Event Planning Budget Template

The Project: Content to Make Event Budgets Easy

Great content provides value to your potential customers in a way that will make them appreciate you before you can even dream up the perfect sales pitch. It’s similar to the strategy Costco uses when they shower you with free samples, and the next thing you know you’ve loaded your cart up with organic quinoa chips in a euphoric stupor when all you meant to buy was toilet paper.

With this strategy in mind, I helped a conference center find opportunities to introduce their “We make events easy” brand to potential customers through helpful content.

Surprisingly, their audience wasn’t comprised of full-time event planners. Rather, the conference center’s customers typically plan events on top of their daily job responsibilities. Content created for the conference center needed to simplify the event planning process for these customers.

My Role: Pinpointing the Perfect Content

Content Strategy
To craft great content you need to know your audience like your BFF. What makes them tick? Keeps them awake at night? Puts a smile on their face? In evaluating the conference center’s customer feedback, I determined event budgets were a primary concern for their audience. So, we created a tool to make budgeting easy.

Content Development
I researched budget documents and gathered input from event professionals to determine the typical line items you should plan for in an event budget. Then, I created a customizable, branded budget tracking spreadsheet potential customers could download.

Distributed Content
Now, to put that content to work! I wrote SEO-optimized landing page copy for the budget template to attract new, qualified leads. These new leads were nurtured through email automations that offered even more useful content such as tips for keeping their event costs low. I also distributed the template to target audiences through paid and organic social media posts, as well as to current customers through email campaigns.

Results: More Leads, More Value

• The budget template contributed to a 52% increase in leads within the first year
• The template reinforced the conference center’s “We make events easy” brand
• We armed the sales team with a sales tool that provides genuine value for potential customers