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We all need a spot of guidance from time to time. Most organisers appreciate the use of a schedule to keep everything on track. And if there is one function that really benefits from a degree of structure, it’s marketing.
You could spend thousands on promoting your event and still end up with an empty venue. Without a set of goals to follow, and a rough idea of how to achieve them, you could be setting yourself up for a fall.
It’s for that reason why you need an event marketing plan template. This should contain questions that apply to any type of gathering, from a conference to a private meeting. So long as you’ve filled in each box, your staff will always have something to refer back to when building publicity and sales.
What goes into an event marketing plan template?
The basics
When building your blank canvas, it always pays to start with the obvious questions:
- What are our goals? – E.g “sell 1,000 tickets per month”
- Who are our target audience?
- Why do they attend our event?
- What is our core messaging?
The idea behind all four questions is to remind people why you’re here and what you’re trying to achieve. It sounds easy, but too many events try and be everything to everyone.
Let’s say I’m organising a networking event for SEO professionals. People will buy a ticket because they want to meet others in their industry. Thus, my messaging should be around connecting people and generating ROI.
“The role of CRM within the events business” Whitepaper
The channels
The next inclusion for your event marketing plan template is a list of channels and a strategy for each.
If I were to promote my SEO networking event, I’d probably want to allocate a share of my time towards advertising on Linkedin. I’d also be looking into any forums and publications that search engine experts would head to for insight. If my event were big enough (2,000+ attendees), I might even want to consider targeted display advertising.
Remember, you don’t have to make a plan for every channel. Some events will target just a few, ignoring anything that doesn’t hit the mark.
The budget
In terms of overall spend, you should study any previous budgets and get advice before creating a figure. Some events can dedicate up to 50% of their overall costs to marketing. However, this will vary on the size of your event, as bigger gatherings tend to require more promotion.
After deciding on an overall figure, you should assign a rough amount to each channel. Some organisers hate overspending. But if you see that one channel is driving more sales than another, you should be willing to shift more money to the high-performing campaigns.
The questions for your event marketing plan template should be:
- What is our budget?
- What is the weighting of spend between channels?
- How do we measure ROI channel by channel?
Plan of activation
Once you’ve outlined your audience, message, channels and spend, you can start to finalise what is arguably the hardest step: your marketing plan. This should give a detailed account of what is happening and when, down to key messaging on your channels.
Try a weekly schedule for your smaller events and a monthly plan for anything bigger. You can always add new elements as you go along, but it helps to have a base to work off.
If you’d like to copy our event marketing plan template, the questions are as follows:
- What are our goals?
- Who are our target audience?
- Why do they attend our event?
- What is our core messaging?
- What channels are we using and what is our strategy for each?
- What is our budget?
- What is the weighting of spend between channels?
- How do we measure ROI channel by channel?
Need more advice on marketing your event? Head to our piece on “mastering promotion via social media”.
