If events aren't a part of your marketing strategy, you could be missing a prime opportunity to connect face-to-face with your current customer base, as well as potential customers. Whether you're a business owner with a store filled with products, or you have an arsenal of services under your belt, organizing events as a part of your marketing strategy can help increase your visibility and improve your sales.
Instructions
1. Evaluate your business' past performance and come up with a list of specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely business goals to guide you through the next month, quarter or year. As a business owner, it's essential to ensure that your business event marketing strategy fits in with your overall growth goals.
2. Use your business goals to come up with marketing objectives, which might include increasing your share in the market by 10 percent or introducing a new flavor to current customers and increasing sales by 15 percent within five months. Identify marketing strategies that will help you achieve your marketing objectives; they may include the way you price your product, the promotions you use, whether you distribute your products and changes you need to make to your product.
3. Develop marketing tactics, which put your marketing objectives and strategies into action. This is where you can determine whether an event works as a tactic for marketing your business. You might use an event to educate consumers about use your products, to introduce customers to the ingredients you use in your product, to launch or relaunch a product or service, to introduce a contest or new employee, or to thank your current customers.
4. Consider your core target market as you plan your event. Knowing the target market for your event will clue you in on how and where to promote the event, such as from which media outlets you should seek coverage, which online and offline publications are best for purchasing advertising space, or if you can effectively use e-mail marketing or social media to help spread the word.
5. Work with an event planner to invite your target consumers to your event. The event planner can also help you plan the details of the event and manage logistics.
6. Execute your event, then evaluate the success of the event by following up with attendees to get feedback. Conduct onsite surveys that ask such questions as "how familiar were you with x product before the event?" or "how did the product demonstrations affect your opinion of x product?"
Tags: your business, your event, your marketing, marketing objectives, marketing strategy, your product, business goals