How to Start a Successful Online Events Business with Little or No Money

Starting up a business with limited or no money may sound unrealistic, but it is possible when it comes to an event planning business. Most people believe that business is all about money. However, proper planning and execution play a bigger role than money here.

In this article, we are going to tell you how you can take your first step in an online event planning business with a limited budget.

You can include the following types of events in your event planning business:

• Promotional events including charity, fashion shows, product launches, fundraisers etc.
• Business and educational events including seminars, meetings, graduation parties and more.
• Celebrations like weddings, birthdays, festivals, sports events and more.

Let us begin with the basics of an event planning business.

Basics of an event planning business

The term “event planning” refers to the service that helps people or businesses conduct successful events through proper planning and execution. An event planner or his team bears the responsibility of A to Z of an event that includes researching, finalizing venues, selecting caterers and ensuring that everything goes according to the plan.

Maintaining every client’s budget is one of the biggest challenges that every event planner faces. So being a successful event planner or holding a business of event planning is a big job.

In simple words, an event planner must have the following qualities:

• Sincere and responsible.
• Attention to details.
• Good communication skills.
• Capable enough to fulfill all clients’ requirements that too within their budget.

What is the minimum investment for an event?

Well, if it is about a physical event planning business then it is going to be a bit more expensive than the online one as you need to have a team of at least four to five people to handle it. Starting from setting up an office and paying your employees to promoting it everything is included in a physical event planning business. However, if you build an online identity for your event planning business, you can use useful WordPress plugins like WP Event Manager to reduce the expenditure. The part about this is that the core plugin is free, and it is enriched with a lot of event management features.

On the other hand, online event planning business can be managed with a little or no money. All you need is proper planning and the support of an efficient event management WordPress plugin like WP Event Manager.

5 steps to start an event planning business with no money

You might be surprised to know that starting up an event planning business from scratch is not so difficult. Using the right software can help you get your first project easily without investing a penny.

Consider the following steps to start your event planning business with no money:

1.  Recognize your target audiences.

No matter what type of business you are going to start, knowing your target audience is crucial for its growth. When it is about an event planning business, you need to be clear about whether you are going to plan all types of events in general or you want to pick a specific event type with targeted audiences.

If you do not have much experience in this field, we recommend you to pick up a specific type of event to plan at first.

Begin with the type of events in which you have experience.

If you do not have any experience in this field, you must start by working for an event organization that hosts the type of events that you want to start your business with and observe the way events are managed over there.

You can consider the following things:

• How often does the company organize events?
• Find out about their budget limit.
• How many attendees usually grace their events and how many do they expect?
• The activities that happen in such events in general.

Once you gain an idea and a bit of experience in this field, you need to focus on the target audiences.

• Find out about the age group your target audiences belong to.
• Which social media platforms they use the most.
• Topics that they have interest in and more.

Gathering this information about your target audiences can help you serve them better and create a bond with them.

2. Set charges for your event planning services.

After deciding about the type of events and knowing your target audiences, the next step is to decide charges for your event planning services.

Here, it is to be mentioned that the service charges for event planning usually depends on the type and size of the event you are hosting but it is good to have a general pricing structure for your business.

You need to decide about the following while fixing charges for your event management services:

• How much would you charge for hourly meetings, discussions and meeting vendors? 
• Fix charges for your resources that you offer your clients.

You can also decide the charges based on the below mentioned things:

• You can fix an hourly charge. 
• You can take a percentage of the total budget of the event.

Once you set your service charges and pricing strategy, you must focus on creating service packages.

3. Marketing and resources

Since we have a limited budget for our event planning business, our marketing options are less at least at the initial stage of the business. Once it starts growing and earning, you can spend a certain amount on marketing every month.

You have both paid and non-paid marketing options. We are going to focus on the free marketing options due to our budget constraint.

Consider the following ways to promote your events:

• Word of mouth promotion

This is one of the most authentic ways of promoting your events business. This is because we usually rely on our friends or family’s recommendation for any type of services. If you can offer your clients a worthwhile experience of working with you, your clients would recommend you to others which will ultimately spread the name of your business. You can start by creating a business card and sharing it with your friends, family and colleagues.

• Social media marketing

This is another free yet powerful platform to promote your event planning business. You can create your events business pages on popular social media platforms and ask your known circle to follow it and share with their friends and followers. Use popular hashtags on your industry and regularly post contents to keep your audiences in touch and reach a maximum number of people.

• Email Marketing

Email marketing is also very useful here but it has a limited capacity. This is because you can regularly update your subscribers with new developments of your business including offers and deals but you can only involve your subscribers here. This might not help you expand your audience reach but it would help you stay in touch with the existing ones.

• Utilize your events website

Creating an events website is extremely important for you especially when you have a tight budget. If you still do not have an events website or you want to create one, turn to WP Event Manager which is an eminent WordPress event management plugin that can help you build a feature rich event management website. The core plugin is free and it comes with all the basic features that you need to create an event management website.

You can also attach an events calendar to it with the help of the Calendar plugin offered by WP Event Manager to let people know about the upcoming events that you are going to plan.

4. Create a business plan

Stepping into the business world is not easy and it needs proper planning and execution. Whether you have a limited budget or not, proper planning is crucial to utilize what you already have.

You need to have a clear idea about which industry you are serving, what type of events you are going to start, your target audiences, what your offerings are and what are your business objectives.

Creating a business plan must include the following:

• Proper industry analysis. 
• Market research. 
• Competitors’ research.
• Operations and logistics.
• Planning promotional activities. 
• An executive summary.
• Financial plan. 
• Target audience analysis.

You can create a solid business plan keeping the above mentioned areas in mind.

5. Market research

Market research is an inseparable part of every business. Before starting your events business it is recommended for you to do a thorough market research.

You need to initiate a market research to find out about the following:

• Who are your competitors?
• How much are your competitors charging for their services?
• What is unique about your business or how you are different from others in the market?

Understanding the above mentioned things will help you hold a good position in the market.

Wrapping up

If you want to start an online event planning business with a limited budget or with no money you need to be careful at every step. We hope that these above mentioned steps along with a superior event management plugin like WP Event Manager will help you fulfill your goals in this field.