Debbie Mayo Smith - August 2012 - Three Cheap, Easy, Effective Marketing Strategies

Here are three strategies to help you enhance your event marketing results using less dollars and less effort.

I can vouch for all three because I personally do them!!!

1. Quantify. Money talks. Fluff walks.
Put a dollar value on how your attendees/members will benefit from attending the event/conference. Show them their rate of return.  

This exercise is easier than you might think. If it saves them time, annualise it then multiply this by their salary per hour breakdown. Can it help them make more sales or increase turnover?  Take the average value of one sale (you can even factor in the life time value of that one new client) multiplied by the number of new ones expected.

You can get the base information any number of ways. Ask the client. Research on the Internet. Their Competitors. Annual reports. Talk to HR professionals about salary levels. Colleagues in that industry.

2. Do your homework
How much time do you take researching a prospect before your initial contact? After several presentations at the Bi-annual Asia Pacific Ronald McDonald House Charities conference, one of the delegates said to me "Debbie the most important point I'm taking home from you isn't one you highlighted. It is rather what you vividly demonstrated throughout this conference. It suddenly hit me that I wasn't doing any research before meeting with prospective business partners or donors. I just front up at the meeting, talk about us and ask for donations or support. It is now clear to me that we can be much more successful by understanding them more. Putting their shoes on. Empathising how we can be of help to them also."

3. Search For New Business
Try www.googlealert.com. It tracks the Internet for your topics/searches and sends you a daily (or weekly) update of new matching items by email. Put this free service to work for you looking for business opportunities. For example conferences coming to your city in 2013; overseas conferences coming to Australia or NZ, corporate activity.

By combining these three strategies, you can improve your success while using less money, time and effort.

By Debbie Mayo-Smith top ranking international speaker. For a free quick tip newsletter, vast collection of 'how -to' articles and other resources to help you work smarter and save time, come to www.debbiespeaks.co.nz