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7 smart tips to create your event budget within minutes!

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Business Events are one of the most important components of the marketing mix of any corporate. While planning an event, a marketer has to also earmark a budget and take required approvals from key stakeholders. Once you have defined the objective, target geography and format of the event, the next step is to prepare a broad budget. We present 7 vital Tips for you to create an accurate event budget.

  • Event Venue & Banquet:

Choice of Venue and Banquet depends on the type of audience & duration of the event. In case your event lasts only two to three hours you can just offer Hi Tea or make it a breakfast event. For longer events, you should surely serve lunch or dinner. Cocktails are useful for partner events or existing customer events. In a Five Star Hotel, you can plan a budget of ₹3000/ pox for Lunch and ₹5000 / pox for a cocktail dinner. In non-metros, the prices go down by about 20%.

  • Event Speakers & Emcee:

Content and speaker profiles are crucial components of the event experience and the takeaway for attendees. Choose speakers with a proven track record and ensure they interact during your event. Also, ensure that the stage is managed by an experienced anchor who can coordinate and stitch various sessions together in an entertaining way. External anchors should be made to undergo mock sessions as their superficial knowledge about the company and products otherwise becomes obvious. If you need to get external speakers, keep a budget of ₹1.5 Lakh (Including Stay and Travel).

  • Designing & Event Branding:

As a marketer, you realize the impact of branding. Ensure the best visibility for your event theme and the products/messaging you want to highlight at the entrance itself. This is best done through high-quality standees and not the ones that are on flimsy flex that curls up or standees that keep falling! Flex Printing (though on the way out for environmental reasons) will normally cost you between ₹50 to ₹70 per square foot. Better still use LED screens/walls for backdrop and messaging. Budgets will, of course, vary according to needs but an amount of ₹50,000 is reasonable to set aside.

  • Audio Visual:

No compromises when it comes to hiring a branded audio system and projector or LED Wall. Who hasn’t attended an event where poor audio or video glitches spoilt the messaging!

A basic audio system with two standard quality speakers, two lapel mikes and two cordless handheld mikes for questions will cost you under₹10,000. A 3500 Lumens Projector, A switcher, long VGA cable, pointer with the remote mouse, 7 X 9 ft. masked projector screen will cost you about₹20,000 additionally. For large events of 500 or more people keep at least ₹1.5 Lakhs for Audio Visual arrangements.

LED walls are a great replacement for projectors and though slightly more expensive they double up as backdrops and also give extra space required for back projection.

  • Event Website and Registration:

Research indicates that automated events lead to the more elevated attendee experience. Event Management Software solutions such as MyEventGateway help immensely by taking registration and payments online. The subscription starts from ₹2000 per month to ₹30000 per event for a fully loaded solution with the mobile application. A budget of about ₹300 to ₹500 / attendee could be a thumb rule for planning budgets for an event technology platform. For large exhibitions, this can come down significantly to₹35 to ₹50 per attendee.

  • Registration:

To assist attendees through the check-in process, welcome them and coordinate inside the sessions you would need trained executives preferably females. Though two hostesses are required at the least, you should plan 1 hostess for every 50 attendees. The cost per hostess works out to₹2000 approximately. The number of hostesses can be reduced by about 30% by using myeventgateway.com

  •  BONUS tip:

Do you wish to create Event Budget in less than a minute? Now you can, after signing up on MyEventGateway, you need to just provide 5 to 7 details about your event and immediately your event budget will be built.

What more? You can even refine it by adding some items from a preset list or manually, you can also delete items that you may not want. The intelligent system also keeps saving your manually added budget items in your private Preset Budget Item List.

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How to get audience at B2B events

Events are the mainstay of marketing activity mix in B2B businesses, to generate opportunities. Hence they need to be carefully planned and executed. The key consideration is the quality of audience that comes to attend an event. The following ten factors need focus to get there.

The first factor is the why. Why would a target customer attend your event? These days information about your product and competing products are readily available on the net. Customers will not come just to listen to your sales pitch. It is then imperative we add general interest sessions about the technology or field that you are in. Preferably this session should be conducted by a neutral, respected person of authority on the subject.  Alternatively, people want to hear celebrities, senior policymakers and leaders. These sessions should form the core of the event.

The second factor is networking. People like to meet others in similar situations and discuss how they are addressing similar challenges. People also like to network to scout for talent or find jobs. It is therefore important to highlight the profile of attendees in all communication.

Location: In large metros, with current traffic scenario, event location becomes an important factor. Centrally located venue (or located close to where a majority of your target audience resides) that is well connected and with parking will ensure fewer dropouts.

Timing:  The timing of your event matters a lot.  It is difficult to draw senior people to day events as it interferes with their office work. Evening events or events which start after 4 Pm will usually get better attended. Even dates and days matter. Events closer to month end are less popular. Monday events are shunned. Events that start at the beginning of a long weekend will see less attendance.

Building Hype: It helps to build hype around your event. This can be done by sending a series of communications each highlighting a particular aspect of an event. Having quality speakers, celebrities in attendance, out-of-the-box content helps.

Reminders.: All registrants must be reminded on phone and email one day prior to the event. This ensures reduction in dropouts.

Venue Quality: Quality of revenue reflects on the perceived quality of the event. Choose good hotels or respectable institutions to host your event.

Multiple databases: No one agency can guarantee you 100% coverage of your potential audience. Use multiple databases to reach out to them.

Multiple Platforms: No one platform can reach out to all the potential attendees. Use a combination of emails, telecalling, social media advertising and digital advertising. Depending on the budget you may consider print, radio, outdoor and TV advertising too, but here targeting is difficult hence are expensive per unit of the result. Event listing websites like myeventgateway.com also increase event’s reach.

Brand association: Big and respected brands draw attendees. If you are a big brand great, if not try to piggyback at events where big brands are present.

We at Channel Technologies manage hundreds of events annually, all the above pointers are based on our experience and may or may not guarantee success in a particular event. So use these guidelines intelligently as you think they would apply to your event.