Fortunately, using Yapsody, you can manage your tasks like selling your tickets, promoting your event using MailChimp & social media, checking real-time stats a lot more efficiently.

Here’s our event planning checklist with timelines you should use to make sure you’re on the right track. 

6 Months to the Event

1. Figure What You Want To Achieve From This Event
   • What are your goals from this event? [Hints: promote your brand, raise funds for your non-profit, entertain your local community]
   • Who are you targeting? [Hints: Define your demographic and the number of people]
   • How much profit do you want to make?

2. Create A Rough Budget
   • Define the ideal amount you’re willing to shell out for the event

3. Define Your Stakeholders
   • Venue
   • Performer/Speaker
   • Lineups
   • Photographers
   • Food & Drink Providers
   • Sound & Lighting Providers

4.   Make Decisions
   • Select a date
   • Pick a Venue
   • Define the event venue seating type [Hints: Reserved Seating and General Admission]
   • Select performers/speakers for your event
   • Decide how you’d like to promote your event
   • Estimate all expenses for your event [Hints: Sound & lighting, food & beverage, ticketing fees]
   • Set prices for your tickets

5. Get Into the Deets
   • Pick your event’s theme [Hints: What would resonate with your target audience?]
   • Select a low-cost online ticketing system
   • Lookup for seasonal offers to save on your budget
   • Create a customized online ticket store
   • Customize your ticket
   • Decide who pays ticketing fees [Hints: You can bear the expense or pass on the fee to your attendee]

3 Months to the Event

6. Finalize the Little Things
   • Follow up with vendors to ensure smooth operation
   • Make food & beverage orders
   • Arrange for lineups & sub-headliners
   • Get performer details [Hints: Artist image, bio]
   • Create a marketing strategy for your event [Hints: Tone of messaging, channels for promotion]
   • Create a promotional video

7. Get Started with Ticket Sales
   • Collate all event marketing data
   • Begin event promotion [Hints: Social media, email marketing via MailChimp, flyers, etc]
   • Go live with Early Bird sales.

2 Months to the Event

8. Send Reminders to All Stakeholders
9. One Final Review
   • Check event sales stats and make changes to marketing strategy
   • Go for a food-tasting
   • Review and make arrangements for security

1 Month to the Event

10. Get People Talking
    • Send reminders to ticket purchasers
    • Offer add-ons to ticket purchasers
    • Increase social media post frequency
    • Blog about the event
    • Set surge pricing for last few tickets

11. Create Event Schedule
    • Create a detailed time-based schedule
    • Forward event schedule to all event stakeholders

1 Week to the Event

12. Perfecting D-Day
    • Approve all performer scripts/speeches
    • Confirm timings with stakeholders
    • Update stakeholders with final ticket sales numbers

Day of the Event

13. Keep Calm. Your Event Is Here.
    • Ensure all checkboxes have been ticked
    • Scan attendee tickets for entry into the venue
    • Let the party begin.

This event checklist will serve as a handy guide to organize your next event with ease! Simply print this checklist or create your own customized version with event specifications.  Now that you have a plan in place, go on, create your event on Yapsody and make use of the crazy holiday season offers we have in store for you!

The post The Event Planning Checklist You’ve Been Searching For appeared first on Yapsody.

Set Clear Goals

The first thing on your mind – to have clear goals for your event planning ideas. Depending upon the kind of goals you want to achieve with this event, you can proceed to decide what kind of event would be suitable. Later, you also have to take into account the attributes of your target audience, the impression you want to create on them, and what can you attendees gain from your event.

Team Up

For small business owners, events can be a little heavy on your pockets. Collaborate with similar businesses to share the workload, expenses, and of course, the benefits. You could even hire a professional event organizer to make sure your event is remembered by all your attendees. Also, ensure that the marketing needs of each of the businesses are met during the event.

Help Is Given To Who Ask For It 

And if this is your first time organizing an event, you need to ask for it. Most people think – “How much effort is it going to take me to put up an event that’s only going to last a few hours?” and the answer is A LOT. Setting a date, finding a venue, organizing a team and allotting tasks, finding caterers, putting up decorations, sending invites – it’s a seemingly endless list. Don’t panic; ask event organizers or those who have done it before to help you out. In such cases, collaborations can be highly beneficial.

The Right Kind Of Promotion 

More than what you say or how you say it, the right kind of promotion relies on where you say it. Once you know who your target audience is, you’ll be able to find out their online and offline hangouts and carry out promotional activities there. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are regulars when it comes to social media marketing. Apart from these, you could go up to your customers and clients and get the word out about your event face-to-face, encouraging your team members to do the same, too.

Incentivize Event Attendees

Even after the right kind of promotion, you might want to be on the safer side and ensure attendance by offering the right kind of incentives. A remarkable guest speaker, a quirky theme or venue, interesting interactive sessions, all pose as points that intrigue attendees and make them register for events. In fact, they might even recommend your event to their friends, boosting people to buy tickets for your event and filling up your venue.

Return Gifts

Who doesn’t like gifts, now? All kinds of freebies make event attendees happy. You don’t have to necessarily provide them with expensive ones. Promotional goodies, product samples, information packets, all are real charmers. They create brand recall after your corporate events are done.

Get Feedback

Where there is scope of being better, there is scope for growth. Getting feedback from your attendees is extremely important so that you can figure out your flaws and correct them, and polish the things you did right. Yapsody lets you have a personalized FAQ section on your online ticket platform, and you can even mail your attendees a short questionnaire. Apart from that, publish blog posts and update your Facebook and Twitter with the highlights of your event, so that your attendees have access to the wonderful moments they spent at your event.

The post What Makes A Corporate Event Successful? appeared first on Yapsody.

PERSONALIZED DIGITAL MARKETING

After you’ve spent the past few hours browsing evening gowns on online stores, all websites you visit next will have advertisements showcasing discounts on evening gowns at various websites. Co-incidence? Nah! Personalized digital marketing.

As an event presenter, you could also segment your customers based on their past experiences with you or their preferences. Simple things like including their names in the subject lines of email newsletters, or greeting them with a “Welcome Back!” if they’re visiting your page for the second time, these things create a lasting impression and you’re bound to get higher conversion rates.

SIMPLIFIED METRICS

Event presenters practically breathe data and analytics to measure their progress, and to ensure their ways are working. The budget, revenue generated from selling event ticket, attendee reports, and engagement analytics are some of the many figures that are always buzzing at the back of your head. Data collection is not a big task, analyzing and utilizing it is. If you have an event at Yapsody, you can use YapStats to get all the numbers related to your event integrated into a single app, so that analyzing it in a single glance doesn’t sound like an overstatement.

SEEING BEYOND “ASL”

Ever logged on to a stranger chatting website and talked to someone? There are very few people who’d actually be interested in your name or your hobbies, or even greeting you for that matter. The first question they ask you would be – ASL? (short for age, sex, location). It is obviously very cold and unwelcoming, and makes you want to disconnect the very next moment.

This is a common mistake that event organizers need to accept and move on from. Grouping customers based on demographics is NOT in trend now. Every attendee wants to be acknowledged by his identity, his personal interests and goals, and not just a number. Add some personal touch to the way you invite your potential attendees, the way you communicate with them and consider their ideals. This will add definite value to your event as well as your organization.

BEING ‘RESPONSIVE’

While it definitely implies responding to your attendees in as little time as possible, the tech-savvy generation is familiar with the pun attached to the term. Your online content is supposed to be responsive, i.e. it should look good on any device that your attendees may use. Event websites, emails, networking platform, speaker profiles – all should be optimized for viewing on the big as well as small screens. Because the world today is way smarter, ensure that online content pertaining to your event is optimized for smartphones and tabs of all kinds.

USING WORD-OF-MOUTH SERIOUSLY

“But… I’ve always been serious about that!”

Of course, you have. But, there’s always scope for betterment, isn’t it?

Word-of-mouth is the BEST (no amount of bolding, italicizing, or underlining could stress on just how important it is) marketing tool. It is organic, and cannot be faked, but you have to roll out referral programs to actually get it going. When attendees are given the opportunity to earn rewards for simply referring the event to their friends or colleagues, you’re turning them into brand ambassadors. The more brand ambassadors you successfully enable, the more you’re going to be promoted.

DEVOUR TECHNOLOGY

Yes, eat it up till you’re satiated! Almost every task can be automated to save time and increase efficiency. Event managers who are too far ahead in the technical marathon even use drones to capture images that professional photographers are unable to. Further, there are innumerable apps that do most of the updating and calculating business for you without you putting in anything except your login details. Find out technological developments in the event industry and make complete use of them.

SKIP THE SPREADSHEETS

Spreadsheets are huge necessities, and give just as huge headaches when they are color-coded, complex, and multi-tabbed. Maybe you can never entirely get rid of them, but you can definitely skip the part where you have to manually edit them. There are apps that automatically update your list of registrations and separate out attendees based on whether they’ve paid or no, or are returning customers, and many other filters.

OUTSOURCING

Now that we’re talking about getting everything done ‘automatically’, let’s talk about the humans who fill in for these robots that you fancy – freelancers. Often, deadlines aren’t met because a few things were left hanging and weren’t achieved on time, be it a promotional video, or a logo for the event, or a simple blog post. With websites like Fiverr and Taskrabbit, you can get a list of people who’d do these little jobs for you for as less as $5, hence relieving you of the stress that these little pesky pests bring with them.

In conclusion, all the above points focus on one primary thing – personalization. The event organizers who look into the depths of the needs and requirements of their target audience, and try to relate with them on a personal level often find the best solutions and strategies to make things work in their favor. Your ultimate goal should be to create an unforgettable experience that touches the lives of your attendees. Anything that distracts you from this goal can be outsourced.

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