact that your events have, from the moment
when you generate a lead to when that lead becomes a customer,
and beyond.
A good event program consists of many different types of events,
and each event has its own KPIs to be met and measured.

CHAPTER 3 Managing Your Budget 17
Chapter 3
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Setting budget goals
»» Identifying costs
»» Creating ancillary revenue
»» Talking to the C-suite
Managing Your Budget
I
t all comes down to money. A robust and reliable budget manage-
ment tool in your event management system is key to accurately
collecting budgetary information, tracking negotiated savings,
demonstrating event ROI, and making better business decisions.
Historically, budget management and spend tracking for meet-
ings and events has been difficult, often inaccurate, and always
time-consuming. As you well know, it’s vital and unavoidable, but
recent research shows that event planners feel budgeting is the
most challenging part of event planning and execution (source:
Cvent “Second Annual Global Event Industry Benchmarks Study”).
Building a Budget
A well-thought-out budget can save you time, money, and head-
aches. Event technology can help you build that projected budget,
think ahead to identify potential overages, and show you ways to
make money from your event beyond registration fees, through
sponsors, exhibitors, and advertising.
Setting your goals
The first step to creating your event budget is to determine what
you’re trying to accomplish. Do you want to generate 100 new

leads for the sales team? Are you running a training seminar for
the customer service staff? Do you want to enroll new members in
your association? Each of these events can be as simple or gran-
diose as your imagination and budget.
Go back to your organization’s overall event strategy and think
about where this event fits in the grand scheme of things. Make
sure this event aligns with your organization’s brand and short-
and long-term objectives. Likewise, consider how your choice of
speakers ties in with your budget and goals. A high-profile key-
note speaker can be a huge draw for potential attendees but can
also represent a huge expense.
Categorizing costs
Each organization manages its cost and revenue centers in a
slightly different way. For example, marketing for your event may
be part of the marketing department’s budget or may be part of
the budget for each individual event.
Some of the categories you should consider are
»» Venue rental: Depending on the size of your event, you may
divide the costs among the various locations, such as
meeting rooms and exhibit space.
»» Audiovisual (AV): Your venue may include this cost, or AV
costs may be allocated separately on the basis of production
and equipment needs.
»» Attendee collateral: Remember to budget for badges, tote
bags, and any memorable swag you want your attendees to
take home.
»» Speaker fees: This may include honorariums as well as
transportation, food, and accommodation.
»» Food and beverage: This may include meals and snacks for
attendees as well as night-time events like welcoming or
closing galas.
»» Entertainment: This can be as simple as an emcee or a
celebrity singer.
»» Transportation and accommodation: This covers travel
and hotel for the event staff.
»» Labor or service fees: Some locations require you to work
with local unions.

If you have an idea of how much you plan to spend, you can iden-
tify some potential areas for negotiation opportunities when
speaking with venues (to learn more, please turn to Chapter 4).
Offsetting Costs
Get creative with finding ways to keep your budget in the black.
You can offset costs with sponsorships and the right pricing
strategy, and reduce or avoid costs for certain parts of your event.
Finding sponsors
When you approach other organizations to sponsor your event in
one way or another, you’re offering to let them into your net-
work and meet your attendees, typically for a fee or a trade of
some kind. To maximize the value that sponsors receive from
your events, make sure to highlight and measure the advertising
benefits across multiple event touchpoints. Sponsorship opportu-
nities can include
»» Mentions in email invitations
»» Call outs on your event website
»» Dedicated posts on social media
»» A logo on name badges
THINKING ABOUT STRATEGIC
MEETINGS MANAGEMENT
If you plan meetings and events across multiple departments and need
visibility into total event spending across the entire organization — or
if you need centralized approval for your event’s budget, date, or
purpose — a Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) program may be
just what you need. An SMM solution streamlines the meeting request
and approval process, collects and tracks budgetary data, and creates a
centralized view of events across the organization.
Companies that implement an SMM program save as much as
25 percent in meeting spend during the first year alone (source:
Worldview Travel Corporate Services).

»» Ads within your mobile event app, including splash pages,
banner ads, and sponsored listings
»» Questions in surveys and polling
»» An onsite networking experience
»» Sponsorship of a session, meal, or giveaway
»» Onsite branding or signage
Selling exhibit space
Exhibitors are the lifeblood of many conferences and trade shows
and can be a large revenue driver for your organization. You want
to make sure exhibitors feel they connected with qualified buyers
and built new relationships at your events, so they’ll decide to
return to your event next time.
Technology can help your exhibitors capture leads, collect the
right information, score leads, input notes, and send them off to
their sales team for follow-up. This makes your exhibitors happy
and excited to sponsor your next event.
In addition, technology enables your event team to view exhibitor
lead counts in real time, which booths attendees are visiting, and
the flow of traffic on the floor. You can use this insight to ensure
exhibitors receive the lead flow they need and can follow up right
away to ensure their ROI.
Pricing approaches
You can boost your bottom line by charging more. Think about
»» Registration fees: Simply increasing the registration fee by
$5 to $10 can add extra dollars to offset costs.
»» Add-on items: Offer items or elevated experiences that
attendees can purchase on top of the registration fee.
Cost avoidance
The alternative to charging more is spending less. Think about
»» A mobile event app: Printing costs add up quickly, not to
mention the cost of shipping heavy paper-based collateral to
your event. Putting information like event agendas and maps

on a mobile event app and then making presentations and
session recordings available online after the event can add
up to big savings and help the environment too.
»» Onsite check-in technology: This can reduce the amount
of staff that’s required at the check-in desk.
»» On-demand onsite badge printing: This can lower the
number of staff hours needed to pre-print, stuff, and
organize name badges before the event.
»» Track meal attendance: Use this data to help you prevent
overspending on F&B for future events.
»» Track session attendance: Use this information to better
gauge your space needs at future events.
Getting Your Budget Approved
Getting event budgets finalized often means you need approval
from the director of marketing, CMO, or CEO. Having a solid bud-
get that demonstrates ROI makes that conversation easier and
event technology helps you do that.
Talking to stakeholders
Your goal when talking to stakeholders is to get everyone on the
proverbial bus. You want them to listen to your event overview,
understand your budget, and have them give you full buy-in. The
reality is, they’ll probably have feedback and you may have to
negotiate a few items on your list. Keep the following in mind
when talking to stakeholders:
»» Use language they use. Executives are concerned with ROI,
revenue, risk, cost containment, labor savings, sales pipeline,
lead generation, and actionable insights.
»» Customer/member acquisition. Acquiring new customers
or members is critically important for most organizations;
show how your event can drive new customers and build
loyalty. Association execs, for example, love to find new
members and retain those they have.
»» Revenue versus cost. Stakeholders roll out the red carpet
for revenue-generating events but those that offer a softer
return such as getting face-time with customers or building

brand recognition can be a harder sell. For all events, but
especially softer ones, lay out a year-over-year plan that will
come close to breaking even and hopefully even earn
money — the ultimate dream and goal.
»» ROI. At the end of the day, you’re back where you began. It’s
really about money and seeing a good return on investment,
however you define that: revenue, leads, conversions, or
brand recognition.
When you negotiate with your stakeholders, keep in mind that
each one has different concerns. Table 3-1 lays out examples of
what some of your stakeholders are likely to be looking for.
TABLE 3-1 Stakeholder Goals
Stakeholder Goals
Executive Having reliable data that shows ROI
Being able to confidently allocate their budget
and resources
Having an efficient, effective team
Hitting revenue goals
Building the organization’s brand and reputation
Marketing leader Being able to prove marketing’s value and hit their KPIs
Driving sufficient leads and pipeline for sales
Having the right marketing mix and live event strategy
Having visibility into the ROI of their events program
Having reliable real-time data that they can act on
IT leader, marketing
technologist, or
marketing operations
Ensuring that all technologies work together smoothly
Ensuring that all data remains integrated
Ensuring that your partners prioritize data security
and integrity
Maintaining compliance with company policies and other
regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation

Convincing the C-suite
Often, your organization’s board of directors or C-suite execu-
tives may not see your event as critical in the grand scheme of
things. Making your event match the overall event strategy that
supports the organization’s purpose and strategy can give you a
leg up when you present to the top brass.
Executives want to know your event puts the organization in a
good light, building brand recognition and adding a shimmer to
the brand halo. They’re more likely to be on board with your event
if you can demonstrate your event will deliver high-quality leads,
accelerate the sales pipeline, and generate revenue. They’ll be
willing to invest in the programs that help the organization hit
growth targets.
Demonstrating ROI
In a world where 80 percent of event processes are managed
manually (Frost & Sullivan), demonstrating ROI can be challenging,
but it’s a challenge that has been solved. This is one of the areas
where event technology really shines!
Centralized reporting provides event planners, marketers, and
stakeholders with key performance indicators like registration
rate, average cost per attendee, and attrition rate, providing a
transparent overview of their events that facilitates better deci-
sion making. You can easily get to and report on the data that’s
most important to each of your stakeholders, including your
executives.
“Best guesses” and manual processes are replaced with concrete
data, giving everyone peace of mind.
Stakeholder Goals
Events team Planning and managing all their events efficiently
Easily reporting on the success of their events
Meeting their attendees’ and internal stakeholders’
expectations for meetings and events
Delivering a great attendee experience

CHAPTER 4 Securing the Best Venues 25
Chapter 4
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Picking the perfect venue
»» Crafting a precise RFP
»» Visiting potential sites
»» Negotiating the best offer
Securing the Best
Venues
V
enue costs are typically the largest cost element of your
meeting or event. Finding a venue is also one of the more
time-consuming tasks for a planner, but one critical to the
success of the event.
Event technology can help you find the best venue at the best
price in the least amount of time by letting you easily request a
proposal from multiple venues and compare rates side-by-side to
ensure you’re spending wisely.
Reviewing the Basics
You have been tasked with planning your organization’s next
conference, and the stakeholders in your company have asked you
to consider unfamiliar destinations and hotels. They have asked
you to “shake it up” and basically start the planning process from
scratch — and that’s left you scratching your head about where to
begin finding a new venue.
Your event should be a cohesive representation of your organiza-
tion’s purpose and culture. Think about the following to begin

to define the type of venue and destination that best meets
your needs:
»» What type of event are you planning? An education
session of like-minded professionals has different require-
ments than an executive offsite.
»» Where will you go? A best practice is to leverage the event
city and venue to drive attendance. On the one hand, that
might mean holding your event in the city where your client
or members are located. On the other hand, choosing a
desirable destination can increase attendance.
»» How will attendees get there? Remember, time out of the
office is one of the top costs of attending an event. Does
your location or city have great lift?
»» What type of venue do you need? Keep in mind the
number and type of sleeping and meeting rooms you need.
»» How much can you spend? Think about both your budget
and your attendee’s budget, keeping in mind airfare, hotel,
transportation, and meal costs.
An event that no one attends is no event at all. The appropriate
choice of a destination and venue shows you have your attendee
in mind. One of the easiest ways to gather this information is to
review surveys from past events, create a new online survey, and
send it to all past and prospective attendees. Carefully consider
their feedback before moving ahead with a future event.
Event management technology keeps those survey results at your
fingertips, helping you improve your events year after year.
Finding the Perfect Destination in a Flash
After you determine your criteria, with a venue sourcing tool such
as the Cvent Supplier Network, rather than spending hours doing
Internet searches, you simply type in a few facts about your event
and a vast database identifies potential venues. Results show you
key information about destinations including
»» Meeting space
»» Number of meeting rooms

»» Capacity of meeting rooms
»» Size of meeting rooms
»» Average hotel room rates
»» Average daily meal costs
»» Total number of sleeping rooms
»» Activities and entertainment
»» Star ratings
»» Promotions
»» Pictures of venues
Using technology to source venue space does not mean you can’t
still work with the venue contacts (NSOs/GSOs) you’ve estab-
lished relationships with. Tech doesn’t mean you have to start
from scratch.
Writing an Electronic RFP
With the results of the database search in hand, you can begin
comparing what the venues offer so you can narrow down to a
handful that you’ll ask to submit proposals. A best practice is to
get bids from multiple venues to guarantee the best rate. Tech-
nology makes this process much simpler and quicker because
you only have to create one eRFP to send to all the venues you’ve
selected — and get bids back in the same format — so that you
can easily compare apples to apples.
Make sure you’re using a technology that can consolidate your
sourcing process via one channel — where you can source to
properties you’re uncovering that could be a good fit — while also
working with the properties where you have contacts or that fall
into your preferred program.
Telling your story
Take the time to give the recipient of your RFP a comprehen-
sive overview of your company and the meeting you are asking
them to bid on. Make sure the vendor understands your needs,

“must-haves” like using your own audiovisual (AV) provider, and
“nice-to-haves” like complimentary parking.
If you’ve hosted this event before, give the venues insight into
what this event has looked like in the past. This helps venues
understand your previous spend and actuals to see if they can
accommodate.
The proposal from the venue is only as good as the information
you provide, and the eRFP templates make it easy to fill in the
blanks. Make sure to include a detailed description of your
»» Event and attendees
»» Sleeping, meeting, and exhibit room requirements
»» Budget guidelines
»» Deadlines and contact information
Defining your purpose
Describe your event objectives, those three to five things your
organization hopes to accomplish with the event and how the
venue can help. Tell them in a clear and concise manner what you
are looking for from the venue. If there’s a possibility that this
venue may be put into your meeting rotation, let them know up
front. The possibility of future business can help them sweeten
the deal even more.
Evaluating Venue Proposals
Now comes the hard part: Evaluating each proposal. This is a
time-consuming and multi-step process. It is vital to review desti-
nations and venues both from a quantitative and qualitative stand-
point. The quantitative analysis helps you weed out venues and
destinations that just won’t fit, while the qualitative data will help
you determine if the venues work well with your group dynamics.
If you don’t use an eRFP tool, hotel proposals can come in many
formats, some easier to read than others, that you will then have
to compile. A digital solution makes your job easier by giving you
a consistent format for receiving venue proposals, allowing you to
make a quicker, more insightful decision.

Creating an assessment
criteria spreadsheet
Before the first proposal hits your email inbox, know your “must-
have” and “nice-to-have” criteria. List those criteria on the left
and the hotels and destinations along the top. You also need to
establish a weight factor on the “nice-to-haves.” For example, free
Wi-Fi may weigh higher than the number of nearby restaurants.
The proposals that meet all your “must-haves” are the ones
that will make the first cut. Now it is time to look at the “nice-
to-haves” — the qualitative factors — and see how they weigh in.
Chances are, five or six venues will rise to the top, so you can feel
confident in your short list.
Qualitative factors
After you’ve narrowed down your destinations and venues, it is
time to move on to the qualitative measurements. Consider things
like star ratings, amenities offered, nearness to restaurants and
attractions.
Meeting rooms matter
According to a study by the International Special Events Society,
information about the meeting rooms is the most important fac-
tor in venue selection, and that makes sense because your attend-
ees spend a good portion of their time there.
Analyze the meeting space floor plans, capacity charts, and pho-
tos online and look for things like
»» Ceiling height: This can affect sight and sound.
»» Layout: For example, are there columns that could block an
attendee’s view, or is the room an odd shape?
»» Proximity: Is the room close to other meeting rooms and
guest rooms?
Building supportive relationships
You’ll be spending a lot of time with the venue staff so it’s impor-
tant to feel you can work well together. Engage with the staff
and determine how responsive they are to your requests. Their
responsiveness will be a good indication of how attentive they will
be if they win your business.

Making the Most of Your Site Visit
Up until now, you and your staff may have been doing everything
in a vacuum, with the occasional update to your boss. Now is the
time to review your research with your management team, event
committee, and a few attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors, and
ask for feedback to help narrow your choices. This is a critical step
because you don’t want to waste your time and resources attend-
ing a site visit for a venue your organization won’t consider.
If possible, hold a face-to-face meeting with all of them. Provide
a video conferencing option for those offsite.
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask a hotel to schedule a site visit with
you. This gives you an opportunity to walk through the venue and
experience what it would be like for your attendees.
Venue sourcing technology helps you prepare for your visit. By
accessing the hotel information before your site visit, you will
have a clear idea of when the hotel was built or renovated, how
much meeting space they have, and what sort of attractions are
close by.
When scheduling and visiting sites, keep the following in mind:
»» Plan to spend at least half a day at one venue, and if
possible, spend the night so you get a true feel for the
facility, including the check-in/check-out experience,
restaurant selections and service levels, quality of guest
rooms, and the ability to use the hotel’s amenities such as
the spa, pool, or fitness center.
»» Spend time with the catering or conference manager and
sample their food, visit every area of the hotel, confirm
meeting space flow with your agenda, acoustics, and visual
appeal, and ask about Wi-Fi and AV support. Ask yourself if
you can visualize your event taking place here.
»» Note your impressions during the entire journey of your site
visit from the destination airport to the sleeping room.
Validate the rates quoted in the RFP, and double check that
all fees and taxes are included. You don’t want surprises
when the final invoice arrives!

After your site visit, call everyone together for another meeting.
Your objective is clear: Rank the venues. Adjust the ranking for
each venue to reflect what you learned during the site visit. It may
quickly become clear which venue is the best choice.
Ask yourself if the venue is too opulent for your guests. “Too
cheap” and “Too expensive” are not words you want to hear from
attendees.
Negotiating with the Venue
Now that your physical or virtual site selection process is com-
plete, it is time to roll up your sleeves and negotiate a fair pack-
age for your organization. Often, this is the most uncomfortable
part of the process for planners because it involves asking for
discounts and complimentary services; but it doesn’t have to be
a grind.
What negotiating boils down to is synchronized value — in other
words, you have what they want (the need for guest rooms, dol-
lars available for meeting space, and revenue for food and bever-
ages), and they have what you want (a great hotel at a desirable
location). If possible, do your negotiations in person or via a video
chat and think about the following:
»» Negotiate the four big concession areas first: Discuss
sleeping room rates, food and beverage, meeting space, and
technology, such as AV and Wi-Fi. The other concessions are
minor compared to the big four.
»» Technology requests: Ask for free Wi-Fi everywhere and
strike the required vendor listing from the technology
concession. Venues will imply you must use their AV (and
catering) vendors; however, these vendors are not required,
and you may bring in your own team.
»» Understand your total value to the venue: Outline the
total estimated economic value your meeting will have to the
venue. Look at the estimated total spend for each conces-
sion. Calculate the total value of spend first and return to it if
you get stuck in the negotiations.

»» Refer to your assessment criteria: Remember your
must-haves and your nice-to-haves. If you’re willing to
concede something, the venue is likely to be flexible, too.
»» Leverage historical data: This best practice improves your
negotiating power. Refer to past rates venues have offered
you or, if you contract a venue for multiple events, show how
much business you’ve given them to negotiate better rates.
»» Using technology to manage venue sourcing means all
historical data is stored in one system.
GLOSSARY OF VENUE TERMS
Request for proposal (RFP): A request to get pricing and availability
(a proposal) from a venue to see if your event will be accommodated
appropriately at that venue.
National/global sales offices (NSOs/GSOs): These are dedicated to
identifying the best business for their chain or branded hotels to
ensure that they’re filling their sleeping rooms and meeting space.
Room block: A planner contracts a “block” of sleeping rooms for an
event to pull the inventory out so it isn’t sold to the public. These
rooms generally have a discounted rate in exchange for the bulk
purchase, but the planner is obligated to fill the rooms.
Room nights: The total number of rooms a planner commits to
occupy at the hotel in exchange for a contracted rate. The number of
room nights does not equal the number of attendees.

CHAPTER 5 Executing a Winning Event Marketing Strategy 33
Chapter 5
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Standing out in a noisy marketplace
»» Creating your marketing strategy
»» Developing content
»» Using email to reach attendees
»» Being social
Executing a Winning
Event Marketing
Strategy
A
s an event planner or marketer, you need to drive the right
attendees to the right events, but it’s getting harder and
harder to do because there’s so much noise in the market-
place. Recent research shows that event planners identify event
marketing and promotion as one of their top three challenges
(source: Cvent “Global Event Industry Benchmarks Study”).
To stand out, you need to understand the audience you’re try-
ing to reach, and then create marketing efforts that resonate with
them. Having the right event marketing strategy can increase
attendance by as much as 20 percent (source: Frost & Sullivan).
An effective marketing strategy that coordinates personal-
ized communication before, during, and after your event gen-
erates excitement, increases attendee loyalty, and drives sales
opportunities.

Facing Today’s Event Marketing
Challenges
When marketing your event, get creative in your use of digital
and offline tactics to break through the traditional model of filling
up the inbox with generic promotions. Talk to customers, mem-
bers, or attendees in a way that interests them and addresses their
individual needs.
Speaking directly to each single attendee, however, is time-
consuming. Technology helps you personalize at scale: You can
easily segment your audience and send different messages to
different types of invitees. In addition to segmentation and
personalized messaging, tech allows you to
»» Meet them where they are when you select channels based
on who your audience is
»» Meet them on the different devices they might be using (for
example, phone, tablet, or laptop)
The right event marketing will ensure you get the word out about
your event, so you’ll attract more attendees. But your marketing
efforts shouldn’t end there. You want to build buzz about your
event, get your registrants engaged and talking about it long
before the first day, and maintain that momentum after it’s over.
Creating Your Marketing Strategy
All strategies are not created equal because not all events are
created equal. For example, the strategy — what you’re trying to
do — for a user conference announcement differs from a
fundraising event strategy. For a user conference, you might want
to increase the number of customers who go through your user
training and create buzz and excitement about your product road
map. For the fundraiser, your message is about how your event
drives your non-profit’s cause.
Your tactics —how you’re going to implement your strategy —
might include timed email announcements, social media ads, and

an event website. The Internet and mobile devices offer an explo-
sion of potential channels and tactics, and you choose the appro-
priate mix to market your events.
Answering the 5 Ws
As you plan your event marketing strategy, ask the five Ws for
your event:
»» Whom do you want to reach?
»» What do they want to learn? What problem do you solve for
them? What action do you want them to take?
»» When is the best time to reach them?
»» Where do they — virtually — hang out?
»» Why should they care about your event?
The answers to these questions help clarify your strategy.
Aligning event and brand
Your event is one of many ways your organization builds brand
awareness, and proper branding is crucial to creating a mar-
ket strategy. Every touchpoint that attendees interact with is an
opportunity to reinforce your organization’s brand. Consider how
many times your attendee interacts with your brand during the
event lifecycle. For example:
»» Invitation emails
»» Email communications leading up to the event
»» Your event website
»» Registration process
»» Name badges
»» Onsite signs at the event
»» Mobile event app
»» Your social media posts about the event
Technology makes consistent branding easier.

Reaching Your Known Audience
Knowing your audience means you have contact information
about them — in particular, names and email addresses — and
ideally information that helps you segment by demographics.
CURATING ENGAGING CONTENT
TO BUILD A GREAT PROGRAM
Attendees expect relevant and compelling content in order to justify
time away from the office and the cost to attend. Use surveys to ask
attendees about their challenges and topics that interest them most,
then build a program that meets their needs. Remember that great
content can help drive attendance.
Of course, you want compelling speakers to present the content.
Never before has it been easier to find speakers, nor have people
been so willing to share their knowledge and expertise as today.
Depending on the type of event, you can find speakers from any
number of sources:
• Someone from your organization who has a story to tell
• Customers or association members
• Subject experts in your industry or outside your sector
• People in your C-suite executives’ network
• Key influencers in the community
• A keynote speaker who will motivate your audience and drive
registration
Event technology can facilitate the call for papers (CFP) process, so
you can feature great content at your event. A CFP solution makes col-
lecting submissions, vetting speakers, voting on their relevancy, and
managing speaker deliverables much easier. Use email, your website,
and social media to let experts in your field know you’re seeking
speakers for your upcoming event.
After you receive the submissions from potential speakers, you can dis-
tribute them electronically to your team members for review and scor-
ing. Event technology enables you to streamline and consolidate the
process of accepting or rejecting submissions and notifying authors.
You can then publish approved submissions on your event’s agenda.

Segmenting your audience is a best practice that allows you to
personalize your marketing and make your communications
relevant to each individual attendee.
Technology automates this process and makes it easy to do at
scale. If you have a strong contact database, you can segment your
marketing by job title, role, company, industry, past attendance at
your events, and more.
Personalizing email at every touchpoint
Email is a fantastic marketing tool for reaching your known audi-
ence. A clean contact list is key to making it effective.
If you’re pulling your list from an Excel sheet or your CRM, clean-
ing it up may take a little work, but will make marketing future
events much easier. With the right email tool, you can manage,
update, and maintain your list on an ongoing basis.
Remember, if you’re planning an email marketing campaign for
your event, you need to consider the local rules of the countries
where your intended audience is. Some countries require permis-
sion from your contacts to be able to send them emails (called
opt-in), and many require you to offer the option to unsubscribe
from future emails (called opt-out). Make sure you know these
rules before you send!
In addition to helping you segment your list, event management
technology can track people you’ve invited who have responded or
declined your invitations, as well as those who are still in process.
It can also help you keep a record of contacts who have unsub-
scribed and make sure you don’t send them emails they don’t
want. It allows for personalization, so you can reach, persuade,
and manage invitees effectively. With highly targeted, person-
alized, and automated email campaigns, you’ll engage contacts,
boost response rates, and drive event attendance.
Email content can include background information on key session
topics, industry studies, or podcasts with speakers. Send each
attendee the information she’ll find most useful.
Test, tweak, and track your emails to see what works and what
doesn’t so you can continually improve your campaigns.

Timing your communications
The attendee journey begins as soon as your event is announced
and continues through the event. Good email marketing — or event
direct mail — looks professional and is systematically deployed.
Event management technology enables you to automate emails,
updates, and confirmations. Event after an invitee registers for
your event, keep communications going to keep them informed,
make speaker announcements, and build excitement and buzz.
By engaging regisrants prior to the event, marketers can encour-
age desired behaviors like upgrading to paid registrations,
choosing sessions or tracks, promoting one-on-one meetings,
downloading the mobile event app, and sharing on social media.
Keeping attendees interested and involved leading up to the event
increases the number of people who actually attend, and they may
encourage others to join them.
Reaching Your Potential Audience
You can leverage a variety of channels to reach your audience,
whether your event is new or you want to broaden the attendance
at an event you have run before.
Organic and paid search
Paid search is a terrific way to attract prospects who have an
interest in what you have to say but might not know you.
Keep organic searches in mind when creating any material that
you publish online. Make sure to use metatags to optimize your
results in search engines.
You can acquire a list of email addresses that match the demo-
graphics of your target audience.
Using social media
Social media is the always-on event marketing channel that fur-
ther engages attendees and extends your reach. You can easily
empower your attendees to spread the word to their networks that
they are attending your event. This can drive attendance by creat-
ing the “fear of missing out” in others.

Use multiple channels to market your event and reach your audi-
ences. You need to know and promote on both the online and
offline channels where your attendees hang out.
Create a designated hashtag for your event to unify social posts
from multiple people on the same subject. Remember to promote
this hashtag on your event page, marketing materials, and blog
before, during, and after the event and encourage people to use it.
One of the fastest and best ways to validate and raise awareness
for your events is tapping into influencers. Encourage people to
share and retweet posts about your event. Identify the influencers
in your sector and reach out to them early in the event process.
Your potential audience listens to these people and often follows
their advice.
Enlisting your sales team
If you have a sales team, these individuals are a great source of
event marketing support. Make sure they know about your event
and ask them to promote it when they have contact with custom-
ers. Think about incentives to motivate them to do so.
Marketing During Your Event
Continuing to engage your audience with your event marketing
tactics, before, during, and after your event is a best practice. The
latest innovations in social and mobile technology, combined with
event management technology, offer opportunities to wow your
attendees.
Going mobile
Smartphones and tablets offer immediate and intimate connec-
tions to your audiences. With a mobile event app, you can market
your event even during the event by sending push notifications to
attendees about upcoming sessions, new sessions that are added,
or parts of the event they should check out. Encourage attendees
to post about your event on their social networks so you can
expand your reach and audience.

Amplifying your message through
attendees
Use multiple formats to amplify your message. For example, you
can stream some of the sessions online, have webcasts during the
event, or even provide a digital track.
Organizations can compile and project attendees’ social content
in real time while also including custom posts to spark excite-
ment. With event management technology, you can create this
virtual event experience that brings your social networks and
event content to life, live at your event. You can use a social wall
to make event announcements and even run onsite games and
challenges to promote interaction.
Event management technology such as registration systems,
mobile event apps, and post-event surveys can collect many types
of personal information, including names, physical addresses,
email addresses, computer IP addresses, session attendance,
frequent flyer information, food preferences, and more. Data
security and privacy are increasingly important to individuals and
organizations alike. Governments and other regulatory bodies
are responding by setting guidelines for how personal informa-
tion can be captured, stored, and accessed. In some cases, non-
compliance can result in significant financial and reputational
damage. So, being a good steward of your attendees’ data isn’t
just good marketing — it’s required.
Keeping the Conversation Going
Event management technology lets you capture your attendee’s
physical footprint while she’s walking the tradeshow floor or
attending sessions. The more data you collect about her movements
and interests, the more personalized follow-up you can send her
during or immediately after the event. This data helps you deliver
more relevant information, and a more relevant event next year.
Following up after the event
After the event, plan a follow-up campaign to thank attendees for
coming to your event and ask for feedback and suggestions for

future events. You can also share resources or news about upcom-
ing events and provide steps for keeping in touch.
Lock in exhibitors and attendees for future events with year-
round communications based on onsite interest.
Extending your event online
The brand building and other engagement opportunities don’t
have to end just because the event is over. Highlight key takeaways
from the event on your event website for those in your target
audience who couldn’t attend. Where possible, include videos,
photos, and quotes from your attendees. Use the same tactics and
channels you used to promote the event to drive your audience
back to your event or organization’s website. Your goal is to start
building demand for the next event.

CHAPTER 6 Building Your Event Website 43
Chapter 6
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Thinking about your registration
experience
»» Designing your site
»» Registering attendees
Building Your Event
Website
Y
our event website is your biggest promotional tool and
the hub for your attendee to read about your event, reg-
ister, choose which sessions to attend, and learn about
the location and its attractions. Event management technology
makes it easy to create a custom website that matches the look
and feel of your event, whether it’s a fundraising banquet, a
board meeting, or a multi-session, multi-day, full-blown
industry conference.
Choosing the Type of Website You Need
You’re probably itching to get started designing your website,
choosing the images and color palette, and writing copy. Hold on!
First you have to make some decisions about the purpose of your
event website.
You can create two different online registration experiences based
on the type of event, how much content the event will have, and

how much demand you must generate to attend. Choose between
two types of event websites:
»» Registration-only website: This type of website simply
allows visitors to register for the event. This website works
best for events that don’t require additional information to
convince the potential attendee to attend.
»» Marketing and registration websites: When you host an
event that requires a more thoughtful decision on the
attendees’ part, you want to create a website that both
markets your event and offers a seamless registration
process. You provide information about the event to build
awareness and use language that converts the visitor into a
registrant. This type of website also educates the attendee
about what to expect at the event. You typically choose this
type of website when you have a complex registration
process or multi-faceted content.
Choosing a Hosting Provider
The number of events you plan each year and your level of tech-
nological expertise help you decide if you will host your website
on your IT platform, use a third-party platform, or turn to an
event management technology provider:
»» Hosting yourself: If you’re part of a large organization,
your organization probably has a self-hosted website and a
webmaster. You may be able to piggyback on that website to
host your event website or rely on the webmaster’s expertise to
create your event website. However, the needs for your event
website may compete with other priorities for your web team.
»» Using a third-party host: A third-party host such as
Wordpress or Squarespace makes creating a website relatively
easy with templates. There will be limitations on how the
website integrates with the registration process, however,
because the user must go to a separate website to register.
»» Working with an event technology provider: This option
allows you and your staff to set up and manage your event
website yourself. With many providers, you can customize
your site without knowledge of HTML and, in some cases,
without knowledge of CSS or any coding at all. Customizable

templates for marketing, registration, speaker bios, and
sessions enable you to create a robust and complete website
with plug-and-play simplicity.
»» Some providers offer user-friendly drag-and-drop designers
to create branded and professional event websites. Keep the
attendee experience in mind when they interact with your
event websites and registration process. Ensure that your
provider can help you meet accessibility standards and
create sites that are responsive, meaning they will look good
no matter which type of device your attendees are using.
Including Key Elements
Your event audience is likely to spend the most time interacting
with your brand on your website in advance of your event. With
this in mind, it’s important to impress your audience with a web-
site that’s sleek, professional, easy to navigate, and informative.
Aligning company and event brand
It’s important to maintain consistency across your event promo-
tions and marketing to build brand awareness throughout the
event journey, and event management technology is tailor-made
to deliver a consistent experience. Your event website and regis-
tration should be an extension of your brand. Having alignment
between the website, emails, and registration will help make your
event seem more legitimate and professional. Event management
technology allows you to choose from a variety of professional-
looking templates and design themes that you can customize to
reflect your organization’s logo and branding.
Providing relevant information
As you begin thinking about the design of your website, gather
content that you’ll want include such as your value propositions,
general information about dates, times, location, and pricing.
Your website may have updates during the event lifecycle — and
tech makes those updates easy to do. In the days leading up to
registration, the call to action may simply be to leave a name and
email to get on the mailing list. After registration opens, the call
to action is to register for the event. While the event is happen-
ing, the call to action may be to post photos or tag the event on
social media.

Making it easy to use
Some of the most common reasons website visitors abandon the
site are because it’s difficult to use, the pages are slow to load, or
relevant information is hard to find. Make sure your website is
user friendly, easy to navigate, and responsive and can be viewed
on any device.
A best practice is to make registration frictionless for invitees, no
matter what device they’re using. Whatever platform you choose
to host your website, make sure it offers a version that’s opti-
mized for mobile devices — more and more people do their web
surfing from their smartphones and tablets.
Designing a Marketing Website
Often, the planning is the most time-consuming part because
once you have determined your website’s goals and purpose and
gathered content, event management technology makes building
the site quite easy. Creating an event marketing website follows
the same foundational steps that you would take when designing
any website:
»» Do your research: Review surveys from past events and any
data you’ve collected from online surveys you’ve been
conducting to find out what information is most useful to the
potential attendee who visits your site. Do they see sessions
on topics relevant to them? Do they think twice about
spending the registration fee compared to the perceived
value? Make sure to address their questions in your market-
ing copy so they can easily say, “Yes” to your event.
»» Create a site map: As you design the website, put yourself
in the visitor’s shoes. You know everything about your event,
but the person coming to your website doesn’t. What’s the
most important piece of information they need to see? Put
that front and center. Think about the types of pages your
website will include, for example, an FAQ page, speaker page,
and pricing that shows early bird and affiliation discounts.
Make your call to action clear to the website visitor.

»» Build the wireframe: As shown in Figure 6-1, a wireframe is
like a storyboard for your website. Event management
technology helps you create the schematic for each page of
your website. At this stage, you can play around with
different arrangements for the elements until you find the
one that best meets your purpose. You won’t see the design
elements or content on the wireframe; you will establish the
functionality and the type of content each page will contain.
FIGURE 6-1: The wireframe shows the plan for each page of your website.

»» Gather content: You need to have all your content in one
place, typed, proofread, and ready to insert in the wireframe.
At this point, you should have the event description. You’ll
add information like speaker bios and photos, session
descriptions, and venue floor plans as that information
becomes available.
Another feature you can consider adding to your event
website is a directory of event registrants, which allows other
attendees to see who is attending and begin networking in
advance of the event — creating a “can’t miss” factor.
»» Put it all together: After you’ve created a wireframe you’re
pleased with and gathered all the content, you put the two
together. Event technology guides you through the process
of placing content in the proper fields of the wireframe.
At this point, you also choose the color palette and insert
your event and organization logos so the website reflects
your brand.
Make sure images you include meet the size and resolution
requirements of the host platform you’re using, and keep in
mind that hi-res images will slow down a website.
»» Test and reiterate: Before launching the website to the
public, you want to work out as many of the kinks as you
can. Event management technology lets you test your
website before going live. Pretend you are an attendee and
go through all the motions that an attendee would do when
visiting your site. Better yet, ask someone who wasn’t part of
the design process to test it. When something doesn’t work
or isn’t intuitive, fix it to make it so.
Pay particular attention to any links you include. You don’t
want your visitor to click on a link to the registration page or
city map and receive the dreaded 404 message. If you use
event management technology, you minimize that risk.
»» Launching the site: Launching your event website can be
an event itself. As part of coordinated marketing efforts,
send an email to your mailing list with a link to the site and
blast your social media accounts with links. Build excitement
around your event and encourage early bird registrations.

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