How to Succeed at Event Marketing for Your WAHM Business
In some situations, event marketing strategies can be a useful way to pitch products for your WAHM business in a low stress environment.
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Often, potential customers will be more apt to seriously consider the product or service you're offering in an environment that doesn't feel like a sales office. In cases like this, it's a good idea to throw a party.
Hosting a party or open house is a popular event marketing strategy that WAHM marketers have been using for years to generate lots of lead and to help convert sales.
People love parties and networking events because they are a great way to get out, meet new people, and socialize while learning about new and innovative products.
Because the environment doesn't generally force them to field a one-on-one sales pitch, their defenses will be down, leaving them much more open to the possibility of making a purchase.
Determine the Type of Event:
The first step in designing your event marketing strategies is to narrow the focus of the even you wish to host. Are you looking to host an intimate home party for a small to moderate sized group of customers?
On the other hand, do you envision a tradeshow setting where you and many other WAHM marketers can present your products to the public over the course of several hours, or perhaps a three-day weekend?
Find a Great Venue:
The ideal location for an event marketing promotion can vary according to a variety of factors. First, consider the number people you hope to have in attendance. If you want a small group of people, your event will work best in someone's home.
But if your event marketing strategies include lots of customers and a variety of WAHM business owners, you may want to consider of hotel ballroom or conference center to give your event more of a trade show feel.
Set the Date:
Whether for a wedding, a play date for the kids or a time to get the family together to celebrate a holiday, setting dates can be a difficult task. Picking the wrong dates can seriously derail your event marketing strategies, so think carefully before setting things in stone.
One important factor for WAHM marketers to consider is to not to schedule your event too close to major holidays because people will likely be too busy to attend.
Get the Word Out:
Once you decide on a suitable date, start advertising in order to draw as many people to your event as you can. This means sending out press releases, putting up flyers and posters in local businesses, and contacting members of the media who may be interested in doing pre-event coverage.
Pre-event coverage is important because it is both an opportunity to generate buzz about your upcoming event, but it's also likely the reporter will spend some time asking you about your own WAHM business. Often, journalists will do pre-event stories will also stop in to do a follow up story about how the event went.
If you happen to land a television slot on your local morning news show, sometimes it's worth it to invest in a bit of media preparation or coaching. A media coach will help you prepare for a live interview by teaching you how to be aware of how you come across on camera.
In addition, you can also brush up on your verbal communication skills for quick thinking in case you face confusing or unexpected questions. When you are given the opportunity to represent both your event and your WAHM business, you can't afford to come across as anything less than competent and authoritative.
If your WAHM event is going to be hosted in a private home, then start sending invitations to the selected guests as soon as possible. One of the most recognized event marketing strategies involves the use of an RSVP.
Asking your attendees to confirm their attendance in advance can not only help grow excited and buzz about the event, but it will also ensure that people don't wait around to the last minute to make a decision, which makes your planning easier.
Set the Atmosphere
The more relaxed and less like a sales pitch your event feels, the more likely many customers will be willing to make a purchase. Some popular event marketing strategies than can help set a festive mood include giving away door prizes, serving refreshments, and utilizing decorations to help people feel relaxed.
In addition, a good party needs some form of entertainment. At a home party, you can get the guests to play icebreaker games. At a trade show event, games can be replaced with presentations.
You and your fellow WAHM marketers can take turns on the "main stage" area of your location to give informative talks and question and answer sessions. While these portions are a bit of a soft sell, customers won't mind if they feel they are learning some useful information or tips from you.
Find Sponsors to Defray Costs:
For the same reason the you implement event marketing strategies, keep in mind that there may be other companies who would also welcome the opportunity to get their name and brand in front of the crowd that your event will draw.
Check around to see if there are any sponsors who would like to defray some event costs by either contributing refreshments, door prizes or helping offset the cost of renting the venue in exchange for the opportunity to post signs saying that they helped to sponsor the event.
Hosting the Online Event:
Keep in mind that implementing event marketing strategies can also be done online. In today's culture, people are very familiar with Internet technology, and they have become comfortable attending "Cyber Events" like webinars, discussion board parties, group chats, and more.
Because of the lack of face to face interaction with a web based event, you must adjust your event marketing strategies to compensate for this. A key factor in making your online event successful is the level of the attendees' participation.
This means that if you structure your WAHM marketing event around a series of live calls or chat based seminars, you'll need to work hard at making sure you're not the only one talking the entire time.
Break up your presentations into short segments and allow time for audience interaction and questions between segments to keep things interesting. If you're hosting a chat or webinar, tell the participants that if they submit a question for you to answer, their name will be entered into a drawing for a free prize or product.
This serves two purposes: you get the consumer personally engaged through the process of working their own question, while also getting them excited about the prospect of owning your product if they win the door prize.
Trade Show Displays - Think Big Picture Having the right trade show display graphics is one critical element that will determine if your trade show marketing efforts are a huge success, or whether your trade show marketing efforts are a huge waste of money. Creating the right trade show display graphics so that your trade show display will stand out from all the other trade show displays means thinking "big picture".
Trade Show Booths Your goal as a trade show exhibitor is to make your booth stand out from all the several other hundred trade show booths. Your booth is the needle in the haystack, and you want your prospects to find it among all that straw. So how do you accomplish this? How do you make your booth stand out and pull in lots of qualified traffic?
Trade Show Booth Promotion Mistakes To be a successful trade show exhibitor, one needs to bring traffic to their trade show booth. Unfortunately, many trade show exhibitors confuse quantity and quality. A high volume of trade show booth traffic isn't very helpful if it isn't quality traffic. When promoting your trade show booth, remember to think QUALIFIED PROSPECTS! With this in mind, let's discuss three common trade show booth promotion mistakes.
Trade Show Displays - Hidden Costs Measure the efficacy of your brand management strategy. You have spent a lot of time and even money to build a brand image for your business but how will you know if your efforts have really yielded the desired results?
Design Better Trade Show Display Graphics - Learn from Others When you are designing trade show display graphics, why not learn from others? Not only from what they do wrong but also from what they do right. It's also a good idea to get other people's input on your own design before you spend the money to print it. Here are the 5 golden rules to designing the effective trade show display graphics.
