Marketing Your Event

This is the time of year when there events start to be on all over the place (a lot outdoors if the British weather doesn't let us down) so we thought it was time we pulled together a few tips for marketing an event, as by their nature events are often one-off activities away from your mainstream marketing.

1. Business to Business events – where your delegates are other businesses. These often take the form of training, informing or networking and occasionally awards ceremonies or conferences. If this is your target audience here are our top tips:

1. Dig out existing customers' details so that you tell them first
2. Make sure you give people plenty of notice to get it in their diaries, we recommend at least one month in advance, preferably two.
3. Think of an innovative way to let your target audience know about the event – a quirky hand delivered invite or special voucher incentives for people to bring along with them work well. And email marketing makes it easy to send out invites while being able to track who opened the email and whether or not they clicked through to your website.
   
4. Don't miss all of the obvious opportunities to market your business event: On your website (do you have a news section?), on the bottom of your invoices; posters near or in your premises (if you have them) or at the venue where the event will be held (if you don't) and at any business networking that you do
5. Give them an irresistible reason to attend! Can you get a high profile guest speaker perhaps or offer expertise that's topical and cutting edge?
6. Make sure you've got a good reason to follow up afterwards, perhaps post your slides on Slideshare and sent out the url by email, or invite them to fill in a feedback form where they can indicate interest for your products or services.
7. If you video the event, post a snapshot on YouTube the next day. That way your event will still be found after it's all over - with a link back to your website.
8. Set up a "hashtag" on Twitter so people can track all mentions of your event and tweet using it as a reference. (More on hashtags at Twitter).
   

2. Consumer Events – marketing to the general public. These are often more fun as you can be more creative if you've got a budget. The reasons for events might be different but the principles are the same, so whether you're planning a festival in a local farmers field or an open evening in a shop, here are our top tips for success:

1. More “in your face” tends to be more effective – if you've got the budget for a celebrity that can work a treat to attract visitors, if you don't can you call in a favour or book an unusual act?
2. Promotion needs to be as public as you can make it but doesn't always have to be expensive– get in touch with the local newspapers, local radio stations, tourist offices, schools and libraries to see if you can post the details on their websites, in their outlets or even outside their premises.
3. Get some banners (as big as you can) made to publicise the date and time anywhere people will let you put one up. Try your local council for permission to use bridges and roundabouts, otherwise approach owners of buildings direct. Try a local printer for good prices for a batch of banners.
4. Create some instant PR with a good press release to local papers with headline information and top reasons to come to your event.
5. If you've got the budget, look at AA or RAC road signs up to a week before the event and while it's on. If you don't, get your own lamp-post signs made (you may need to check with the local council before you put them up)
6. Mention the event in all of your social networks, both personal and business, with a link back to your website.
7. Investigate local community websites that will let you post your event details on for free and take advantage of their website traffic.
   
8. Book a photographer and get some video footage if you can. This will be great for adding to your website afterwards and posting into your social networks.
   

Events are often fun to promote because you can use a few more techniques from your marketing toolbox than you might normally. The most important thing is usually to get bums on seats, so spreading the word as far as you can is the best thing you can do. The Internet makes that easier than ever, and if your event can go viral you might be surprised by the response!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Are "learning styles" relevant to the marketing mix?

Bear with me here, as I have a theory that helps us to understand why there should always be a "mix" of marketing activity rather than focusing on just one method. That "one" method might work of course, but what could you be missing if you don't think about how different members of your target audience react to marketing media?

Children are now taught in school to recognise their 'learning style', usually based on a model proposed by Fleming. Here's a Wikipedia definition of learning styles but you do have to stick with it to get to the bit I'm talking about (you wouldn't believe how many learning styles there are out there). Anyway, Fleming's is based on three main ways in which we respond to stimuli:

1. Visual (seeing, using pictures in your head)
   
2. Auditory (listening, discussing)
   
3. Kinaesthetic (doing, touching/feeling, practising)

That's a very simplistic description, but helps to make my point. If we learn that way, then we probably approach the rest of the world in a similar way. In actual fact, most of us use a mixture of learning styles but you usually mainly relate to one of them (I also learnt).

So, back to marketing, before I wander dangerously into an area I know little else about. If we're putting together a marketing plan then we want to reach as many of our identified target audience as possible. Online we have a number of brilliant ways now of doing this with internet marketing. We can use websites, advertising, blogging, social networking and video (visual) and podcast (auditory) as marketing tools, all of which help us to fulfill different preferences. And branding experts will tell you (read James Hammond, he talks an awful lot of sense on this subject) that engaging with the five different senses is key to developing a connection with your audience.

But we get a bit stuck online with the whole smell, taste, touch thing - so far anyway. Which means that in my view, there's often still a case for offline marketing so your customer can engage with you using a sense other than visual. When you think of how many visual messages we're bombarded with every day, it's no wonder some of us prefer something different. So back to flyers, "try before you buy", giveways and other tangible marketing activity to mop up those who didn't see us online. Ever wondered why so many "e-commerce" retailers who sell mainly online, still send out paper catalogues?

I know I'm a stickler for a tactile object or shiny piece of literature every time. I always thought I was a bit strange, but I'm happily reassured now that I just approach some things kinaesthetically. See - perfectly normal!


Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk



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Internet Marketing for B2B starting to pay back

One of the objections I'm met with when I talk to businesses about internet marketing is that it doesn't work for B2B (business to business). I think this is more perception than fact. The full range of social media doesn't get such good results for B2B as B2C (business to consumer), because they have been slower to adopt digital marketing.

If you target other businesses using just a couple of components of the internet marketing mix (notably email marketing and website development) you will get a return on investment, as your customers are now undoubtedly online.

Below is a survey taken in the United States just a couple of months ago, reproduced by emarketer.com:
And look how many of the businesses surveyed were planning on increasing their spend in 2010:


There are some brilliant examples of bold B2B online marketing, some of which I use regularly when training, such as Dell who have created their own Dell social network aimed at supporting business customers and have used Dell on Facebook to provide social media support to businesses:

"Based on our experience at Dell and conversations with customers, we created a series of “Social Media Guides” to help small and medium businesses effectively use these tools to grow and better serve customers." Says the Facebook Page.

This demonstrates some good lateral thinking, and how effective! They've now got nearly 38,000 fans to their Facebook page.

It might be tougher than marketing to consumers, but as with traditional marketing methods, digital marketing can be adapted for B2B marketing quite successfully.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Ten Reasons to Put Together an Internet Marketing Plan

If you're one of the enlightened and know that a marketing plan is a good idea, it will come as no surprise that an Internet Marketing Plan is also worth doing, or at least a section on Internet Marketing in your overall plan. Taking this a step further, you can include a social media strategy as part of this.

Back to basics first. The main components of an Internet Marketing Plan are:

• How you will use your website as a marketing tool
• Distributing news and press releases online
• Social networking (blogs, social networks such as Facebook, MySpace), YouTube, forums and wikis (such as Wikipedia).
• Online advertising (pay per click, banners)
• Email marketing
• Viral marketing
• Search engine optimisation

Even if you can't address all of these in one go, they should be on your radar for relevance. But knowing that these exist isn't enough - here are my top ten reasons to draft an Internet Marketing Plan:

1. The UK market for email marketing platforms and services was worth £254million in 2008 and was predicted to grow by an estimate 15% to £292 million by the end of 2009, a trend which is continuing - they do this because it works.
   
2. It's very low cost compared to traditional marketing in almost every case
3. All content that you put out onto the internet will still be there next year and the year after and that means it will continued to be found by search engines. Not like a printed advert, here today and gone tomorrow.
4. All Internet marketing is measurable and the stats don't lie. Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic came from your Facebook page or Twitter.
5. Our customers buying behaviour has changed - they use the internet now to research, learn, review and make buying decisions.
6. Google received 299 million search requests globally in just May 2009. In 2009 $58.1 billion was spent on online advertising across the world - that accounts for 13.2% of advertising spend worldwide. If you're going to use paid advertising doing it online is budget controlled, can be stopped at any moment - and very targeted.
7. Your website is your shop window. Even if your customers don't buy from it they will check you out here first. If you do nothing else, this must be up-to-date otherwise your competitors may get the business - can you afford to take that risk?
8. It's not just young people who use the Internet. Facebook's fastest growing demographic is people over 30.
9. The more places you publish information and interact online, the more links there will be back to your website - part of your search engine optimisation!
   
10. Your customers are there already: Of the 36.9 million UK Internet users in May 2009, 29.4 million visited at least one social networking website.

We know a good marketing plan tool if you're looking for a starting point...


Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Internet Tips from Doug Richards and More

I know it's nearly two weeks ago, but this is still fresh in my mind. Fay and I went to the Enterprise Nation Home Business Conference on 20th November and apart from meeting lots of like minded small businesses (with big plans to grow and good luck to us all), picked up some good marketing tips.

First of all, keynote speaker on sales and marketing Doug Richards, now running School for StartUps, couldn't emphasise enough:

• Low cost and value for money marketing is good whether you're a small or large business
• That means that using social media is a good idea for most of us. I would add to that, you still need to make time for it but most social networks are free to join and use and if you don't participate you miss out being seen if nothing else
  
• Video, video and more video! It's so low cost and easy to use even a basic video camera and set up a free YouTube account. I'll add to that Google likes video (it owns YouTube), it adds interest to your website and being on YouTube gets you links to your website.
• The other thing about video on social networks is that quality isn't as important as content. So if you've got something to say, why not try video - far more interesting than text? You can add video to Facebook, link to video on Twitter and embed it in your website.
  

You can find out more about Enterprise Nation on their website, and we're regular contributers to their blog posts we're pleased to say. Well, going on and on about marketing is something we're always happy to do...

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Isn't Social Networking for Young People?

This is the question I get asked most often when talking to businesses about Internet Marketing and in particular using social networks to communicate with their target audience.

The thing is, it's easy to forget that the people you are targeting probably use these media to communicate. Many of us struggle with the concept of marketing via social networks because we don't use them ourselves. It's true - many adults with busy home lives, businesses or other work commitments, simply don't have time to log on to Facebook when they get home. For many very successful marketers even, checking out what's happening on Twitter when we get up in the morning is not the first thing on the list. I've certainly noticed that a lot of 35 - 50 year old professionals are struggling with this one.

But that's not a strong enough argument not to add them to your marketing toolkit or even your media list. If you're trying to reach consumers (B2C or the general public), then these days individuals are even using their social network of choice as their search engine too. They're here to stay and we must consider them when we're marketing.

But just look at the stats for UK usage of social networks, it seriously isn't just young people...

Even for business to business (B2B, or marketing your services to other businesses), they are increasingly relevant because the Search Engines are starting to introduce social networking results into their search results - Google and Bing have now both signed a deal with Twitter to inlcude real time Tweets in results related to search terms. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that search engines want as much current, relevant content as they can to match search queries and satisfy searchers.

So how do you use social networks for your marketing? Well you can start by looking at a Facebook Business Page. Do you write a blog, have pictures about your products or services, even video? You can post all of these onto your page - take a look at how some of the well known players use them, such as Coca -Cola.

If you do have video (if not, can you make one?), then set up an account on YouTube - it's free! Once you get your head around the "openness" of using these media, it becomes an opportunity to engage with your customers as never before. But that's another blog I think.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Measurable Marketing is Easier Than You think

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half"

So said Jon Wanamaker, US department store merchant in the late 1800s. But you'll have heard many others quote this since, because advertising has been notoriously difficult to track, vexing even the best marketers for years. The reason for this is that data has been unreliable - even if you ask somebody where they heard about you, you're relying on them:

(a) Remembering
(b) Remembering it correctly

I recently put some thought to how much of our marketing can be measured now, so that you know what works and what doesn't. Having put together a good marketing plan, you need to know what got you the best results, ready for your next plan. If you do this with all of your marketing you should get better targeted marketing year on year and hopefully a better return on investment.

I came up with ten tips for measurable marketing activity in 2009:

1. Pay per click advertising, either on search engines such as Google, or social networking websites - as you have access to instant statistics for every advert that you run, including number of "clicks" and even "conversions" to sales or other activities that your visitor undertook.
2. Run a promotion or advertisement with a different telephone number then you know that all calls that come in on that number are related to that advertising campaign.
3. Start a blog...you can track the number of visitors to your website from the blog
4. Send a direct mail-shot and track it with a unique reference number or promotional code.
5. Tweet (Twitter) or join another public social network such as setting up a Facebook business page or LinkedIn public page. You can track referrals to your website and "mentions" of your business name or product.
6. Email marketing - find out how many people opened your email and what they did next.
7. Telemarketing - track every phone call, gather market intelligence and feedback
8. YouTube - are you an expert? Post a video on YouTube and track page views
9. Free online giveaway - collect email addresses to receive your free download/gift and count them!
10. Editorial - getting some press coverage either on or offline can be tracked with cuttings (offline) and equated to the equivalent advertising cost, or tracked online with Google Alerts.

I could go on... You can find some more good tips from Goris.com and some interesting info from Business Link about online marketing including the fact that it is so measurable. Meanwhile I'm pleased that as a marketer I can finally produce evidence and be more accountable for my clients. That's how it should be.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk