Event Planning & Management

22 August 2018

55+ Event Planning Resources From Event Experts

Daniel Mendelson

If you’re responsible for event organizing or marketing, you are probably over-stressed, constantly busy and lacking the resources you need to learn and grow as a professional. We have a solution for you — this guide to awesome and free event planning resources.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the most important conference planning resources that organizers can refer to for all their event planning and event marketing needs. From blogs on ways to increase ticket sales to 40-page eBooks on ways to maximize event sponsorship to webinars featuring event organizers in the field— you’ll find something useful within this directory of event planning resources.

For more information, check out our event resources home.

Event Registration Guide: Unlock the key to event registration — from what is event registration and best practices, to marketing and promotional strategies to maximize attendance.
Event Strategy Guide: Event organizing ain’t easy. In this guide you’ll find what you need to know about event strategy in 2018—from planning an event, to promoting an event and more!
Mobile Event and Conference Apps: The 2018 Guide: Mobile event and conference apps have now become a pillar of the event experience. In this guide we will explore event app best practices, uses cases and more.
Event Marketing Guide: Master the best practices on selling out your event, leveraging event data and more!
Event Engagement Guide: What does it take to fully engage your event attendees? How do you measure such an initiative? Read on to learn the in’s and out’s of event engagement.
Measuring Event ROI and Event Marketing Attribution: This guide covers 17 KPIs to measure specific business goals for your event, as well as event marketing attribution models to measure success beyond your event.
Guide to Boosting Event Promotion: Looking for ideas to maximize your event promotion strategy? Check out this guide on how to promote your event — effectively and creatively.
Event Budgeting 101 Guide for Event Marketers: Is your event budget setting you up for success? In this guide we’ll look at tips, best practices and examples for creating a reliable event marketing budget.
Enterprise Event Marketing, The Definitive Guide: As businesses scale, their needs do as well. In this guide, we will review how enterprise organizations can approach event marketing with actionable tips and concrete examples.
The Ultimate Design Handbook: The conference planner’s guide to creating an impeccably designed event, from design principles and spatial design to digital and sustainable design.
The Smart Event Marketing Playbook: Everything the modern event planner should know about marketing a conference or professional event.
The SEO Guide For Event Planners: a comprehensive guide to creating an event website potential attendees will discover on major search engines.
The Event Sponsorship Guide: Learn how to find, pitch and keep amazing conference and event sponsors.
Guide to Email Marketing and Generating Event Buzz with an Awesome Email Signature: Insights into email marketing best practices, statistics on email marketing, and its relevance to the events industry + create a stunning email signature that will also help you to promote your events.
The 2016 Event Professionals of Tomorrow Study: The latest event planning trends organizers must know to take their events to the next level.
Ultimate Guide To Networking Platform Adoption: Familiarize yourself with excellent tips to promote your networking platform and make sure that attendees use your event app.
The Event Venue eBook: learn keys to finding inspirational venues that don’t break the bank.
Harness the Power of Social Media: The Event Marketer’s Social Media Bundle features five helpful essays on using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Snapchat and more to market and event.
Become an Advertising Expert: Read The CMO’s eBook On Event Advertising to learn how to use Google Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat ads to promote an event or conference.

Blogs

10 KPIs for Measuring Attendee Satisfaction: We all know attendee satisfaction is key to event success, but how do we measure it? Learn which KPIs are most helpful when capturing attendee satisfaction.
5 Successful Tips for Twitter Event Promotion: Why you should promote your events on Twitter, crafting the perfect hashtag, and making your event go viral.
Tips To Be A Better Event Planning Consultant: Check out these 10 tips to better serve your clients.
Event Metrics Data-Driven Organizers Need To Know: Learn how to identify and analyze the data you need to understand your event.
Increase Event Ticket Sales With 10 Creative Marketing Tips: 10 marketing tactics to maximize ticket sales at your next event.
Instagram For Events: Check out some of the ways you can promote your event and engage millennials into your event through social media.
How To Set Event Planning Goals: Learn about ways organizers can to set planning goals to achieve event success.
How To Develop An Effective Content Strategy: Find strategies to provide value for your event community through the development of an effective content strategy.
Six Last Minute Event Promotion Strategies: Six ways to promote your event effectively when you’re on a tight deadline.
Five Trends Event Planners Should Know Before Booking A Keynote Speaker: Key trends organizers should be paying attention to this year to book the right speaker.
5 Event Website Design Principles You Must Know: A discussion of the 5 proven principles of event website design.

Webinars

Previous live webinars have been recorded for your convenience.

Growth Marketing Tips to Sell Out Your Events: In collaboration with Growth Marketing Conference founder, Vasil Azarov, this webinar gives you the keys to drive event growth, time and time again.
Unleash the Power of Video: A Webinar for Event Organizers: Learn how to use video content to market events, and engage event attendees.
How To Plan a User Conference: The event organizers’ guide to successfully launching a user conference.
Big Data and the Future of Events Webinar: The future of event data and its impact on events — collect the right data sources to help plan successful events and learn data collection & analysis best practices.
Digital Advertising Strategies & Crash Course: This webinar covers how to promote events with digital ads, as well as specific digital ad strategies for event marketers.
How to Plan a SaaS Conference: Watch the webinar recording to see how SaaS event experts from leading brands plan successful conferences, featuring Brightcove, Moz, and Namely.
Intro to Planning Crypto Events: A webinar to help guide you on the best preliminary tips and guidelines to planning a crypto conference at each stage of the event process.
On-Site Event Management Software: Learn how on-site event management software can make your next event a success!
Account Based Marketing (ABM) Crash Course and Live Event Strategy: This webinar will help you create an account-based live event strategy and will go over all the basics to ensure ABM event success.
Apple Private Label Mobile App Guidelines: Understand how Apple’s guidelines affect Private Label Mobile Apps.
Master Event ROI and Event Attribution: Watch this free webinar created by Bizzabo and Glisser to learn how to effectively measure ROI.
Event Lead Generation Advice from Marketing Gurus: Learn how to improve your live event lead generation strategy by watching this free webinar.
The Event Planner’s Guide To SEO: Optimize your event website for search and learn specific SEO tactics you can employ to build a high ranking event website.
The Event Planners Attendee Engagement Crash Course: Learn how to improve attendee engagement at your events — one of the most crucial metrics behind event success!
10 Things You Need to Know Before Using Snapchat at Your Event: Considering implementing Snapchat social media tool at your next event? Before you do, watch this webinar!
The Event Organizer’s Guide to Live Video: Harness the power of live video to promote an event and engage attendees with AllSeated!
How To Optimize Your Marketing Funnel with Live Events: Command your next event with these demand marketing lead generation principles you can implement when attending and organizing live events.
Event Marketing Like a Boss: The must-know secrets to event success for event organizers — from maximizing registrations, to the importance of attendee networking and engagement.
6 Event Venue Trends to Consider: Harness the power of event venue design to maximize your attendees’ experience and engagement!
Optimize Your Event Design Experience: Organize better events by architecting your event for success and creating a better experience for attendees!
10 Tips to Measure Event Sponsorship: Design an impactful event experience by understanding and maximizing event sponsorships.

Other

Eventovation – An Online Community For Event Planners: discover an online community specifically for people involved in event planning.

Event Planning Resources

5 Most Popular Resources

1. Event Technology Assessment

Contemporary marketers now rely on an intricate mix of tools (such as marketing automation software, CRMs and event software) that work together in what is called the event technology stack, to achieve successful events. They leverage this event tech stack to build websites that drive registrations, promote their event through email marketing and social media, and gather data at every stage of the event lifecycle. However, not every mix of tools is the right mix of tools. Some may not fully work with one another, others may rely on the manual exporting and importing of data, and others may have hidden potential just waiting to be unlocked.

This personalized, step-by-step analysis of your own personal event stack will help guide your understanding of the right tools you need to achieve event success.

2. The Quick Event Software Buyer’s Guide

Event planners have a number of different software solutions to choose from. Unfortunately, many solutions out there cause more heartache than they solve. So to help event professionals find the ideal event management software for them, we created a quick guide. Inside, readers will find questions they should ask technology provides, strategies to determine if the company is capable of providing organizers with real value, and a breakdown of different solutions on the market.

3. Landing the Big Fish: How to Secure Valuable Event Sponsorships

This webinar covers how to catch the big sponsorship revenue stream by securing valuable event sponsorships for your events. During this webinar, hear from Sales Hacker’s Head of Partnerships Scott Barker on how you can build a repeatable framework to land the biggest sponsors. In this webinar, you will learn:

How to build the right sponsorship pitch that woos big partners.
Proven tactics and strategies used to secure and delight sponsors to sign on the dotted line.

4. The Biggest Event Trends of 2018

Learn from Corbin Ball & Co.’s Corbin Ball what the lasting event trends are in the last year and a tour de force discussion on where the future of events will lead. With 20 years of experience running international technology meetings, Corbin is a highly acclaimed speaker with the ability to make complex subjects understandable and fun. Corbin has been named as one of “The 25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry” five times. Stay ahead of the market and learn how technology is shifting the way budgets are managed and events are promoted.

Webinar topics covered include:

Artificial intelligence
Cross event analytics
Data security and GDPR
Event roadshows
Event tech platforms

5. Aligning Your Organization to Your Event Strategy

This insightful webinar highlights the importance of a single, comprehensive company event strategy — requiring all teams and departments to come together. Featuring industry thought leader Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing, learn the secrets and tactics proven to bring better organizational alignment and execution of your events.

Topics include:

Identifying organizational misalignment and the counter-productive outcomes that follow.
How to deploy proven frameworks and strategies that unify your company to plan successful events.

Guides and eBooks

1. Event Registration Guide

Event registration is at the core of your event success. This comprehensive 2018 guide serves event organizers to understand the value in registration as a KPI, find the best registration software for your event, and provides website examples — as well as 10 key practices for maximizing attendee sign-ups!

2. Event Strategy Guide

Event professionals have a million and one things on their plate — from determining event goals, building the event website, sending out email blasts, deciding on what type of event planning software to use (if any), making sure event goals are hit—and that’s just the beginning.

The thing is, events are more important than ever. Leading organizations like Apple, Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal, HubSpot and Target all consider events to be absolutely essential to their event strategy. Meanwhile, the average B2B CMO allocates 24% of their event planning budget to events. Organizations who aspire to be at the top of their industry need to invest in their event strategy.

To help you keep track of every stage of the event organizing process, we’ve put together this event strategy guide. In this guide, we’ll focus on 5 critical aspects of the event strategy timeline:

Planning the Event
Launching the Event
Promoting the Event
Managing the Event
Wrapping up the Event

3. Mobile Event and Conference Apps: The 2018 Guide

An event app allows attendees to more effectively network, keeps everyone aware of the latest event updates, and most importantly, provides a rich dataset from which event organizers can draw insights. Given an event app’s versatility, it’s no wonder that 91% of event organizers stated that adopting a conference app resulted in positive event ROI.

This comprehensive guide will cover the spectrum of what organizers need to know about the event app. Readers will learn the full range of event app capabilities and how they can best leverage them to achieve event success.

4. Event Marketing Guide

Event marketing refers to the promotion of a product, brand, or service through in-person interactions. There are many forms of event marketing and each can be catered to address a marketer’s specific goals. A company can host its own event, building stronger relationships with its prospects and customers. A company can attend an event as an exhibitor and introduce their product to potential clients. Online events, such as webinars or live streamed workshops, vary in scope and prove to be just as impactful as live events.

Whatever the format, event marketing is a versatile and incredibly effective strategy that builds long-term value upon relationships with clients and partners alike. Check out this guide to learn why 80% of marketers believe that event marketing is the single-most effective marketing channel!

5. Event Engagement Guide

Keeping attendees actively engaged throughout the event is instrumental in solidifying the overall success of the event. And while event engagement is clearly an important metric to keep track of within your larger event strategy, it can be hard to define, let alone measure.

This guide will help you to understand all angles of event engagement, how to implement them into your own event, and how to accurately measure them for post-event reporting. When understood in the right context, event engagement can become the aspect of your enterprise event marketing strategy that propels your events from good to great.

6. Measuring Event ROI and Event Marketing Attribution

Given that events account for the single largest item in the budget of the average B2B CMO, it makes sense that marketers would want to track their return on investment (ROI). But how exactly can event ROI be tracked? On the surface it would seem simple: money in, money out. However, event ROI is anything but simple. In fact, the more complicated the ROI picture gets, the more accurate event attribution becomes. In this guide we will take a look at the many different forms of determining, measuring and analyzing event ROI. Of course, you can’t go about measuring ROI if you don’t have a sound attribution plan in place. That’s why you’ll find a large portion of this piece is dedicated to event marketing attribution, as well.

Included in this guide:

Event ROI Defined
Event ROI Goals
Event ROI Models
Event Technology and ROI
Event Marketing Attribution
Event ROI Tools
Event ROI Integrations

7. Guide to Boosting Event Promotion

Event promotion consists of all of the different marketing strategies used to get the word out about your event and thus to drive event registration. It can seem rather overwhelming if you’re trying to tackle it all at once. With all of the different ways there are to market your event, it’s hard to even know where to even start. However, once you break down your strategy into digestible pieces, it becomes a lot easier to conceive and achieve.

This guide is meant to help you devise an actionable event promotion strategy that is specific to your event strategy. Thinking about your promotion plan as compartmentalized initiatives will make it not only more manageable but easier to measure and analyze once the event is over and done with.

8. Event Budgeting Guide

The many moving parts of a live event strategy are bound together by the event budget. Given that an event’s financial foundation is directly related to the event outcome, creating a thorough and realistic event budget is a key ingredient to the recipe for event success.

The following blog post is meant to serve as a guide as you create your event budget that will reduce stress and increase your ability to focus on the parts that will elevate your event. These tips and best practices should not only assist you in creating a sound event budget but also worth establishing a repeatable process through which an event budget will be successfully mapped out and executed for future event marketing campaigns.

9. Enterprise Event Marketing Guide

Enterprise event marketing is an experiential-focused marketing strategy that is executed by enterprise class organizations, which may be B2B-focused, B2C-focused or a hybrid of the two. Specifically, enterprise event marketing enables these organizations to unify their goals, analyze their processes and optimize these processes on a cross-team basis. In order to accomplish this task, enterprise organizations frequently adopt a rigorous event technology stack.

In this guide you will learn:

How an event technology stack enables enterprise event marketing.
5 Examples of enterprise event marketing.
10 Best practices.

10. The Ultimate Design Handbook

The design of an event is more than just decorations at the event venue. Event design encompasses a wide range of important facets of your event: the design of your website or app, the sustainable design of your event, the way you organize the space, and even the way you design the swag material at your event.

It also requires a close attention to the principles of design, like balance and color, as these characteristics directly influence the ways that potential attendees interact with your event brand.

Event design is a direct reflection on your planning preparation. Since design is a part of all facets of the event, from the website to the event space itself, it can often be difficult to manage. In this Handbook, you’ll find a detailed consideration of all these necessary design practices and trends, as well as how to incorporate them into your event.

11. The Smart Event Marketing Playbook

Your event marketing campaign can often make or break the success of your event. With the growing importance of technology and social media within the events industry, event marketing has recently surged to the forefront of the priority list for many planners. Without a well-thought out marketing campaign, you won’t be able to attract a significant amount of attendees to your event, and you will not be able to create a brand that resonates with attendees.

This playbook covers a comprehensive range of marketing best practices for event organizers, while incorporating the newest trends in the industry. Content includes insights into the best ways to utilize social media for your event, as well as how to go about paid advertising to drive traffic to your event website. From discussing ways to create personas for more targeted marketing to helping you launch a successful content marketing campaign, you’ll be exposed to a wide range of marketing best practices tailored to events.

The Smart Event Marketing Playbook is for event planners at any level who are interested in taking their event marketing campaign to up a notch. With its detailed consideration of current event marketing trends, you can be confident that armed with this playbook, you’ll be able to build a really robust event marketing strategy and campaign that works.

12. The Event Sponsorship Guide

How do I know which companies to reach out to, to talk about sponsorships?

How do I show my sponsors that I have provided them with value?

How can I build longstanding relationships with event sponsors?

From bringing in high quality speakers to setting up an event website and marketing campaign, events and conferences within any industry can be expensive to organize. In order to facilitate event registration prices that are attractive to attendees, and in an effort to create more profitable events, utilizing prestigious event sponsors can be very useful.

13. Guide to Email Marketing and Generating Event Buzz with an Awesome Email Signature

Getting email marketing right has become somewhat of a science. How do you make sure that your email won’t get swiped? How do you make your email stand out among the hundreds of other emails your potential attendees receive? These are all questions that event planners have to ask in order to make the most out of email marketing and drive potential attendees to take action.

In addition to providing statistics that justify the significance and relevance of email marketing, the Email Marketing Guide answers the questions above with content tailored to the events industry. With a close attention to best practices, like email hacks and ways to structure marketing email to ensure optimization, you’ll be on your way to maximizing your email marketing campaign! Plus, create a stunning email signature that will help to alert your contacts about an upcoming event. Feature links to your event website and social media profiles to effortlessly generate pre-event buzz.

14. The 2016 Event Professionals Of Tomorrow Study

The events industry is constantly changing, and keeping up with trends can often be a difficult endeavor. Organizers have to keep up with best practices in social media marketing, budgeting, and more. Thus, organizers find themselves asking a wide of range of questions like:

Which social media platform will best promote my event?

What is the best way to integrate event technology into the planning process?

A close consideration of industry trends, statistics and survey evidence from a global community of event planners will help organizers utilize trends in the industry to maximize the potential of their event.

In this study, event experts surveyed hundreds of event planners globally, regarding event technology, event marketing and event success. In summary, the trends generally tended to favor event technology as leading the industry and ameliorating many of the challenges that event organizers face daily.

15. Ultimate Guide To Networking Platform Adoption

Event planners have always known the importance of networking as a motivation for attendees to come to their event. Recently, many event planners have begun to incorporate new technologies, like an event app, to maximize networking capabilities and provide real value for attendees. However, even if events have event apps, attendees are simply not using them. This is not necessarily the attendees’ fault, but rather the lack of promotion organizers provide for their app.

This guide serves to make sure this does not happen. With detailed tips about ways to promote an event networking app, you no longer have to worry about attendees not using the event app you’ve spent so much time and money developing.

16. The Event Venue eBook

Want to find an inspiring event that will suit your next meet-up, conference, or convention? Learn how to find unique event venues that will delight attendees without going over budget.

Discover the latest trends in event venues, from mixed-use spaces, to venues that are green certified, and more, in this comprehensive eBook.

17. The SEO Guide For Event Planners

Some organizers hope to increase the number of visits to their event website by optimizing for SEO. Unfortunately, most event planners and marketers lack the understanding of SEO needed in order to do just that. That’s where this eBook comes in.

Learn the key components any event planner must know in order to rank well on popular search engines like Google. Discover helpful tools and resources that can make SEO work much easier. Click the button below to get your copy now!

18. The Event Organizer’s Social Media Bundle

Learn how to harness the viral marketing power of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and others to market an event, conference or meetup. Click the button below to get a free event planning resource!

19. The CMO’s eBook On Event Advertising

Next year the amount spent on digital ads will surpass the amount spent on TV ads for the first time in history. Learn how to harness the remarkable power of digital ads to promote an event. Readers will learn how to use Google Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat ads to promote an event.