10 Best Event Marketing Tools of 2024 (+ Alternatives)

You’re probably here because your company wants to run more events in 2024. That’s great. Events, both virtual and in-person, are a proven way to grow your business. But how do you get people to attend your event? That’s the real challenge. 

This is where event marketing tools come in. They help you promote your event and connect with people. In this article we dive into the 10 best event marketing tools of 2024. We'll also show you what to look for in a good tool and how to pick the right one. Let's dive in and find the best tool to make your events shine.

What Should You Look for in an Event Marketing Tool

Picking the right event marketing tool can give you a competitive edge. Here’s how to pick the right platform for your company:

User-Friendly Interface

An event marketing tool should have a simple UI for both the organizers and the attendees. Complex forms, hard-to-access features, and confusing buttons increase the friction of the experience.

If the tool has a user-facing component, like a webinar platform, try attending an event that’s hosted using that tool. It will give you a lot of insight into what your audience will experience.

Integration Capabilities

Any event marketing tools you choose should be able to integrate with the other tools in your tech stack. Seamless integration with your CRM and marketing platforms can streamline data flow and enhance your overall strategy. Look for tools that connect with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, or have webhooks or APIs to easily sync the data you need and build automations off of it. 

For example, Contrast's HubSpot integration allows users to streamline event registrations, engagement tracking, and follow-up processes.

Analytics and Reporting

Good event marketing tools tell you what's working and what isn’t. They show you who comes to your events, how they found out about it, how long they stay, and what they like. This info helps you make your next event even better. Look for tools that share these details in a way that's easy to understand.

Customization Options

Events are a great opportunity to build your brand identity. When picking an event marketing tool, make sure it lets you customize the look and feel of all of your event marketing collateral to match your brand’s style. 

For example, older platforms like Zoom have fewer customization options, while modern webinar platforms will let you brand your entire event, from registration pages to post-event emails. 

Scalability

An event marketing tool should adapt to your needs as you grow. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re promoting a small webinar or an all-day virtual conference. It should really work for both without any trouble. 

Cost and ROI

Finding the right balance between cost and what you get is key. You want a tool that fits your budget but still does everything you need. Measure and analyze your event analytics as you build out your strategy. Think about what you're willing to spend and what features are must-haves for your events. 

10 Best Event Marketing Tools

Next up, we'll look at the top 10 event marketing tools for 2024. We picked tools across a wide variety of categories in order to cover different parts of an event marketing campaign.

Hubspot - Best Marketing Automation Tool for Event Marketing

Hubspot is the leader for marketing automation with a 41.6% share of small business automation. You can use HubSpot to keep your customer information in one place, promote your events across email and your website, and analyze the performance of your event. While not designed specifically for event management, it works really well for it. HubSpot is ideal for building event marketing workflows and understanding performance. 

Pros:

• Marketing automation 
• Email marketing
• Social media management
• Ads management
• Landing pages
• Email automation 
• Analytics

Cons:

• Not designed for event management
• Can get expensive as your audience grows
  

If you need an alternative to HubSpot, try Customer.io

Contrast - Best Webinar Platform for Event Marketing

Contrast is a modern platform designed to host webinars and virtual events that are engaging and memorable. To help promote your events,  we offer tools for creating custom emails and high-converting registration pages.

Our Repurpose AI feature also transforms your content into new types of formats like blogs, short clips, and social media posts. This makes it easy to promote your webinar after the fact to drive on-demand views, which increases your ROI.

Contrast also has detailed webinar analytics that show you the most and least engaging moments of the event. You can use that data to tailor future content to your audience’s preferences.

Pros:

• Simple UI - create a webinar in a few clicks
• Fully customizable - edit the look and feel of your webinar and all of its marketing material
• Advanced engagement features - On-screen Q&As and polls, threaded chats, topics, and widgets.
• Free to use - see Contrast’s pricing
• Unlimited users - collaborate with as many colleagues as you like.
• Unlimited audience size - invite as many people as you like.

Cons:

• Not optimal for physical events

Hoppier - Best Virtual Catering Tool for Event Marketing

Hoppier is a unique way to get some of the benefits of in-person events at a low cost. With Hoppier, you can give virtual or physical cards to virtual event attendees which they can use to buy food and drinks. It’s a low-cost way to provide food to virtual event guests around the world. This increases the appeal of your virtual event and can be listed as a benefit in all of your event’s marketing material. 

Pros:

• Simple onboarding
• Good customer service 

Cons:

• No free trial
• No integrations

If you need an alternative to Hoppier, try Tango. 

Eventbrite - Best Event Management Tool for Event Marketing

Eventbrite is designed for creating, managing, and promoting events of all types. It also offers a range of tools for event marketing. Event organizers can benefit from Eventbrite's reach and distribution, tapping into a large community of users who are already on the platform. This can boost the visibility and attendance of your event, especially for in-person events, as you can promote your event locally on their platform. It also has email marketing, automated workflows, ad creation tools, and analytics. 

Pros:

• Wide reach to their existing users
• Easy to use
• Event pages
• Email marketing
• Automated workflows
• Free to use

Cons:

• High service fees per ticket sold
• Limited customization

If you need an alternative to Eventbrite, try Cvent.

Canva - Best Design Tool for Event Marketing

Canva is a graphic design platform that makes it easy to create images and even videos. As an event marketing tool, Canva offers templates for invitations, flyers, emails, and social media posts to promote your event. It is easy to use and has a big library of templates and design elements that help create eye-catching marketing materials for your event. They’ve also recently added a lot of AI features that make it even easier to create event marketing collateral. 

Pros:

• Wide range templates
• Generous features in the free version 
• AI text-to-image generator

Cons:

• Customization can be limited 
• There is a bit of a learning curve for more advanced features
• Your designs might look similar to other companies’ who use Canva templates

If you need an alternative to Canva, try Figma.

Mailchimp - Best Email Marketing Tool for Event Marketing

Mailchimp makes email tasks easy for event marketers. It offers tools for any type of email campaign you could need. It can help you attract attendees from your email marketing list and can also be used to contact them after the event. Its wide range of compatibility with other marketing tools is also really helpful. 

Pros:

• Customize email campaigns
• Great email analytics
• Wide variety of integrations
• Simple user interface
• Free plan

Cons:

• Paid plans can get expensive quickly
• No email or live chat support on free plan

If you need an alternative to Mailchimp, try Brevo (formerly SendinBlue).

Attendease - Best End-to-End Event Marketing Tool 

Attendease gives you tools for the whole event marketing cycle.  It is a comprehensive event marketing tool that helps with everything from website creation to attendee registration, email communications, and everything in between. The platform is also equipped with scheduling features and analytics. If you’re looking for one platform to manage everything related to your event, Attendease could be a good choice. 

Pros:

• Manage everything in one place
• They offer training sessions for your team
• Great for complex events with multiple stages and concurrent sessions

Cons:

• Pricing only available on request
• Important integrations with marketing automation platforms cost extra

If you need an alternative to Attendease, try Splash.

Zapier - Best Integration Tool for Event Marketing

Zapier automates tasks between different apps and tools, saving time and reducing manual work. As an event marketing tool, it can connect all of the software you’re using for your event. When an important event happens in one tool, Zapier can use that as a trigger to do something in another platform. 

For example, when someone registers for a webinar hosted on Contrast, you can use Zapier to share that data with any CRM to create or update the contact record there. If that same person watches a replay of the on-demand webinar, Zapier can send a signal from Contrast to your CRM with that information so that your sales or marketing team can take further action. Here’s a full list of how you can take action on your Contrast data with Zapier. 

Pros:

• Very customizable
• Wide range of reliable integrations
• Affordable and scalable
• Free forever plan

Cons:

• Learning curve for new users
• Some technical knowledge needed for advanced customization
• Free plan only allows for two-steps in your automation

If you need an alternative to Zapier, try Make (formerly Integromat).

Asana - Best Project Management Tool for Event Marketing

Asana is a project management tool that helps teams organize their work and tasks. We’ve added it to this list of event marketing tools though because it serves as a central hub for all of your event marketing. It will help you make sure that every part of your event marketing plan is on schedule. 

You can use Asana as a content calendar, to track key deadlines and deliverables, and can even coordinate with external vendors and stakeholders through shared projects. It can also be used to gather and action feedback after your event through their forms and automation features. Event organizers can even use Asana as a CRM to manage selling event sponsorships.

Pros:

• Plan all of your event marketing with internal and external stakeholders
• Scalable - works for both small and large teams
• Wide range of integrations
• Powerful automation features
• Free forever plan

Cons:

• Not built specifically for events
• Forms, automation and popular integrations are only on paid plans

If you need an alternative to Asana, try Trello. 

ChatGPT - Best Data Analysis Event Marketing Tool 

ChatGPT is widely known for text and image generation, but its data analysis capabilities have been overlooked by a lot of event marketers. ChatGPT can analyze large datasets by identifying patterns, categorizing information, and generating summaries or insights.  

For example, you could export attendee data into a CSV and have ChatGPT analyze and enrich it with industry tags for each company. This gives you more info about your audience and can help you segment your post-event attendee follow up emails. You could also bulk analyze post-event feedback, identifying common themes and areas for improvement. 

Pros:

• Analyze large amounts of data to uncover trends and insights
• Easy to get started with
• Highly customizable
• Generate text and image content

Cons:

• Data analysis is only available in the paid version
• Can generate inaccurate content, so use with caution
• There is a learning curve to figure out the right prompts

If you’re looking for an alternative to ChatGPT for data analysis, try Google Bard.

FAQs About Event Marketing Tools

What's the best way to promote my event with limited resources?

Promoting your event without a big budget for event marketing tools can be tough, but not impossible. Many of the tools listed, like Contrast, Asana, HubSpot, and Zapier, offer free versions that are packed with features to help you get started. You can get a lot done by stitching together a few free tools. Do that for a few events, prove the ROI to your leadership team, and then request more budget to be able to deliver even better results.  

Looking for free webinar software? Check out out this list: 5 Best Free Webinar Software for Your Online Events

Where can I find independent reviews of event marketing tools? 

For independent reviews of event marketing tools, check out third-party review sites like G2. For example, Contrast has a strong 4.8-star rating on G2. You can scroll through all of the reviews and see detailed reasons why people like a certain event marketing tool.  

When considering integrations, look for reviews that specifically discuss the two event marketing tools that you’re connecting.

For instance, reviews on HubSpot's app ecosystem talk about the integration between HubSpot and Contrast, where Contrast has a perfect 5-star rating. Integration reviews are important, because a tool might work great on its own, but if it doesn’t play nice with your other event marketing software, then it is just going to end up being a pain in the long run.

How do I measure the success of my event marketing campaign?

To measure the success of your event marketing campaign and the impact of your event marketing tools, focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) like attendance rate, engagement during the event, and the conversion rate. The conversion rate measures how many attendees took your next desired action during or after the event. That action can be anything like booking a demo, signing up for your product, requesting more info, or anything else that is important to your business.

Tracking these metrics will give you a clear picture of your event’s impact and highlight areas for improvement. For more info, check out our guide on webinar KPIs.

Wrapping up our guide to event marketing tools

By now you should understand what to look for in an event marketing tool and better understand some of the best options out there. Each tool, from Contrast's engagement-focused webinar platform to Canva’s user-friendly design software, offers a unique way to make your events stand out. Choosing the right tools will help you promote your event and make sure the right people attend. 

Ready to run more engaging virtual events and webinars? You can use Contrast for free and set up an event in minutes.