Have you ever ran an event without planning experience thinking how easy and quick it would be, only to realize a bit later that you couldn’t have been more wrong? Whether you work in the marketing or communication department or you run a business, there may come a time when you’ll have to plan your first event.
In many cases, the budget won’t allow you to hire an event professional, which means you’ll have to do everything yourself. You can run into multiple problems when holding an event without planning experience.
First, by not knowing how to handle the event logistics, you may experience big delays that will compromise the experience of your attendees. Second, the way you plan the event may be incongruent with your goals. In other words, you may run a brand event with the intention to attract new clients, yet end up having a weak event with no marketing potential. Finally, the lack of planning knowledge and skills may cost you enormous amounts of money, time, and stress.
So what you do then? To help you out, we put together a few steps on how to run high-quality events without planning experience.
Step 1. Create a powerful event business plan
Why are you planning the event in the first place? Are you trying to raise brand awareness? Strengthen brand loyalty? You can’t plan an event without having a clear end goal you want to achieve. That’s why you must set up an efficient and powerful event business plan.
Apart from controlling the expenses and hunting for sponsors, setting up a conference business plan will help you gain a better perspective on how to attract new attendees and sell more tickets. In other words, there’s no other way around envisioning your event as a business opportunity that can potentially increase your revenue. Considering this, check out these must-include steps to take into account when creating your event business plan.
Step 2. Use powerful event planning software
When running events without planning experience, you need help. Event logistics can become a nightmare in a matter of minutes, and if you don’t have the proper tools to handle it, you may end up canceling the whole event. Apart from a lot of stress, tasks such as setting up a website, coordinating the online registration and sending email campaigns, can take a lot of time. So don’t hesitate to purchase powerful event planning software, which integrates all the features you need. By doing so, you’ll be able to automatize different tasks, and save days of planning. To find out more, check out this article on how to choose the best event planning software.
Step 3. Create a user-friendly event agenda
Regardless of the type of event (from product launches to corporate conferences), the number one factor that will truly impact your attendees’ experience is how you decide to create your event agenda. When organizing an event without planning experience, building a program requires a lot of thinking and context-aware decision-making. Your agenda will influence how your guests perceive the event and the memories they’ll form about the overall experience. Check out this article before you create your first event agenda.
Step 4. Design a powerful email campaign to attract more attendees
Compared to other marketing strategies, an email campaign lets you be more personal and have better control over the outcomes. You have immediate access to options such as open or response rates, and you can always experiment with different follow-up approaches, depending on the email receivers’ profile. Here are some tips you can follow when designing your event email campaign.
Step 5. Take event promotion seriously
Poor event promotion equals a lower attendance rate and unsatisfying overall results. And considering the multitude of communication platforms and tools out there for event professionals, it’s easier than ever to get lost and commit big marketing errors that may compromise the success of your next event. To help you avoid promotion blunders, here’s a list of common mistakes people without planning experience make when working (or NOT working) on their marketing strategies.
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When organizing an event without planning experience, you have two options. The first one is to go with the flow, believing that you can manage it. The second option is to take it seriously, and learn as much as you can before actually doing it. That’s why you shouldn’t hesitate to invest your time into checking our blog posts and articles on how to run awesome events.
Our mission is to provide you not only with the necessary tools to accomplish the tasks and automatize the event logistics, but to also help you better understand how event management works and how you can transform you upcoming event into a high-quality experience for your attendees. Just click on our blog, and level up your game.
