How to Generate Revenue With a Big Event

How to Generate Revenue With a Big Event

ANTHONY KENNADA 3 min

How to Generate Revenue With a Big Event

By:

Anthony Kennada


One of the hardest things to wrap your head around when putting a conference together is the up-front capital you need to produce the event.

On a gross basis, events are really expensive — you’ve got to pay for a venue, food and beverage, speaker fees, room blocks, and so many other program-level expenses.

The bet, of course, is that you can offset a lot of those expenses (if not all of them) with both registration and sponsor revenue. So at the end of the day, your net expenses for the program are on budget, maybe even a complete break-even.

But success is not guaranteed.

Will people show up? Will they pay the ticket price your asking for? Will sponsors want to be part of it? Will enough attendees cover the room block?

You’re making a bet. But here are some things to consider to de-risk the expense side of hosting a conference.


STEP 1: THE PRICE

After detailing out the cost side of producing the event, subtract from that number your expected sponsorship revenue and any marketing budget that you’re committing to the event.

What your left with is your registration revenue target. Using that number, and your expected attendee count, come up with the bottom-line ticket price per attendee.

With that number in mind, develop different pricing SKUs that help you get to your registration revenue goals — perhaps an early bird ticket that’s the cheapest, a full price ticket, and a 20% off pricing band for promo codes. Don’t forget to factor in free tickets into your model for employees, speakers, sponsors, and even some high value prospects and customers.


STEP 2: HOW TO DRIVE REGISTRATIONS WITH FOMO

You’ll want to develop a steady comms strategy across both owned and rented channels to promote the event.

Mark the major milestone on the calendar — keynotes announced, first-wave speakers announced, full agenda announced, and so on. The tuning fork for these promotions is FOMO, possibly the most powerful emotion to tap into for event marketing.


STEP 3: PROMO CODES

Since we have confidence in the terminal price per attendee, once early bird is officially over, you should be generous with using promo codes that offer 20% off registration fees.

Let em fly.

Activate your employees, speakers, sponsors, you name it — as the people around the event will be the only way to access the cost savings.

This is also an important part of the audience borrowing strategy — getting the event in front of your audience’s audience to take advantage of the network effects there.


STEP 4: PACKAGE A VIP GIVEAWAY

I’m telling you, FOMO is real. As you get closer to the event, create an exclusive VIP giveaway or experience to push people over the edge.

“The next 50 people to register by Friday are entered into a chance to win… [something].”

Maybe it’s an exclusive meet and greet with a key speaker. Or a VIP suite at the hotel for their stay. These offers also represent a great opportunity for Sales and CS to add value to prospect and customer relationships.


STEP 5: CREATE A SPONSOR PROSPECTUS

Going back to step one, you’ll need a decent amount of your total incoming revenue for the event program to come from partners in your ecosystem.

You’ll need to create a prospectus that shares event details, attendee demographics, and walks through various sponsorship packages. Treat this like your sales deck, because that’s what it actually is!

Sponsorship revenue represents a non-trivial amount of program revenue, sometimes upwards of 50% of revenue or more! Key in on what sponsors want out of an event sponsorship — increasingly, it’s less about having a booth and more about an experience. At Goldenhour we allowed partners to sponsor what we called "content activations" and it was a big hit with partners AND attendees.

It takes a lot to host an event, but with these tips in mind, you’ll give your team the best shot of limiting the financial risk of the program, and maximizing the impact of the event on what we actually care about — software revenue.

ANTHONY KENNADA 3 min

How to Generate Revenue With a Big Event


Anthony Kennada reveals his playbook to ensure your next conference will pay for itself.


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