Discover the top tip for budget friendly event management

Ahh, the event budget. The thing all event managers dread but accept its importance in the overall scheme of a successful event.

As we all know, a reasonable event budget is central to running a successful event. Without one, you risk overextending yourself and running at a loss, or you may end up with money left over but failing to excite and engage your attendees.

Whether you plan a virtual event, a hybrid event, or a traditional in-person event, a solid event budget is necessary. That said, nearly every single one of us would love to get more mileage out of a budget. Finding ways to do that, however, is not always immediately apparent.

Luckily, using the right event technology platform can help you increase your event budget and run a more dynamic and profitable event. Let’s explore the ways how.

How Using an Event Technology Platform Can Increase Your Event Budget

There are many different ways that you can use an event technology platform to increase your event budget and realize a strong event ROI.

Streamlined Productivity and Planning

First of all, it’s imperative to note that event technology platforms can simplify the planning process.

With an all-in-one event management platform, you can perform all of your tasks in one place. You can create an event webpage, manage social media marketing, process ticketing and registration, and collect donations. Also, you can also manage attendees, manage speakers and exhibitors, and build an event agenda. Perhaps most importantly, you can view sales and marketing data so you can make informed decisions.

All of these capabilities, all in the same platform will streamline your workflow, saving you hours of work while providing you with the data you need to track your event budget and your revenues. Use it to create an event plan, filter event logistics, and optimize the event experience.

And because the platform makes it possible to perform several different tasks within one tool, you will save money in your tech stack budget.

Reduced Marketing Costs

While it is essential to establish a marketing budget as part of your overall event budget, an event tech platform can give you a bit more wiggle room.

Event apps and platforms can save event budget marketing costs by:

• Saving time and labor: Event management platforms like Accelevents integrate with email marketing platforms and CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, and Zapier. These integrations ensure continuity in your marketing materials and help you coordinate your marketing efforts. Again, doing this all in one place will save you time which can also save you money.
• Providing data for marketing insights: Event management platforms are great for planning and optimizing an event strategy as it collects data on your registrants and visitors. It will let you know through which channels attendees arrived at your site. You can use this information to manage your event budget more effectively. If, for example, attendees are arriving at your ticketing page primarily through Facebook, you can allocate more resources to Facebook and reevaluate your estimated costs.
• Streamlined event marketing: Event promotion is effortless with a virtual event platform. It can provide users with integrated marketing materials, including an event website. Building your own website and or landing page can cost you thousands of dollars. However, you can do this instead with the right event platform -- without the need for expensive programmers to get involved. Sell tickets, display your agenda, publish an event description, and display speaker, vendor, and sponsor information – all with a few clicks of a button.

Increased Sponsorship Opportunities

One way to increase your event budget is to bring in more sponsorship revenue. Event technology platforms help you provide excellent ROI for your potential sponsors. This means you can actually charge more for your packages and, in turn, put some of those revenues back into your event budget.

For starters, event apps create unique opportunities to display sponsorship branding. For hybrid and virtual events, branding can be displayed during each and every session. Essentially, sponsorship branding can be visible at every attendee touchpoint.

During in-person events, sponsorship branding will primarily be in and around the actual venue. But, using an event platform for ticketing and registration ensures a virtual presence for your sponsors as well.

For obvious reasons, sponsors love this increased visibility.

But more than just increased visibility, event management platforms enable you to provide more valuable insights on your virtual attendees than you would otherwise be able to do. Without an event platform, you are forced to rely on the demographic data provided in the registration form. This is useful, to be sure, but if you can offer more, sponsors and exhibitors will pay more.

With a virtual event platform, you can share on-the-fly attendee analytics:

• Demographic information
• Data on attendee behavior during the event, like session attendance, exhibit booth visits, purchases, video views, asset downloads, and more
• Live polling results. You can learn a lot about attendees from their responses to live polling questions

Sponsors will participate in your event because you share or have overlapping target audiences. The above information can help sponsors better understand their audience and help them improve products, services, and marketing campaigns to serve this audience better.

This data is valuable, and you can be sure that sponsors will pay more to obtain it.

Finally, event platforms can provide lead retrieval and lead capturing for both your vendors and sponsors. This can help you increase your online event budget in two ways:

1. Sponsors, vendors, and exhibitors will likely pay more for a package that includes automatic lead capturing and retrieval for them. The less they have to do to see an event ROI, the better.
2. You do not need to pay for additional software tools to process leads. So, you can use your platform to capture all the necessary information for yourself and sponsors and exhibitors without having to pay more.

Reduced Printing Costs

A live event can come with a heavy paper requirement. Between event agendas, post-event surveys, registration forms and data sheets, tickets, name badges, session handouts, and even sponsorship materials, you may find yourself devoting a hefty portion of your event budget to printing.

But, with an event platform, you can save yourself hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on the event size. The reason is that all of these printed materials are accessible online with the right event platform. Event check-in will be improved as well. No longer will event staff have to pour through reams of paper to identify attendees and their credentials. All registration information will be available through the platform.

The speed and ease will ensure that your staff is happy, your virtual audience is happy, and the environment is comfortable!

And remember, happy event attendees can mean more significant revenues for you!

Reduced Tech Budget

Event tech is an essential line item in an event budget. This is especially true for virtual and hybrid events. You will need to have funds to procure the proper video equipment and other technology components to make your virtual event successful.

You see, virtual and hybrid events rely heavily on streaming video. Whether you live stream or stream pre-recorded content at a delayed broadcast, you will need a video streaming platform and probably some editing tools.

A good event management platform has integrated live streaming capabilities and a suite of editing tools to help you pull off high-quality, professional videos without the additional costs.

Increase Your Event Budget with Accelevents

One event tech platform that can help you not only stay within your budget (and increase it!) is Accelevents. As an all-in-one event platform, Accelevents makes the planning and facilitation process easy. And with this ease comes better budget management, productivity improvements, and increased savings.

Don’t let your event budget get the best of you. Sign up today to get started!