Event Marketing: The Ultimate Guide That Cost $300k to Make

The Ahrefs team at Evolve

It wasn’t just a conference; it was an entire week of events. From Monday to Wednesday, we ran two paid workshops per day and then the conference on Thursday and Friday.

Victor Karpenko’s workshop during Evolve week

Before that, we ran online webinars, networking meetups, panel discussions, and even a smaller-scale conference. Suffice to say, we’ve had plenty of experience doing event marketing.

A content marketing panel we ran

But even though I’m writing this, I’m not the person behind it all. There is a brain behind all of our events, and that’s Shermin Lim, our events marketer.

So, I interviewed her to find out how we did it, especially how we took on such an ungodly task of organizing a multi-day conference with just a two-person team.

My interview with Shermin

This is our guide to event marketing, specifically focused on building up to an actual conference. You can use the same knowledge to scale up or down depending on your goals.

Event marketing is the planning and organizing of an event to promote your brand, product, or service. The event can be big or small, online or offline.

Now that we’ve gotten what Google wants to see out of the way, let’s get into our why.

We’re a mostly self-serve SaaS business, so why are we organizing events?

The answer is simple: Business is social. Humans are not logical, rational creatures that buy everything based on pros and cons. We buy because there’s an emotional and human connection to the brand or the people behind the brand.

How can you not do the cheek heart pose if you’re taking pictures with Koreans?!

And nothing in this world beats seeing them in-person. I think we all learnt this lesson deeply during the pandemic. This core rationale trickles down to the other reasons we can list out on why we run events and even a conference:

• Provide a great, in-person event for our existing customers to hang out, network, learn from each other, and potentially build partnerships or do business together.
• Hang out with our customers, talk to them, learn about them, give them our beloved swag, and (hopefully) endear them to us.
• Let our enterprise sales team talk (in person) to our top customers.
• Educate our customers about our new product features and how to better use them
• Get non-customers to drink our Kool-Aid, buy into our brand, and convert into customers.

VIP networking night at the Ahrefs office, the day before Evolve. I’m not sure why I look so impressed.

If these reasons compel you too, then keep reading to learn how to do event marketing for your brand.

Like everything else in life, your goals determine where you should be going. In this case, it’ll help you decide if you should actually organize an event for your business.

After all, organizing an event from start to finish can be expensive. Most things, like food, venue, and audiovisual (A/V) cost money. And even if you’re not providing food, using a free space, and not running talks, you’ll need manpower. Part-timers cost money. And even if you use your own staff, remember you’re sacrificing work days.

For example, I lose the hours I could use to create content whenever I attend or speak at an event. FYI, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Speaking at events builds my personal brand, which increases my “authority”, and in turn, creates all sorts of unmeasurable benefits for my content.

Me giving a workshop in Chiang Mai

Again, it goes back to your goals. What are you trying to achieve?

You can use any type of framework you prefer, like SMART, OKRs, or BHAG. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have a goal and direction.

By the way, even if you think events are a great marketing channel for you, consider sponsoring them first. In fact, before we ran Ahrefs Evolve, we sponsored other conferences for years.

Like Chiang Mai SEO for >seven years:

Our booth at Chiang Mai SEO 2024

BrightonSEO for a few years now:

Our product marketer Andrei Țiț demoing how powerful our toolset is at BrightonSEO

SaaStock:

Our CMO Tim Soulo speaking at SaaStock Dublin

And a whole host of other events:

Our Head of International Marketing, Erik Sarissky, standing on top of our branded floatmingo

I think the experience of sponsoring and attending other conferences gave us a lot of insights into making our own conference. As sponsors and attendees, we knew what people wanted, what they liked, and what they disliked.

Knowing your target audience determines what kind of event you’ll run and what kind of speakers you’d invite. It’ll also help sponsors to decide if they want to sponsor your event.

For Ahrefs Evolve, we decided we wanted to bring top digital marketing professionals together, and not just SEOs.

That informed our eventual speaker line-up—we had speakers who presented about account-based marketing, performance branding, TikTok, and more.

Robert Lai speaking about performance branding

Charlotte Ang speaking about TikTok

Marcus Ho speaking about account-based marketing

Many companies dream of a major conference with their brand name splashed on it.

But it would be a huge mistake to jump right into creating a conference. Even for us—widely considered the top tool in our industry—it took us years before we even made Evolve.

Here’s how our journey unfolded:

As I’ve mentioned, we started sponsoring events first. Then, when we decided to put our foot down on the channel, we started with light networking events (SEO Beer and Snacks) that we hosted at our office.

Our first ever SEO Beer and Snacks

There was no agenda—just SEOs and digital marketers having a drink and chatting with each other.

Then we started to build from there and slowly increase complexity. We started to make the meetups educational by having presentations and panels.

A panel we ran on “Using SEO to Create a Billion-Dollar Revenue Channel”

Next, we turned it into actual paid workshops.

Link building workshop conducted by our product marketer, Constance

We then started doing these paid workshops at conferences we were already sponsoring, like Chiang Mai SEO.

Andrei giving a workshop at Chiang Mai SEO

It eventually culminated in a smaller conference that we held in 2023, called the Singapore SEO Summit.

Tim kicking off SG SEO Summit 2023

We got a small venue, marketed it only to Singaporeans, and limited the tickets to 200 people. Most of our speakers were locally based too, except James Norquay and Nik Ranger, who were from Australia.

While the conference wasn’t sold out, it gave us confidence in scaling up and running an international one. After all, it did well despite:

• No “big name” speakers
• Shorter timeframe
• Marketing only to locals

Most importantly, we learned that people were happy to fly all the way to Singapore just to attend an Ahrefs conference. We had attendees from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and even South Korea.

Networking time at SG SEO Summit 2023

You may argue that these were countries close to Singapore. But consider the fact that ASEAN (besides SG) isn’t particularly economically developed and it probably costs a lot to fly to Singapore and stay there (notoriously expensive). The fact they would do that is a sure sign of our brand power.

It was only when we saw these results that we decided to make a 500-person conference for 2024.

As Shermin told me, everything in an event eventually comes down to the budget.

Developing the budget means answering two important questions:

• What do you need and how much is everything going to cost?
• How are you going to earn revenue?

Costs

These are the things we needed for our conference with their estimated costs.

Do you really need to spend that much? Well, it depends on the size of your event.

We wanted to make Ahrefs Evolve spectacular and that’s why we needed all of them. But for our initial networking events, we only needed food and drinks. Later, we incurred a one-time cost for A/V equipment when we started doing workshops.

It also depends on what you want to offer. For example, we didn’t want people to leave the venue—a beautiful, award-winning one, by the way—and hang out with the cliques they already knew. We wanted them to network. That’s why we chose a hotel, which catered food.

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:

• First Page Digital
• Pitchbox
• Digital Web Solutions
• Contadu
• Konigle

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.

For smaller events, dates can be flexible. For example, we usually announce our networking events two to three weeks before.

For a major conference, you’d want to ensure the dates are good:

• Doesn’t clash with a major holiday, e.g., Chinese New Year in Singapore
• Doesn’t clash with any major events, e.g., 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:

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.

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.

A big part of an event, if you’re doing an educational one, are the speakers. People will attend an event just to hear someone speak. For example, in 2016, I flew all the way to London just to hear 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.

Here’s everything we did to market Ahrefs Evolve:

Discounting

As mentioned earlier, we implemented early bird and group discounts.

Event landing page

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:

Creating content

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

• 7 SEO Conferences to Attend in 2024
• 5 Content Marketing Conferences to Attend in 2024

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!

The question every sponsor will ask: what do we get if we sponsor your event?

Typically, they are:

• On-site branding (e.g., on stage, on wall displays, on lanyards)
• On-stage shoutout
• Brand visibility on event page/website and social media
• Physical booth with furnishings
• A speaking slot
• Free event tickets

Most conferences will offer these perks in tiers, e.g., Regular, Gold, Platinum. For example, here’s what we got from sponsoring Chiang Mai SEO as a Platinum sponsor:

• 20 minute on-stage presentation + 10 minute Q&A
• First choice of placement for vendor booth, including backdrop, pull-up banner and TV screen
• Platinum partner placement on stage backdrop and digital signage
• Logo placement on event badges
• On-stage booth shout-out by MC for break periods
• Logo placement on website and email marketing campaign
• Virtual booth and banner advertising on CMSEO App
• Goodie bag inclusion for Deluxe Ticket Holders
• 2 Deluxe Passes
• 3 Vendor Passes

Since it was our first event, we wanted to keep it simple. So, we offered only one tier to all sponsors. Here’s what our sponsors received:

• Exhibition booth with essential furnishings: table, chairs, and an extension cable. We also recommended suppliers if they needed additional display items.
• Visibility on our social media and the event page.
• Onsite branding displayed throughout the event.
• Three complimentary event tickets.

First Page Digital’s booth at Evolve

Our social media shoutout for sponsors

To begin with, we contacted our connections and asked if they’d sponsor our conference. We also provided a contact form for potential sponsors on our event page.

In terms of running the actual event, we partnered with an events agency to do bulk of the work. They handled:

• A/V
• Lighting
• Production management, including the crew and part-timers
• Event registration, including software, analytics, and part-timers
• Lanyards

We also hired a photo and videography team for three days, including the VIP networking night.

Our photographer Rohan kindly stepped in front of the camera for once to snap a photo with Elysa from our events team

The rest of the marketing and support team were also involved, from handling the VIP booth to giving out swag, to managing the speakers and directing people around.

Our swag booth

But I want to remind you that when it comes to events, 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.

If you’ve done a major event like a conference, then it’s time for you to take a vacation. Go as far away as possible, lock up your laptop, and switch off your mobile phone. Go for a massage, get a mani-pedi, and sleep as long as you want.

You deserve it.

The beautiful and unfortunate part about events is that when the current one ends, the next one begins.

After a few days (and hopefully a few weeks) of rest, the prep for the next one begins. For Shermin, it’s Evolve 2025. (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:

• Right from X: All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
• What I Learned From Ahrefs Evolve: 4 Marketing Things I’m Doing Differently

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.