“An idea is salvation by imagination.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
A well-crafted event portfolio is a holy grail for vendors who are constantly searching for organizers to partner with! Gone is the time when you could just exchange quotations over calls and emails to seal the deal. In present-day event planning, you must focus on marketing yourself to your target event planning stakeholders. Building an event portfolio that strikes the right chord with your preferred industry organizers will require some profound thought. To spare you the effort, we have designed a checklist that is a 'must' for every vendor.
Top 7 Parameters for Your Event Portfolio: A Vendors Checklist
To partner with organizers for event planning, your portfolio must depict your expertise, experience and functionalities in the most dynamic way. For an organizer, presentation is everything, so you must focus on highlighting your skills and creativity right from the first meeting with potential clients. Now, let’s look at the elements that should be a part of your event portfolio.
The Brand Package: Logo, Colors and Tagline
While designing or revamping your event portfolio, ensure that you incorporate at least two to three primary brand colors on every landing page to provide a wholesome feel and experience of your brand. In addition, make sure that your portfolio directly portrays your brand’s objective and theme to initiate brand capture and recall.
Visual Proof: Real Before and After Photos of Your Event
A prospect event organizer will only decide to partner if you have some actual work to showcase! So even though the D-day of the event might be hectic, you should click some images of the venue, décor, booth setups, seating arrangements and even centerpieces. From your image library, you can select, crop or resize images to fit into your portfolio. Once on display, you can start talking to prospect organizers about how you worked on setting up an event from scratch! Apart from photos, you can also record your entire event setup process and make a timelapse video. The videos will get the job done to engage site visitors, followers, and target audiences.
Convey Your Credibility With Client Testimonials
Reviews, client testimonials, and feedback illustrate the customer's
experience in words. Using glorious reviews for marketing gives a prospect a closer look at your business and its outcomes. According to research by Demand Gen Report, 97% of B2B customers cite testimonials as the most authentic and reliable form of content. Let’s suppose you want to make your testimonial column diverse. In that case, you can even go above and beyond with your previous clientele to ask your colleagues or professors to vouch for your skills regarding team ethics, creativity and discipline.
Tell Them About Your Team: Have an 'About Us' Section
When an organizer looks at your portfolio, he or she would want to know about your team and the overall accomplishments. So, you can create a 'Meet my Team' or an 'About Us' section where you can highlight the achievements, education, awards and fun facts about you and your team members. What aspects can you include in the ‘About Us’ section?
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Upload professional photos
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Write short bios that highlight the strengths of your team members as event planners
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You can also list their passions or hobbies
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The event team members can each contribute a quote that they like
Include Social Links for a Glimpse Into Your Community
There are different ways to display your social reach in an event portfolio. You can simply include the links to your social accounts to let the prospect know about your audience if you are going digital. If you have a paperback folder or a file, you can mention your usernames for the organizer to check them out later.
Exhibit Your Credibility Indicators Loud and Proud
If any of your event designs have received media mentions or good ratings on event review websites, you can display these raving reviews on your portfolio. The number of reviews you have is directly proportional to your brand credibility!
“If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you.” – David Brier
You can include press releases, newspaper cut-outs or news mentions, reviews from Yelp or any other review website to keep a good tempo going.
Give the Prospect a Glimpse of Your Timeline
While setting up events, you must have a set timeline to knock off deadlines! So, it will be a good idea to show potential organizers how you plan your work and the steps you take to achieve common event planning goals. In addition, you can also indulge in some background research of the prospect’s previous events and give a sample plan of how you would go about setting it up.