Archive for the ‘Marketing Live Events’ Category

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What’s that gathering dust on your desk?

Friday, January 8th, 2010

small business marketingIn this online world that we all seem to live in, it is easy to focus all your efforts on one or more of the new social media tools at the start of this new year.

Yup, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are being used more and more by small businesses. But did you know that there is a quicker way to get in touch with people?

I know it’s rather old fashioned and it hardly gets a mention nowadays, but the telephone is really a wonderful device!

At the start of a New Year, you have a great excuse to pick up the phone and call a few past clients and customers. Wish them a Happy New Year and find out how the past few months have been for them.

You may want to find out if they are still on target with the plans you helped set out for them. It could that you ask for feedback on the last product they purchased from you.

However the phone call goes, there is a very good chance that a couple of those calls may lead to a re-booking or a re-order.

Go on – you know you remember how to use it. Just pick up that handset thingy, press the numbers and when the ringing sound stops, the person will be there on the other end.

It’s quite magical you know :) And not a tweet or poke in sight!

Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Selling You & Your Business | 1 Comment »

Why niche marketing works for small businesses

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

niche marketing for small businessesNiche marketing works for small businesses.  The more focused you are on the particular problem that you can solve, the easier it is to communicate and spread the word about the solutions you offer.

Imagine a coach who has a background in teaching and happens to love the great outdoors.  What if you came to their website and they offered you general life coaching, coaching support for teachers, a special programme that helped school children study better and a few walking holidays combined with personalised coaching sessions.

Phew!  All that from one person?  Really?

Think back to the last time you needed your boiler serviced.  Who did you use?  A specialist corgi registered boiler servicing company or the odd-job-man who offers to clean your gutters, re-paint your living room, fix and install bathrooms, trim your hedges as well as service your boiler?

If your odd-job-man comes highly recommended by your neighbours, then perhaps he is the “man for the job” – but looking through the Yellow Pages, he may not be your first point of call.

So, what about you?  If you are competing with everyone else and not at the stage that all your customers are coming via the “highly recommended” route, then you may want to take another look at your marketing messages.

Are you an “odd-job-man”?  Or are you a specialist?

Posted in Business Attitude, Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Prices & Charge Rates | No Comments »

Promoting everything all of the time just confuses your clients

Friday, December 4th, 2009

promoting small businessWhen you are marketing your business, you can’t help get passionate about what you do, do you?

It can be all too easy to tell all your potential clients about all your products and services, all of the time.  After all, you want to make sure they know everything about what you do, don’t you?

This is a common mistake that many small business owners make.  Just think about many of the high street shops are gearing up for christmas at the moment.  Promotional signs up everywhere – and yet which are the shops that you decide to go in to?

If a shop window is full of messages and big red signs shouting different messages, it is confusing and you will walk by.  A shop with a very clear message “50% on all stock” will attract a higher number of walk-in customers.

When marketing your own business, have the courage to promote one product and one service at a time. It may feel like you are missing out on opportunities to make a sale, but by giving your customers one message at a time, they will be clearer on what it is they need to do to “walk in to your shop”.

Got a question you want to ask about your current promotions? Submit your question in the comment box below.

 

Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Running Teleseminars | No Comments »

6 Common Mistakes Made When Marketing Events & Workshops

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

marketing workshopsAdding workshops and training events to your business mix can be an excellent way of increasing your revenue as well as raising your profile in your local market place.

Workshops can be run at plush hotels, coffee bars, online, through conference calls – in fact when you let your imagination run wild, events can be as big or small as you want them to be.

But there is nothing worse than spending your precious time designing an event, booking a venue and marketing it only to have more trainers than delegates!  And I am sure this is why so many people are put off by running events.

It’s the thought “but what happens if no one comes?”

There are several common mistakes that many people make running live events.  Read on to find out how you can avoid them and make sure your events are filled successfully.

Mistake No 1: Offer events that people need – not what they want.  It is too easy to spot a gap in the market and decide to share your expertise on a subject that you just know is needed.  But if there is no desire for what you are offering, it makes selling your event incredibly hard work. After all, it is not just money someone is investing in a live event – it is their time as well.

Find out what your market place really wants before deciding on your agenda.  If you don’t believe me, try offering a time management workshop and just see how many people pay you money to attend :)

Mistake No 2: Think advertising not marketing.  “How do I advertise my events?” is often one of the first questions people ask.  Advertising costs can eat in to your profit incredibly quickly and to be frank, will not work if you are offering an event “cold”.  Unless you have a strong brand presence in your market, you need to build people’s trust in you.  You need to design a marketing plan that builds a conversation with potential delegates.

Mistake No 3: Start marketing with no database.  The larger the database of interested customers you have, the more likely you are to fill your event.  If you have a database of 100 people and you are trying to market an event that you need 7 to break even and 20 to make your target profit, the maths just don’t add up.  Your conversion rate needs to be 20% which will only work if you have a very desirable topic and those people all happen to be free on the same day.

Mistake No 4: Offer the whole cake rather than a taster.  The reason that stall holders at Farmers’ Markets offer a morsel to taste is that they want to tempt you to buy the whole cake.  If you want to offer taster sessions to test the market place, consider breaking down your offerings to morsels. It makes it much easier to charge the true value of the event once you start marketing it commercially.

Mistake No 5: Discount heavily as desperation sets in.  Your workshop is in 5 days and you need another 4 or 5 people to really make it work.  You start discounting and offering BOGOFFs (buy one, get one free!).  But how do you think this makes the people, who have already committed to you, feel?  It’s like going on holiday, only to find that the person in the room next door got the exact same holiday for half the price because they booked on teletext the week before.

Offer early bird discounts and reward the people who book in advance. If you really need to increase the numbers at short notice, it is far better PR by offering a few free places to your favourite customers as a thank you for their loyalty to you.

Mistake No 6:  Have no follow on events.  One event does not make a business.  Always have something else to offer to people who genuinely can’t attend the day of the workshop, but are interested in what you are offering.  (at the very least offer an email newsletter to keep in touch with them!)

You may find that it takes 4 or 5 months to build up awareness for your events.  It seems a long time, but believe me it will then make filling workshop 3 and 4 far easier (and a lot more fun for you!)

What’s my biggest mistake?  Not to double check the day that I had booked a training room.  I found out the day before 15 ladies where expecting to drive to Guildford from across the South East that I wasn’t due until the day after!  We had a fun workshop in the staff training room, complete with mops and buckets, which actually added to the day :)

Got any great marketing mistakes to share? Add your comment below

Posted in Featured Articles, Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business | 1 Comment »

Completion not perfection

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

business perfectIt can be expected that everything you do in your business, you want done right.  To have the correct grammar and spelling.  To have the right message and images in your marketing material.  TO have the your logo in the right corner of your invoice.

After all you have standards and the right business image to create.

But to strive for perfection is business suicide.

Perfection means that everything has to be just right.  And to be just right it can take weeks, if not months, of checking and checking again.

Running your own business means that you can’t afford weeks of indecision and making the smallest of corrections before launching a new product or service.

Actions need to be taken for you to move forward.  Projects need completing for results to be seen.  And you can’t find out what is and what isn’t going to work until the results come in.

So if you are a perfectionist and are waiting for a final check before you launch that website, send out that email, speak to that client – just remember the completion not perfection rule.

Take action and do!

What are your thoughts? Do you find yourself putting off project launches because you want everything “just right”? Leave your comment below

Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Website & SEO Tips | 1 Comment »

Writing a Marketing Plan for Your Small Business: The 3 questions you must answer

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

marketing planWhether you are just starting up your own business from home or have been working for yourself for several years, a clear marketing plan is essential to not only show you what you should be doing to attract clients to your business, but also to keep you on track.

A marketing plan is really quite a simple document to produce.

There are far too many complicated templates that can be downloaded from the internet or got from a business book.  And when you feel you may have to produce a 20 page document, it can be the fastest way to put off the whole planning process.

There are only 3 questions that you need to answer in your marketing plan and they are:

1.  Where are you now?

2.  where are you going?

3.  How are you going to get there?

And they need to be in this order.

Too many business owners jump in to the “how are you going get there” question and get bogged down with marketing strategies and tools that, frankly, may not help you bit.

Start with the easiest question of all “where are you now?”. Not only will this help build your confidence up (after all, you should know the answer to this question without much thinking!), it will give you a baseline from where to start building.

The second question “where are you going?” is designed to focus you on targets and goals.  Where do you want to be this time next year?  How many clients do you want to managing?  How many hours do you want to be working? How much money do you want to be creating?

Your destination needs to specific.  It needs to be something that you can measure.  It’s got to have a timescales.  And it’s got to be realistic and something that you know is achievable. (Yup, you’ve guessed it – it has to a SMART goal!).

Once you have your SMART desination, you will find it far easier to answer the third and final question “How are you going to get there?”.

So forget about mission statements and synopsises.  Get to the basics and focus on what’s going to work for you on a day-to-day basis.

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Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business | 1 Comment »

Writing Marketing Copy? Know your customer first!

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

how to write website copyHad a great business mentoring session with a client last week who wanted to focus on getting an action plan together to help her write her website copy.  The design and template was done, but it couldn’t go live until the copy had been written.

However, one hour later we had not only time planned the copy writing but also spent the best part of the session focusing on who exactly she wanted to attract to her website.

Her target audience of “women” was just too broad and she soon realised that to enable her to write powerful and engaging copy that stopped online surfers in their tracks and got them to leave their name and email address to opt-in to her newsletter, she needed to be absolutely clear on who it was she wanted to engage with.Whether it is the home page of your website, a flyer for your next event or a postcard to handout at networking events, you have to spend time writing out the profile of the person you want to be attracting before you write the copy.

It will save you months of wasted marketing!

Posted in Marketing Design & Copy, Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business | No Comments »

Promote Less and Charge More

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

charge rates for workshopsOne of the easiest ways of making your business more profitable is to stop offering lots of choice and put your prices up.

Offer “affordable” and “low-cost” solutions to your clients and it is easy to get caught in the trap of constant promotions.  You can see this happening on the High Street at the moment.  Big retailers are offering pre-christmas sales and slashing their prices.  But the low margins mean that they have to get large numbers of customers through their doors to hit their sales targets.

When you run your own business, this is a strategy that rarely works.  It’s hard to attract the high numbers of clients you need to make the profits you want.

Here is a simple example using workshops to show you what I mean.

Half-day workshop tickets sell at £45
Delegate rate & room hire cost you £10 per person
Gross Profit per person £35

To make a total gross profit (and remember you still need to take in to account all the cost of promoting the event, work book printing, admin support, etc) of £500, you need a minimum of 15 tickets sold. 

Full-day workshop tickets sell at £195
Delegate rate & room hire cost you £40 per person
Gross Profit per person £155

To make the same £500 gross profit, you only need to sell 4 tickets.  If you sold 15 tickets, you would make a gross profit of £2325.

You would have to run at least 4 half day workshops to make the same gross profit as running one full day workshop.

Which workshop programme do you think will take less of your time to make £2,000?

(Please note, these calculations are highly simplified.  Do make sure you work out your net profit carefully when running events and don’t get caught out by focusing on your gross profit per person!)

Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Running Teleseminars | 1 Comment »

Marketing by Temptation: a lesson in wants and needs

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

marketing by temptationI popped in to our local branch of Waitrose earlier this week for a couple of pints of milk and few veggies. Now the thing about food shopping in the likes of Waitrose and M&S, is that is very easy to get caught up and turn your 5 item list in to a over-loaded shopping trolley.

I came out with a couple of frozen pizzas (to top up my last-minute-supper freezer draw), bag of chicken breasts (they were on special offer so I saved £2.31), a selection of frozen herbs (3 for £4 – how I can refuse?), a punnet of strawberries (over-priced and out-of-season but remembered my 9 year old mentioning she wanted strawberries on the way to school) to name but a few things that I wanted – but I didn’t really “need”.

My quick shop turned in to a £69.54 shopping trip which was precisely £50 more than I had intended to spend!

Why did I spend so much more than I intended? 

The £50 was the difference between buying what I “wanted” and buying what I “needed”.

And this is the trap that many coaches, consultants and service based professionals fall in to.  The trap of trying to sell something that they feel their clients need – and not what they want.

Yes, some people “need” help with their time management.  But do they “want” to spend their money (and their time!) on a half day workshop or 3 month long training programme to improve it?

Some people “need” to organise their house and de-clutter their cupboards, but do they “want” to cough up a few hundred pounds for someone to come in and do it for them?

And yes, there are people who “need” to lose weight, feel more confident, find a perfect partner and know how to manage their staff better – but if they don’t “want” to pay for a solution then it’s doesn’t matter how much your service is “needed”, you’ll won’t find enough clients unless your solution is something they “want”.

So next time you are struggling to fill your workshop or find enough clients to work with on a 1-2-1, ask yourself is the service or product you are offering be tempting enough for clients to “want” you?

Are you challenged by the needs and wants of your clients? Add your thoughts or ideas in the comments box below

Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Prices & Charge Rates | 1 Comment »

How a nail technician training room got me started marketing workshops

Monday, April 13th, 2009

When marketing live events and workshops, the biggest cost and hit to your profit line is often the venue.

It can be tough when you have made the decision to start offering group sessions, only to fall at the first hurdle – the conference day delegate rate!

The traditional conference hotel or business centre can easily charge £10 a head just for coffee and a few danishes, never mind the £70 for a finger buffet lunch and afternoon tea!

What to do?  Think outside the box and consider where all the free (or lower cost) venues could be.

Who do you know who could offer a meeting room at local offices?  You could offer to publicise the event with a “thanks for our sponsors” link.

What about finding places that have rooms available at their non-busy times?  Weekdays for wedding venues, Saturday mornings for conference hotels, mid-mornings at the local sports centre. Private rooms at restaurants and function rooms at pubs outside of eating times

My first “Work/Life Balance” workshops were run in a hairdressing salon where they offered me their nail technician training room in exchange for me showing my workshop delegates round the salon at the end of the session.  I got a free venue and all I had to do was to bring a handful of women in to their salon on their quieter days.

OK, not the glam or the glitz of a usual training room, but it gave me the opportunity to deliver my first open workshops with a very low financial risk.  So if venue costs are stopping you, where can you start?

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Posted in Marketing Live Events | No Comments »

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