Event Marketing: The Ultimate Guide That Cost $400k to Make

Walking the talk—here I am networking with other attendees

But other conferences, like BrightonSEO, don’t offer lunch or dinner.

Whichever you opt for, make sure you negotiate. You can negotiate away a lot of additional costs.

For example, our venue wanted to impose an ‘overnight hold’ charge on us because they deemed it as lost potential income. For context, hotels are popular wedding venues in Singapore. Since we had to hold the space for one night (to maintain the conference setup), the hotel considered it as “lost revenue” since it could have theoretically been rented out for a wedding.

But the overnight hold was on Thursday evening and very, very rarely will someone hold their wedding on a Thursday night.

The event wanted to charge us to hold this space for one night

You’d really want to go through line-by-line, especially if you’re renting a large venue like us, and make sure there are no unnecessary charges and fees. If they are, negotiate them away.

Ticket sales

Costs are relative to revenue: If you can make enough money, you can spend enough money. But how are you going to earn that through your event?

The most obvious is, of course, ticket sales.

How much should you charge per ticket? Here are a few considerations:

• The ticket price should cover your costs. But it should also be attractive enough to entice people to come.
• Event attendees are, for some reason, notoriously last-minute buyers and that can incite panic for your events team. You’d want to consider discounting in the early stages (i.e. early bird discounts) to get people to commit earlier.
• You’d want to encourage bulk buys too, as companies may send an entire team of 3-5 (sometimes more). Discounting works here.
• Tiers also matter: For example, we created a VIP tier where we promised exclusive treatment. However, VIP treatment may also mean extra costs.

There’s no exact answer to this—It comes down to a mix of mathematical calculations, experimentation, competitive analysis, and gut feeling.

Here’s what we eventually settled with:

• Regular ticket at $650; early bird pricing of $570 (and up to 20% discount for bulk purchases)
• VIP ticket at $980; early bird pricing at $840

All discounts were available up till 1 August, two months before the conference.

Sponsors

The next important revenue stream is sponsors. These are companies or people who will pay to have their branding appear at your event. It could also involve a speaking slot and booths.

For example, these companies sponsored Ahrefs Evolve:

I’ll talk more about how to get sponsors in the “Secure your sponsors” section.

Pitchbox was one of our sponsors

Grants

Finally, don’t forget about grants. Check if there are any available from the government or elsewhere for companies that are holding their own events, especially big ones that could bring in hordes of tourists!

For example, we tried to get a grant from the Singapore Tourism Board.

In this case, we failed. But it’s always worth a try!

According to Shermin, most major events do not make money for the first time. It’s common to incur losses.

That’s why your budget needs to be realistic. Shermin already had an “easier” time forecasting our budget because we did SG SEO Summit the year before. Even then, our goal for Ahrefs Evolve was simply to break even.

And that’s why I believe you should start small.

• You have no idea how much everything costs.
• You have no anchor points and could be overpaying.
• You could be underestimating certain items (e.g., the amount of food and drinks)
• A lot of what you can charge eventually comes down to demand — we could justify certain prices because we had thousands of customers, built a strong brand, and had connections to sought-after speakers. But if you suddenly make a conference out of nowhere and attempt to charge $10,000 for VIP tiers, no one will be interested.

Formula One in Singapore

Doesn’t clash with other major industry events in the region, e.g., Chiang Mai SEO

Gives you enough time to prepare

The venue is available

To choose a venue, here are some considerations:

Consideration	What to check
Availability	Whether the venue is available on your preferred date(s)
Location	Whether it’s easy for people to get to
Size	Whether it can fit your number of expected guests and whether it has space for networking and sponsor booths
Rates	Whether it fits your budget
Aesthetics	Whether the exterior and interior design matches what you’re looking for
Food	Whether the food is good and if they can accommodate preferences (e.g., vegan, halal)
Toilets	Whether there are enough toilets and cubicles
WiFi	Whether it’s fast enough
Service	Whether it’s good on the day. Regular communications with you should also be professional and on time

For Evolve, Shermin shortlisted three dates:

• 24-25 October
• 7-8 November
• 14-15 November

She then built a criteria for venues:

• It must be available on those dates
• The location should be in Orchard or in the Central Business District (CBD)
• There should be enough toilets — for example, we opted out of one hotel when we saw they only had a maximum of four cubicles (big problem for 500 attendees)
• For aesthetics, she preferred high ceilings and modern vibes. (I know, we’re all Gen Z.) The venue should also ideally have a LED wall available.
• The space should be large enough for 500 people — This was surprisingly difficult, as most venues in Singapore either accommodated 100-200 or 700-1,000 people.

With the criteria, she built a tentative list of 10 hotels and narrowed it down to two after emailing the venue’s events team and doing an in-person site recce.

Sidenote.

IMPORTANT: You should always visit the venue in person. There are photos, there are videos, but you’ll never get the actual feels and vibes for the venue until you visit it.

The final venue was chosen after the sales representative for our original preferred venue took up to four weeks to reply to each email. This is an important consideration because it’s a sign of things to come. Organizing an event is stressful in and of itself and you don’t want communications to derail it. Work with people who are professional and responsive; after all, it’s service and hospitality.

This ceiling was high enough for Shermin

Shermin also asked the venue for food tasting. Since most attendees were not local, we wanted to represent our country’s culture and cuisine during the conference.

GaryVee speak in a boxing arena.

My poorly zoomed-in photo of GaryVee. Interesting to note that my photography skills have still not improved.

So, the quality of your speakers will determine whether people will come and how much you can charge too.

When we planned our conference, we already had a few major names in mind. We knew people like Lily Ray, Cyrus Shepard, and Aleyda Solis would be big draws, especially since you don’t see them often in Asia.

Again, thanks to our brand power and CMO Tim Soulo’s personal connections, we were able to secure them easily.

Since it was an Ahrefs conference, we also wanted our own people to speak. Thus, my colleagues Tim, Sam Oh, Patrick Stox, and Ryan Law, took up speaking slots too.

We also asked people to apply to speak on our conference landing page.

We asked them a few questions, like their job title, where they’re based, the latest events they’ve presented at, and their proposed talk titles with descriptions.

I (yes, I was involved this time) then vetted their topics, shortlisted those we thought would improve our conference, and officially invited them.

Once they’ve given their confirmation, you’ll want them to give the official title and description for their presentation. Make sure to give them a deadline to submit their slides. In our case, we asked them to submit their decks by 20 October.

We also had Constance vet all their presentations. We wanted to ensure that each speaker was genuinely giving helpful information and not just pitching their products or services. We also wanted to avoid any inappropriate or NSFW content.

In fact, by vetting through each presentation, you’ll also get a sense of which talk would be better for the start of the conference and which for the end, allowing you to design the schedule.

This was one of our most important marketing assets. Again, thanks to the fact that we organized a smaller conference before, we had a template to build on.

Since we started on this page early in the process, we didn’t have all the information. So, we just left it as TBD.

We updated the landing page gradually as we received more confirmation about the venues, speakers, and sponsors.

We also knew it would be the first time most attendees were in Singapore, so we created a section on the best things to do:

Owned media

Needless to say, we began our promotions on every asset we owned. Starting with regular posts on LinkedIn and X:

The marketing team, especially Shermin and Tim, also regularly posted about Evolve:

We sent an in-app message to our customers:

Regular emails to our newsletter audience:

Display banners on our blog and articles:

Speaker cards

We made social media “cards” for our speakers and encouraged them to promote the conference to their audience:

One of our speakers, Charlotte, with a video promoting the event

Video tour of the venue

Someone once told Tim that a big part of why Ahrefs does great marketing is that the team has taste. This extends to venue selection too.

The venue was amazing, and we wanted everyone to know. Plus, you rarely see any conference organizer promoting the venue, even though it plays a major role in making any conference a success.

And that’s why Tim actually made a video promoting the venue… alongside the conference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-dGwMxSqMU

Creating content

We published two blog posts targeted at “conference”-related keywords, so we could rank high and gain visibility for our conference:

Of course, we found these keywords via Keywords Explorer:

We also came up with a few unique angles for content, for example this one showing how to persuade your boss to let you attend Evolve:

And this one on how to become an SEO conference speaker, with a pitch to learn from the best SEO conference speakers at Evolve:

Advertising balloon

We tend to take risks when it comes to marketing. Promoting the conference was no different. We specifically made a giant helium balloon (no, it’s not Midjourney or ChatGPT), flew it up, took pictures, and turned it into our conference ad creative:

Promoting the conference at other Ahrefs events

Since we were still running workshops and other offline events, we made sure to promote it there too.

Paid advertising

We ran ads on Facebook and Instagram to promote the conference:

Build FOMO

We also made sure to consistently build FOMO. For example, we announced whenever tickets were sold out or selling fast:

We created graphics showing who’s coming from where:

We even ran a giveaway:

Finally, we made a social media card for attendees to share that they’re attending Evolve!

Murphy’s Law will always hold true.

No matter how much prep you did, no matter how much you delegated and outsourced, something will always go wrong. You, or your events team, will have to be boots on the ground to fix any last minute issues or errors.

For an entire week, Shermin was a trooper, handling anything that went wrong and trying to get everything sorted out so the conference could run smoothly. There are simply no words to describe what she went through.

Sign up here if you want to be notified!)

In the meantime, when the excitement about the event has yet to die down, send out a post-event survey to gather feedback.

Ask them to rate:

• Their experience at the conference
• Your organization
• Quality of speakers (and potentially rank them)
• Venue and facilities
• Length and duration of the conference
• Sponsors
• Your event communication

And more. You’d want to ask for qualitative feedback on what can be improved too.

Don’t forget your own team:

And don’t forget your sponsors:

Once you’ve received your feedback, debrief the team and determine what needs improvement for the next event.

Oh, and don’t forget to publish event recaps:

Final thoughts

Even though this guide looks like it’s written sequentially going from step-to-step, I want you to know that it’s anything but that. Besides the actual event execution, most of what happens happens concurrently.

That means: even if you’re still deciding on the venue, you should already be reaching out to speakers and sponsors, creating your marketing assets, getting designs done, and ensuring the logistics are settled.

There are so many details that go into organizing an event and I couldn’t possibly include all of them. One example: some attendees reached out to us for help with their visa application. So, we wrote up a template for them:

The only way to get all details is to plug Shermin into a machine and download her brain. But hey, we need her to organize the next Evolve

And if you were wondering, yes, we hit our goal.