- Oct 30, 2019

3 Pro Tips to Making Your Open House a Hit

The secret has been out for a while… Beatnik Studios is one of our absolute FAVORITE event venues here in Sacramento. For, like, a bajillion reasons. Even though this space is well established within the wedding/event community in Sac, we felt it was necessary to make it equally well known who their preferred partners are and what it would actually look and feel like to host your event within their industrial brick walls. I mean… look at this space! It’s always such a dream to design here and we want to share all our tips on this event with you. {Big thank you to LUMI Photography for capturing all the designs and event so well!}

indoor design at Beatnik Studios pro tip

outdoor design at Beatnik Studios pro tip

During the process of crafting their open house event, Beatific, we narrowed in on 3 key pro tips you MUST consider when looking to host an open house event at any venue. Now, this is something we can dive into more specifically with our 1-0n-1 coaching services {click here to learn more!} but we couldn’t help but share these pro tips with all of you for free – just ‘cus. You may now call us Santa Claus! LOL just kidding… maybe?

Okay let’s get into it…

PRO TIP #1: Establish a goal

Before you even think about putting together a design board or a vendor team, you need to establish your end goal. Your “why” for this open house, this is probably the most important pro tip we have in our list. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? Are you trying to book more clients? Are you trying to get your name out into the event industry amongst other professionals? Are you aiming to introduce new partnerships and get your current clients to book their services? Goal setting is critical when you first set out to throw an open house. Once you set that goal, you can move forward with the rest of the planning asking yourself with every decision being made: Does this serve my end goal? If it doesn’t, get rid of it! Not worth your time.

With Beatific, Beatnik Studios had over the last year begun to establish new exclusive partnerships. It was unclear to potential clients, existing clients, and other event pros who are actively referring Beatnik exactly who Beatnik was partnered with. Beatific’s goal was to showcase these incredible vendors and achieve this much needed clarity.

PRO TIP #2: Collaborating with the right vendors

We LOVE to use the term #friendors, and if you follow us on any of our social media platforms you’ve for sure seen it in a caption or two before. {Seriously, our Instagram is really just a feed of bragging about the insane talent we are so lucky to work with on a daily basis} But it’s so much more than a trendy hashtag. It’s an accurate depiction of what it means to be a vendor friend of ours that we not only love on a personal level, but on a working level. Having mutually beneficial working relationships are endlessly rewarding, in every industry. But when it comes to blowing your audience away with a killer open house, why not work with people who will elevate the event to levels you cannot comprehend on your own?

With that said, being able to rely on their creative abilities just as much as their professionalism and how they do business is not only necessary, it’s a game changer. Ultimately, if you work with someone who creates the most visually stunning designs but they are continuously flakey, delayed, or oblivious to things like commitments and timing, no amount of style will be worth it when they have zero follow through. Especially if you’re the venue. The client will only see that as a failure to deliver on your end, not on this other vendor’s end who they never even knew existed. So when dreaming up your collab team, dream big and select vendors that you know will make you, not break you.

Need help making sure you hit all the key players and don’t miss a vendor? Download our free Vendor Checklist here!

For Beatific, a huge piece of the announcement for new partnerships was the introduction of their new neighbor A & Be, a bridal boutique. So when we asked them to collab for the event, we knew we had to do it BIG. Well, we ended up throwing a full on fashion show of their inventory! It was a brilliant way to let this new partnership shine.

PRO TIP #3: Create Excitement!

Get. To. Scheduling. Your marketing content and strategy is everything. And guess what? It doesn’t have to cost you a single cent. YEP! That’s the absolute beauty of Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and your newsletter. I highly suggest sticking to the free advertisement, unless you have a budget to work with and are ready to exercise a strategy for print materials. For now, and the for sake of my best pro-tip-advise-foot-forward (I just made that a word, no biggie), I’d say stick to the free stuff!

Create your content FOR FREE via Canva {not an #ad, although if they wanna sponsor me all they gotta do is holla at your girl!}. Canva is literally where 99% of our content gets created.

Once you have the content, you need to create a posting schedule to follow for all outlets you plan to market through. Ok don’t get overwhelmed, but let’s take it oooooone step further! Communicate this schedule and share this content with your collab team! Give them guidelines on when to share, what the event hashtag is, and create a vendor credit list easy for them to copy/paste right into their posts. This allows you to keep control over the branding of the event while leveraging not only your online audience, but all of your collab team’s online audience. The reach is vastly greater! Best advice here – keep it simple. Bullet point key points in an email and make it a no-brainer for everyone to feel confident sharing the content.

BONUS TIP: if you’re not pre-scheduling your social media posts you are probably hating the social media game. Is that you? Time to save yourself! We use Later and it’s seriously a game changer {again, not an ad but wouldn’t say no a collab opportunity!}. Pre-schedule your posts once a week, set them all to auto-publish, and watch the work do itself. Thank us Later… see what we did there 😉

We can’t wait to see what you do with your next event! Let us know if these tips helped, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Now… we have to share some of our fav photos from this epic event! Scroll down to see who our #friendors were!