When you’re growing your event, you’re going to need more marketing. You have to reach a bigger audience — and connect with them — to be successful. And with only a few teammates to help you out — or none at all — how do you do it?
Overcome these three common challenges to better scale your event marketing.
Event marketing challenge #1: Not enough resources
Marketing budgets are often small. In fact, majority of event creators say that their budget is inefficient. So when you’re looking to grow your event, you need to make informed decisions on where to allocate your marketing spend.
Given resource constraints, many event organisers choose to share costs by partnering up with brands and sponsors. These partners can often be cheaper than a full-time hire, freeing up your budget for other uses — like benefits, food and drinks, and insurance.
Here are ways you can collaborate with brands and sponsors with limited resources:
- Brand partners: When you’re a small team, your budget is tight. Partnering with locally (or nationally) known brands can help you offload some of those costs. For example, these brands can post about your event on their social media and send promotional emails to their audience.
- Sponsors: Companies are chomping at the bit to get their name out in the public arena. Take advantage of that. Find a budding company looking to make a name for itself. Offer discounted sponsorship packages if they pitch in additional marketing. Check out this guide to find out the best ways to win over sponsors and bring them back every year.
Event marketing challenge #2: Not enough people power
On any given day, you have multiple tasks to complete in an impossibly small window of time.
Worse? You probably don’t have a big team to help out. In a survey of 1,000 event creators, 45% of respondents said their teams consist of two to five people. Nearly a third (28%) said they’re flying solo. That means without ruthless prioritisation, the smallest inefficiency can set you back.
Lean into these two ways to make the time you spend on marketing more productive.
- Use the 80/20 rule: This rule suggests that 80% of your output comes from only 20% of your input. In other words, focus on the tasks that create the most impact. When’s the last time you sold a ticket using a Twitter ad? If it’s not worth the effort, cut it.
- Automate your marketing: When you don’t have other people to help out, activities like manually pulling email lists, optimising ads, or scheduling social media posts will quickly leave you with no time to level up your event marketing. Automation can help free up your time by doing the work of several skilled marketers for you!
Event marketing challenge #3: Not enough time
With so much to do, you can’t waste a single minute. There are always sponsors you need to win, contracts you need to review, and volunteers you need to train. And you still need to find time for marketing.
Invest in help that you trust — a team (or even just one person) that you can delegate to and know things will get done successfully.
If you’re looking to alleviate stress, outsource what you can.
- Hire part-time help: Even if you can’t afford to get a full-time partner, you might be ready to hire a part-time coordinator. Let them help with some of the day-to-day tasks, so you can focus on the more strategic aspects of your event.
- Put the heavy lifting on your ticketing partner: Choose a ticketing partner that helps you work smarter, not harder. From analytics to an easy checkout, make it easy for attendees to find your event — and click buy.
- Build out your core team: The lifeblood of your event, your core team is the staff that should be on the clock year-round. “Since most events teams are so small, you need a team that can carry on with the vision and work independently to get the job done,” says Joel Strycharz, Senior Field Operations Manager at Eventbrite. Check out this guide for tips to build your all-star team.
Don’t miss out on more efficient marketing
Discover how to scale your event with limited resources and prevent small-team burnout in Small Teams, Big Pay-Off: How to Maximise Your Event Budget.
