Event budgets are critical and cannot be overemphasized. It may take time to create and plan a good budget and manage it throughout the year. However, it can make the biggest difference and determine whether you are successful or not.
While building your budget, it is important to know your event goals, the most significant events and how much to allocate for each. Here is when an event expert is needed! In the following blog, we break down how to plan your annual event and budgets so that you can be successful all throughout the upcoming fiscal year!
1. Divide budget allocation into quarters.
While strategizing and planning annually, breaking your allocated budget into quarters is important. It will make it more manageable to plan what can be done with the overall budget. Breaking your annual budget into quarters will also ensure that money is available to fund your events throughout the year.
2. Compare it with your marketing goals.
While deciding how you want to allocate your budget, it is necessary to align it with your overall marketing goals to ensure that they are prioritized and achieved. It may be a daunting task, but compare it to your past years’ performance, set benchmarks for your success, and then ask the team and yourself whether the allocated budgets will help you achieve your marketing goal for the upcoming fiscal year.
Moreover, after you have identified your marketing goals and compared them to the previous year’s performance, you’re less likely to repeat mistakes made in previous years because you’ve already identified them.
3. Identify the significant events throughout the year.
As a business, you need to decide what events are the most significant in your upcoming year. This is so that you can further decide how to allocate your quarterly event budgets. This is where an Event Consultant would step in to help with budget optimization and ensure you have planned for your significant events.
Another aspect of budget planning is deciding as a company why you are holding the event(s). Establishing your event goals and objectives is critical in planning your year of events.
4. Create a strategy for your audience
There are multiple types of events to host, whether internal or external for employees or awareness. It is important to strategize the event purpose alongside your budget so you can ensure that the proper budgets are allocated.
With an internal event, the purpose to host the event is commonly for the company’s employees to make announcements, celebrate milestone achievements and introduce new company policies.
However, an external event will normally be held for sales and marketing purposes or general awareness. Again, an Event Consultant strategize and plan these events, so the audience is catered to correctly.
5. Lay out event objectives and goals
While planning your event calendar, it is important to plan out the goals and objectives for each event. This will help ensure that you meet them and set yourself up for success.
Note that the annual event budget is an allocation and forecast of your spending for the upcoming fiscal year. With the labour shortage and supply chain issues for 2023, it is essential to predict higher expenses. As a company nowadays, you have to be more flexible with your budget because Covid has taught us just how unpredictable things can get.
6. How to measure ROI
Everything that you spend within your annual event budget should be an investment. The funds should be going towards providing real ROI to your organization. Your annual event budget provides a great starting point to lay out your vision for the year ahead. Not just for you but also for key stakeholders who know much less about event planning than you do.
With all these steps, it is still important to remember that your budget will forever be a living document. Changes are made throughout the year to accommodate unexpected occurrences along the way.
All this said, planning your annual event budget with an Event Consultant will give you a clearer look. An expert will help you understand where to allocate event funds. You will be able to plan more precisely as an Event Expert is aware of the trends and challenges of planning annual event budgets.
Does setting an annual event budget mean you can’t do an impromptu one?
Yes you can do an impromptu event but only if you have taken consideration into your annual budget for all events. It is dangerous to host an impromptu event only to find out that you have no money for an important event down the year.