Maximise Your Event Budget: SEO vs PPC – What Works & When?

Event organisers face a critical question when planning their digital marketing strategy: where should you invest for the biggest impact? In our recent webinar, Jon Monk from ASP and Tom McMahon from MCM broke down the strategic differences between SEO and PPC, helping event marketing teams to make smarter budget decisions.

The Fundamental Difference: Timing & Audience Reach

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) works best when audiences are actively searching for events similar to yours. It's a year-round strategy allowing you to reach people who are already looking for what you offer.

PPC (Pay Per Click) offers aggressive targeting capabilities, reaching audiences wherever and whenever they are – whether they're scrolling through Instagram stories or browsing TikTok. This flexibility allows you to target specific seniority levels, company lists, and demographics with precision.

PPC's Superpowers: When Paid Advertising Excels

Hard-to-Reach Audiences
PPC shines when targeting specific seniority levels from particular companies with defined buying power and interests. The granular targeting options make it invaluable for reaching decision-makers who might never actively search for your event.

Competitor Targeting and New Audience Discovery

Who are the audiences that don't know about your event? They don't know that they want to attend. They don't know that you've got all of these brilliant speakers and all of these fantastic opportunities. That's where a PPC campaign can put the right ads in front of the right people at the right time.

Exhibitor Lead Generation

Finding high-quality exhibitors who will return year after year has become increasingly sophisticated through PPC platforms, offering exciting targeting options for this traditionally challenging task.

The Budget Reality: Why Foundation Matters

Here's a crucial insight: PPC costs can almost double if your website's foundation isn't strong. When technical SEO, conversion journeys, and site health are neglected, every penny spent on PPC becomes significantly less effective.

Conversely, when a solid SEO strategy is in place (at least a year before launching PPC campaigns), you can effectively get double the results from your investment. The relationship is symbiotic – SEO provides the foundation, while PPC acts as the cherry on top.

The Optimal PPC Campaign Structure

The most effective approach involves running targeted campaigns for 8-12 weeks, structured around three key phases:

• Awareness Phase: Building brand recognition
• Consideration Phase: Nurturing interest with detailed information
• Conversion Phase: Driving registrations and sign-ups

Minimum Budget Guidelines:

• £1,000 for awareness campaigns
• £4,000-£5,000 to start seeing ticket conversions

Platform Diversification: Beyond Google and Facebook

The digital advertising landscape has expanded significantly. While Google and Meta remain strong performers, emerging platforms offer cost-effective alternatives:

TikTok deserves special attention – with 33 million active monthly users in the UK and costs approximately one-third of Meta advertising, it's becoming essential for B2B and event marketing. The key insight: "Create TikToks, not ads" – authentic, point-of-view content performs better than polished promotional material.

Emerging opportunities include Spotify (extremely cost-effective for awareness), Connected TV (Netflix advertising), and vertical video content across all platforms.

SEO: The Year-Round Asset Builder

While PPC delivers immediate results during focused campaigns, SEO builds lasting value. In our AI-driven world, this becomes even more critical – whether someone searches on Google, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, they're looking for quality information.

The AI Search Revolution

AI searches increased by 80% from 2024 to 2025, though still representing only 2.5% of total searches. However, this growth trajectory means event organisers must become the source of truth for their industry topics. If quality information isn't on your website, AI platforms will either find outdated information elsewhere or, worse, generate incorrect information through "hallucinations."

Content That Drives Year-Round Traffic

Transform your event website from a seasonal landing page into an industry resource hub through:

• Speaker interviews with meaningful, engaging questions
• Session summaries transcribed from audio/video content
• Industry thought leadership blogs and white papers
• Content hubs organised around conference streams, themes, or industry sectors

Some of the conference information blog posts written by AI using session videos and transcripts are as good as human written content now. This is content gold for your website.

The Privacy Challenge and SEO Solution

Google's Consent Mode 2.0 has reduced available data for advertising platforms, making targeting slightly more challenging. However, SEO can fill this gap effectively. A website with only event-name keywords gives Google a small audience to model for PPC campaigns. A website with thousands of industry-focused pages provides a much larger canvas for audience targeting and significantly improves PPC efficiency.

The Takeaways

• Budget Synergy: SEO and PPC work best together – invest in both for maximum ROI
• Timing Strategy: Use SEO year-round for audience building, deploy PPC in focused 8-12 week bursts
• Content Gold Mine: Your conference sessions and speaker content are valuable assets – transcribe and publish them
• Platform Diversification: Don't rely solely on Google and Facebook – explore TikTok, Spotify, and emerging platforms
• Foundation First: Strong website health and SEO make PPC campaigns significantly more cost-effective
• AI Preparation: Become the authoritative source for your industry topics to dominate AI search results

The Bottom Line...

The question isn't SEO versus PPC – it's how to strategically combine both for maximum impact. SEO builds your year-round foundation and audience intelligence, while PPC provides the focused boost needed to fill seats and attract quality exhibitors. Together, they create a comprehensive strategy that maximises every pound of your marketing budget.

Session Recording

If you'd like to watch back the full session check out the video recording here: