It seems that wherever you look nowadays someone is screaming for your attention. With increasing competition to gain mind-share of your customers from email marketing, online, print, direct mail, TV, and outdoor advertising, people are experiencing ‘advertising overload’. As a small or medium sized company, trying to gain cut-through and get your product or service noticed amongst all this ‘noise’ can seem a daunting task – especially without the marketing budget of a multinational company!
However, with a bit of clever thought and careful planning you can utilise customer events to do just that.
Old Fashioned Face-to-Face Marketing? It Gets Results.
With so much time spent with our eyes glued to a screen both at work and at home, it is always refreshing to get out and finally meet people face-to-face. In fact, it’s a dying art, which is why it’s so appealing, possibly as a result of people’s thirst for contact and the lack of community activities in our lives caused by our spiraling workloads and commitments.
Many large companies such as MINI, Virgin Mobile and Absolut Vodka are now realising the value of personalising their marketing and are using customer events as important marketing tools. Unsurprisingly, in a world full of advertising clutter, this is making a real impact with customers and ensuring a company’s messages stand-out from the crowd.
There is a different level of intimacy that brands and companies can achieve with customers through events. Customers really appreciate the personal touch that an event can give.They can also act as a springboard – sparking the type of word-of-mouth marketing and PR that not even the largest marketing budgets can buy.
You too can take advantage of this and it’s not difficult.
How to Create Events That Get Results:
What do you want to achieve? What is the aim of your event? What do you want the end outcome to be? It could be to raise your profile to customers and media or you may want to gain sales on the day. Make a list of objectives beforehand so that you can keep this front-of-mind when planning and measure the success of the event afterwards.
Do your research – find out what your prospective and current clients enjoy and then think of interesting ways that you could use these ideas to showcase your products or services. Get creative with ideas – flick through fashion and lifestyle magazines to get some inspiration for things you could do, visit other events and see what you like and don’t like.
How many people? Think about how many people you would feel comfortable targeting with each event. You could organise one big event or a few smaller events where you could spend more time with your prospective clients.
Talk to experts – once you have a general idea of what you want, approach some great suppliers – a professional event producer can really add value to what you are aiming to achieve. Or, you can pull it together yourself and choose individual suppliers such as venues, caterers, entertainers, florists, gift companies etc – visit RSVP Sydney on 22 – 23 July 2009 at Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. RSVP is free to attend and showcases the best event suppliers including: venues, entertainers, caterers, florists and event producers. It is packed with inspiration and ideas on how to create innovative, memorable events. Best of all, it allows you to try before you buy! Check out www.rsvpevent.com.au to book your free tickets.
Do one thing well – if you don’t have a huge budget, just concentrate on doing one thing really well that people will remember. If you are having food, make sure that it’s great quality or if you have central feature such as an entertainer or a model, make them stand out.
Plan your invite list with care – give people enough warning so that they can plan the event into their diaries and also give yourself lots of time to find out final numbers. Also, ensure that you get a good invite made up – this does not have to be printed, you can create a great e-invite and sent it to people online. Also make sure people RSVP – you may need to do a bit of chasing on this so that you can plan your numbers for catering etc.
Organise the event with another company who offer a complimentary product or service to your own and who want to target the same audience. This way you can both make an impact but save time and money organising the event together.
Get good pictures – ensure that you have someone taking good photos on the day – you can use these in your marketing material, website, for the press and to send out afterwards to guests. It is worth investing some money in this so that you get quality shots.
Link it back – remember that any events you do must work for you longer term. Remember to follow up those that attended and very importantly those that did not attend. You may have a goody bag for people that attended and you could send this to those that couldn’t attend too – that always makes an impact with people and takes them by surprise. Also, it may be good to get people to RSVP online to the event so that you can collect all their details and add them to your mailing list after the event.
ROI – when you have finished your event, measure your results against the objectives that you wrote out at the beginning. See what was achieved and what wasn’t so that you can learn for next time.
