The first and foremost thing needed is self awareness. You need to be self aware of what you are good at and what you suck at. Once you know what you are good at and what you can offer value in, you are set to create your first event.
Creating events is not a single day job. It takes months to set up a really successful event. The key requirements for a successful event are
1. Knowledge and awareness around the concept of event.
2. Marketing
3. Business development before the event
4. Strategic partnerships with businesses for the brand.
5. Providing value to people attending the event.
6. The economics of actual spends on event
7. Post event requirements
1. Knowledge and awareness around the product or event.
If you are not aware of your product or the theme of the event and you are in it for money, you’ve lost. There is no worse way to lose than to start with a wanna be event. People are not fool. Market will chew you and spit you out before you know it.
If you are good at painting and you know that you can put up an event around displaying your paintings or the paintings of people you know, you are on good path but if you have never ever picked up a brush in your life and you are lame in judging colours, and you still go ahead and put up an event, you will lose. Yes you may get few people to pay you for a crap show but no one will ever turn up again for your event. Ever.
Hence it is very important to define what you are good at and then go and build around it. That’s how it works. If you are good at painting, go put up an event around art. If you are good at real estate go put up an event around real estate. If you are good at furniture, go put up an event around furniture. Just because you’ve seen your friend making money in an event around fashion doesn’t mean you’ve to do that. Just be Binary about what you know and what you don’t.
2. Marketing
Like I said at the start of the blog, the event marketing starts way before the event. Technically it should start a month in advance. You should take advantage of social media attention because it is underpriced and will not be so for a very long time. Run ads on facebook and Instagram for your ad. Target your audience. If your event is centered around fashion lovers or people in fashion, run your ads in categories related to fashion. Collaborate with Instagram, facebook and YouTube influencers to promote your event.
It is always advisable to put up an advertisement in a local newspaper before you go live with the event. It is very very necessary to capture attention using social, newspapers and radio way before your event.
3. Business development around your event
Solo events have a history of failing. I’ve never seen a person organise an event single handedly, it doesn’t work that way. Your event has to include business development way before your event starts.
If your event is around fashion and you haven’t talked to all the fashion brands in the city, you have lost. You need to DM, cold call and meet all the fashion brands and ask them “hey I’m putting up an event around fashion and I believe you setting up your stall at my event will give you visibility and traction that your brand deserves,” and then charge them an amount for putting up the stall at your event. Your fee for the Hall in hotel along with the lunch or dinner for all should come from these stalls. And this needs work. Put up a nice presentation and talk to businesses for an entire month. You need to put in the work. People assume that events are easy, they don’t see the rejections and hardwork that comes along with it. If your business development part is strong, your event will be strong.
After you’re done picking up ten or fifteen partners to display with you, put out their name. Some of these brands could be natural crowd attractors and hence you win.
4. Strategic partnerships with brands
You are not just offering the space to display, you are also offering these brands some value. You have to charge these brands and put up the underlying contracts for those. Some of these brands might not pay you and might engage in barter system of may be paying you per engagement with the customers that you’ve brought. In either case do the right thing which is win win for you and the brand together. Please know that you don’t want to lose these brands just after one event. They should benefit from the value you are offering and should stay with you long term. Build partnerships not quick money hacks.
5. Providing value to people attending the event.
This is the most important part of any event. Please know that people are not coming to your event for coffee, or lunch. Everyone can afford that. If someone is paying a gate fee, or an entry fee they are looking at the value you are providing in that amount.
The keynotes need to be crisp. The event needs to be simple where people are given the schedule of the day and of course the networking should bring them value. This said the lunch and beverages should be good too. You might not be able to attend everyone personally but try and make sure you’ve just met almost everyone or have a team to do that for you.
People love personalised attention. Offer that.
6. Economics of actual spends.
Whether you agree or not, the event if not profitable is a charity event and you sure want to make profits out of the event. The easiest way to do that is to understand the economics behind the event. You should have all the calculations about the cost that you are bearing and actual money that you are saving. Everything right from the gate fee to the charges paid by the stalls should fall in accordance. If you have figured that excel sheet, you’ve won.
7. Post event requirements
The event is not over even the last visitor leaves the hall. The event actually starts at that time. There are few things that you need to do all throughout the day..
You need to know the data that you are collecting.
You need to know the data that all the companies/ stalls are collecting and make them share that with you.
You need to send out a thank you email to everyone who attends the event.
The process of following up with the leads should start the very next day and should end in three days after event.
The cash saved or the profits made should be clear within the 24hrs of event.
Now go do!
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