THE BEST EVENT MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE IN 2024

Boost your event results and sales by learning how to write the best Event Marketing Plan in 2024 with this premium template and exclusive tips, best practices & ideas.

Brought to you by Mau, a Senior Event Marketing Specialist at eDigital.

THE TOP 2 REASONS YOU WANT TO RUN AN EVENT

1. An event is the key product/service of a business. You are in the business of running a specific event or a series of events.
2. An event is just a channel to promote your main product or service. In this case, we call it a “marketing event“.

Most of the tips shared in this article are aimed at helping you with “marketing events“. However, you may find the tips and the premium template useful if you run events as your main business service.

THE BEST EVENT MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE IN 2024

You are about to learn the top techniques I have been personally using when writing successful event marketing plans for more than 15 years to get the most memorable events. 

What I discovered in this process was that most of the principles for writing an event marketing plan remain the same regardless of industries, company sizes and changes in the way brands connect with consumers.

However, one fact emerged:

You should always map out your top two or three goals for marketing and promoting your next event. It is in this format that you can find out what exact actions are driving the best results for your event. 

That’s exactly what I do.

Whether I want to have a successful event, I craft a well-written event marketing plan. 

You know you have done your event marketing plan correctly when you have designed the best strategies and tactics that best reach, convert and nurture your key event’s audiences.

In this article, I will take you through the step-by-step process of writing the best event marketing plan.

I think you will be surprised at how easy it is to craft with this exclusive and premium template.

This unique template will take the complexity out of the process while it will show you how to best structure your event marketing plan even if you have never presented one.

The most popular comment I get from professionals who have secured this top template is:

“Thank you Mau, I now realise how important and easy is to write a good event marketing plan”

Several business owners and marketers have paid me to help them polish their event marketing plans, now you can have this successful template for a small fee. 

That’s right, being able to write a successful event marketing plan is a powerful skill that will serve you for the rest of your marketing life.

And before you get ready, grab a comfy chair now, a cup of your favourite drink, lock the door and let this top template guide you through the steps to follow as you quickly write an event marketing plan. 

IMPORTANCE OF A PROFESSIONAL EVENT MARKETING PLAN

Whether you are using the 4 p’s of the marketing mix model or another marketing strategy framework that includes event activation activities and other popular digital marketing activities; savvy event marketers are realising the importance of professionally writing successful event marketing plans.

The top key reasons include:

• Focus. If you are going to launch your first event or have a regular event, it’s fundamental that your business has an Event Marketing plan that helps you understand the key audiences you’re targeting, design your event communications with the right appeal, at the right time and using the right marketing channels. This will ensure your event marketing campaigns are communicated most effectively.
• Clarity. A well-written Event Marketing Plan will ensure expectations from all parties and stakeholders are clear and reduce any misinterpretations of what your promotional activities are supposed to achieve for your event.
• Planning. Building your Event Marketing Plan will help you answer key business questions about how to promote your event offline and online and build and retain loyal attendees using offline, digital and social media channels. This way, your Event Marketing Plan is your reference point to guide your event consolidation strategy and tactical executions. Our Event Marketing Plan Template will offer you a proven structure to plan, define and measure results in the most optimal way.
• Track progress. Most large-scale Event Marketing Plans are executed by different people within an organisation, including content agencies, creative agencies, media agencies, SEO consultants, social media managers, community managers, graphic designers, web designers, PR agencies, etc. Tracking the progress of all the different activities becomes key. That’s why our Event Marketing Plan Template is the cloud (Google Sheets) where you and anyone involved with your event can update their progress and add comments.
• Stakeholder engagement. A key benefit of having a professionally crafted Event Marketing Plan template is to make the reading as clear as possible by other team members and stakeholders and at the same time helps you monitor your event marketing activities, progress and success.
• Raise your salary package. A well-written and well-presented Event Marketing Plan should not only help you achieve a successful event but also offer you the fuel to have a compelling story for a salary package negotiation. In other words, you hit your Event Marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and then you can present your desired promotion or salary package increase.

The best way to ensure all your company stakeholders understand the importance of your event marketing activities, value its budget allocation and easily be informed about the event marketing progress; is by having an official event marketing plan template that is created, managed, updated and shared within your marketing team members, key company’s stakeholders and external agency support teams.

BENEFITS OF AN EVENT MARKETING PLAN

To ensure you get the best from your event marketing campaigns, you need to write an Event Marketing Plan specifying the exact type of work and results you are after. This is especially important for maximising your event results when campaign budgets, resources and time are limited.

Some of the top benefits of a well-written event marketing plan include:

• Deliver successful event marketing campaigns. Remember that “success” means different things for different businesses. Depending on your key objectives.
• Easy monitoring. As your team completes key tasks you can easily track and fix any issues affecting the completion of your event’s marketing activities.
• Campaign timings, resources and budgets are locked in. Having your Event Marketing Plan completed and approved by the different key stakeholders ensures your campaign timings, resources and budgets are locked in.
• Agree on your key events’ marketing goals.
• Help you identify your ideal event attendees.  Develop an event marketing strategy to make your event stand out over similar others
• Purchase funnel. Ensuring your event marketing reaches your potential attendees across all the purchase funnel stages: awareness, preference, purchase and loyalty.
• Save time when explaining, briefing agencies and/or presenting results to your C-level team members. Our Event Marketing Plan Template has been professionally designed by Certified Marketers to help you present and track your event marketing objectives, strategies and tactical executions.
• Effective communication. Easily present results to your team members.
• Increase brand reputation. Build your brand presence across your industry through a successful well-crafted event.

UPDATING YOUR EVENT MARKETING PLAN

Surely your event will evolve and your Event Marketing Plan will have to adapt and get an update. As soon as you bring learnings and insights from your past event results and metrics, sales data, marketing data, employees’ stories and customer feedback, competitor review and observation and evaluation of your industry event environment; you will be in a better position to update your next event’s objectives and marketing execution tactics.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Time saver

This template is saving us so much time especially for tracking progress and offering easy access to other stakeholders. 

Peter  D. ✅ Verified user

ASSIGNING RESPONSIBILITIES TO YOUR EVENT MARKETING ACTIVITIES

Your event marketing team should be actively involved in the production and tracking of all the elements committed in your Event Marketing Plan. Assigning responsibilities in advance will clear up any questions to make sure everyone is on the same page.

COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL EVENT MARKETING PLAN 

Your event marketing plan should outline:

• Your key event marketing communication objectives
• Your defined audiences to target (most profitable attendees)
• The key marketing campaigns you will be executing
• Your budget allocation for these campaigns
• All the requirements and resources needed to succeed and
• The key metrics you will be using to measure that success.

If you do not have an Event Marketing Plan mapped out, it is likely that obstacles will come up throughout your overall event marketing activities and can have a detrimental impact on the overall success of your event.

Get our latest Event Marketing Plan Template (on Google Sheets) for real-time cross-collaboration. This template will help you plan and develop successful event marketing campaigns from simple and basic strategies to advanced executions.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️  An essential tool

We use this template to plan a handful of events every year. We have added some customisations to it that fit the way we like to plan our events. It has become an essential tool. 

Kylie C. ✅ Verified user

USE THIS INTERACTIVE EVENT MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE

• Being this template located on Google Sheets, your team members will be able to view, add and collaborate on this document at your office or from anywhere.
• Forget about emailing the latest version of your Event Marketing Plan to your team. Just send them a link to it! Easy!
• The template can be easily transferred to Microsoft Excel if needed.

Bonus: You also get “The Ultimate Guide to Successful Influencer Marketing Campaigns” a fantastic 9-page PDF Guide!

Fast access: Once payment is completed, you will be sent to a secure page where you will find the template. If there are any issues, you can always contact us.

BEFORE WRITING AN EVENT MARKETING PLAN

Any event – for marketing purposes – should ALWAYS help your business either increase profit or boost brand equity.

Do not get your marketing event to help you with something else.

This way you and your team are aware that your event is tied to your business goal and strategies.

Before you write an Event Marketing Plan, you should define:

1. Key objectives. Write down the number one key objective for running your event. As a general rule, any event for marketing purposes should help customers in their path to purchase, otherwise, the event will be a waste of time, money and resources. This premium event marketing plan template will help you set realistic and measurable objectives and includes budgets, action plans and responsibility allocations.

2. Target market. Define the exact audience you want to reach out to with your event. Here you have plenty of options. Your event can reach and engage with:
   • Advocates (customers who enjoy positively talking about your business)
   • Loyal customers (customers who have demonstrated high purchase frequency)
   • Premium/VIP customers (customers who tend to buy your most expensive products/services)
   • Brand switchers (People who buy from you but also from your competitors)
   • New customers (People who just bought from you for the first time)
   • Potential customers (people who have never purchased and/or used your product and services)
   • Top industry leaders and influencers (industry association executives, etc)
   • Government officials
   • Media (journalists, editors, tv presenters)
   • Partners (suppliers, contractors, resellers, affiliates, others)

Expert Tip: The more audiences you want to reach with one single event, the less niche your event will be. Be careful.

3. Alignment with other marketing. Your event is important but it is also part of your overall event marketing strategy and needs to sync with your offline, event and other marketing media and customer engagement activities. It should not be a stand-alone plan.
4. Success metric. If you have defined a clear objective for your event, you must have a success metric so you can track your event performance.
5. Stakeholder involvement. Involve all stakeholders who deal with event attendees including sales, customer service and support. If a set of meetings are required to define your event marketing with different stakeholders; ensure you have a structured agenda and expected outcomes so the plan is agreed upon.

EVENT MARKETING PLAN – TEMPLATE SECTIONS

Whether you want to build your Event Marketing Plan from scratch or you want to get our Event Marketing Plan, the following are the sections you should include:

BRIEF EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A brief executive summary of your event marketing plan should be done last and should be an overview of your event marketing plan to other readers. Use language that will be easy for all stakeholders to understand.

Remember: many C-level executives will only read your Executive Summary so make sure your key information and insights are added here.

Here at eDigital, we use the SOSTAC model to help our clients build their Event Marketing Plans.

The SOSTAC model includes:

SITUATION ANALYSIS

You will write down: where is your event now? How do you understand your event marketplace and how is influencing your attendees’ needs and wants? Are there any insights that might affect the way you design your vent and plan your event marketing activities?

• Our top attendees. Who are your attendees: write down the 20% of attendees bringing you 80% of revenue. Define them by Demographics and Psychographics and what media channels they consume and why. Also, it is important to have defined the exact needs at every attendee buying cycle phase (see graph below). So you know what type of content, experience and stories to use to move your current and potential attendees in the cycle.
• Our Market. What the market needs. Are there any trends? Are there any new similar events that are growing within the industry that our attendees might be also looking to register for?
• Our Competitors.  What are the top 3 competitors, their unique selling propositions and how they are using Marketing channels to connect with potential and current attendees? What different set of unique activities you will be delivering that will provide a unique mix of value to your most profitable attendees’ segment that no other competitor can copy-cat?
• Influencers and potential partners. What other organisations and top industry leaders are influencing our attendee’s buying decisions? For example, search engines, comparison sites, specialist websites, magazines, top bloggers, industry leaders and celebrities, etc.
• Our capabilities and weaknesses. You write down your top 3 capabilities and weaknesses.

External Macro Influencers

• Social: have attendees’ attitudes changed that might affect our event ticket sales targets?
• Legal: do we comply with privacy and online trading laws?
• Environment: Will our event marketing activities be ethical and sustainable? (Related: The top ethical issues in marketing)
• Political: is there any government support we can use for our event marketing Activities?
• Technology/marketing automation: Is there any specific technology we should review that will help us more effectively achieve our event marketing objectives?

This Premium Event Marketing Plan template includes a SWOT analysis using the TOW’s format to ensure you come up with a formula to: make the most of your strengths, circumvent your weaknesses, capitalise on your opportunities and manage your threats.

EVENT MARKETING OBJECTIVES

Ensure you write each objective using the SMART formula: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Targeting your “most profitable” attendees segment will help you focus your Event Marketing on your event attendees more likely to bring a higher Return on Investment (ROI).

EVENT MARKETING STRATEGY

• Targeting and segmentation: here you will prioritise your top audience/segment where you will be targeting all your event marketing efforts.
• Positioning: Your potential and past event attendees will not be able to remember all the cool things you can offer. You will need to pick one positioning statement and stick to it so people can remember you and differentiate you from other similar events.
• Content strategy: What type of stories you will be sharing or activities that your prime prospect would love to hear to create buzz?
• Promotion. The channels, people and budget you will use to promote your event.
• Event acquisition strategy: What would be your top 2-3 drivers for registrations? 
• Event conversion strategy: Define tools and optimisation methodology to ensure you are consistently reducing the gap between enquiries/visits and successful event ticket sales. Here you might define that you want to optimise key landing pages on a specific time frame and use a/b testing methodology in favour of multi-variable testing.
• Event retention strategy: This is likely to be the most important section of your entire event marketing plan! Yes, most event marketers spend too much time and energy trying to secure new attendees versus investing in getting past attendees to buy more events, more premium tickets (ie. VIP), more quantities (ie. group purchases) or more new events over time. In this section, you will note and tick off your top Retention strategies. This might include VIP programs, extra services to frequent attendees, “money can’t buy” activities, monthly e-newsletters, training, customer loyalty programs, etc.

• Multichannel integration strategy: How your different marketing channels will work together to amplify your event benefits and key messages.
• Data strategy: how you will be using data to make event marketing decisions and how you will be updating and securing this customer data.
• Social media strategy: define which social media channels your brand will focus on and how you will use social media websites and apps to attract new event attendees and engage with existing ones.
• Online affiliates strategy: Which online affiliate network you will be using and what commission/payment structure you will be offering? Define technicalities and challenges about tracking and monitoring.
• SEO strategy: write down changes and/or additions to your event website to increase rankings on top search engines: Google. Identify the “low hanging fruit” keywords you would like to optimise your website and online content for search engines.
• SEM strategy: What are your Adwords and Bing paid campaigns to promote your event for key searches, its objectives and optimisation strategies?
• Growth strategy: (aka word of mouth – WOM Strategy): Your event needs to define Growth Strategies (growth hacking)  to incentivise existing attendees to bring more new attendees to your event. Here you will list what a “referral program” will look like and schedule activities to increase referrals.  Imagine every new event ticket buyer refers on average two new event ticket buyers a day. You will have here a “growth hacking” machine!  To do this, you have to have a formalised referral strategy. In this section, you will determine when your brand will ask customers for referrals, and what reward you will be offering.
• Influencer marketing strategy: Who are your top 5 influencers that your team should review and negotiate deals with as part of your event marketing strategy? What type of content they should be creating?
• Potential partners strategy.  In this section, you will write down any agreements, partnerships or joint ventures you have or you are planning to help reach new attendees or better monetise existing event customers. You might find complementary brands – services or products – that could be quite lucrative to partner with as they might have an established customer base that you could tap into at affordable prices. Think about what other activities and events your ideal attendees also participate in, you might find interesting partnerships you should test out. Document such potential partnerships in this section of your event marketing plan and then reach out to try to secure them.

EVENT MARKETING TACTICS

Your event marketing tactics will confirm what exact executions that will go live.

Event marketing campaigns you will be launching to reach your customers at specific purchase funnel/phases:

• Awareness: letting people become aware your event exists.
• Comparison: why your event is different or better than other similar ones?
• Preference: why your event is the right event for your key audience.
• Trial: invite people to some pre-event activities.
• Purchase: encourage ticket sales via offers, promotions or discounts.
• Evaluation: invite event participants to evaluate your event performance.
• Recommendation: incentivise testimonials you can use for future events.
• Education: invite participants to co-create or offer ideas to improve your next event or offer new exciting ways to experience your event.
• Rewards: encourage loyalty by offering “money cannot buy” experiences to people who have assisted at more than one of your events.

For example, for the purchase phase, you might want to promote event marketing campaigns that include: key promotions (ie. early bird, group discounts), special deals for VIPs only and offers.  Timely offers will help your customer base to grow quicker and incentivise past customers to buy again from you. Offers can include packages (e.g., accessing different event activities) and/or premium seat offers.

REQUIREMENTS AND RESOURCES NEEDED

FINAL RESULTS

The last phase during the execution of your event marketing plan is to ensure you are measuring progress, tweak your Event Marketing Template accordingly and have your success metrics ready to be compared with your initial baseline.

KEY LEARNINGS

It is important to have a section within your event marketing plan template to add the key learnings and insights you gathered while running your latest events. This will be important when planning your next ones.

FINANCIAL PROJECTIONS

In this section, you will list all the expenses you will incur and provide an indication of what your expected results will be in terms of new customers and sales. The idea of a financial projection is to define which promotional expenses and other marketing executions you expect will give your organisation the highest return on investment (ROI). This section should also set you on the task of writing down your set of goals (e.g., your goals for your referral program) for which your company should strive.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Great template!

I did not know much about the tactics used for planning an event until I found this article. I am really happy with the template. Thank you! 

Chloe  D. ✅ Verified user

NEXT

• Save time building your template and get our Event Marketing Plan template today!
• Need a hand with your next Event Marketing Plan? Contact us today!
• eDigital can also run workshops and training sessions for your team to ensure you have a sound event marketing plan.

CONCLUSION

A well-written event marketing plan will help you define clear objectives and goals for your event.

The plan will allow you to define what the marketing activities for promoting the event should achieve, whether it’s increasing attendance, generating leads, enhancing brand awareness, or driving sales.

A successful event marketing plan serves as a blueprint that outlines the strategies, goals, and actions required to effectively promote and market an event to your most valuable target market. 

The plan must include how you will develop strategic promotion, allocate resources effectively, execute timely marketing activities, and measure the results.

By having a well-thought-out plan, you increase your chances of creating a successful event and achieving your goals.

NEXT > Save time building your template and get your Event Marketing Plan template today!

eDigital can help you conceptualise, plan, develop, run and optimise successful event marketing campaigns that generate leads and sales for your brand.

Our digital marketing services include:

• Strategic planning for social media and other digital marketing channels.
• Online advertising management and optimisation: Google Ads Search, Display, Re-marketing and social media advertising.
• Training: social media marketing training and digital marketing training. 
• SEO strategy and execution. Including content development:articles, stories, eye-catching and SEO-optimised visuals.
• Celebrity and influencer marketing campaign strategy. 
• Brand development. Logo creation, brand personality development and design of marketing materials.
• Consumer contests/competitions/giveaways.
• Email marketing. Dip sequence design and deployment. 
• Conversion rate optimisation. It is also called “path to purchase” optimisation. 

Contact us today and start boosting your leads and sales.

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Final note: Want to reduce customer acquisition costs and dependency on paid media? eDigital‘s marketing strategy training will unmercifully review your marketing, help you build a marketing engine with channels and assets you own, stir your team’s thinking, bring new ideas for new conversion paths and boost customer lifetime value.

THE BEST EVENT MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE IN 2024

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