As conference experts, we are often quite surprised by the number of businesses who don’t consider events as part of their core business, and so are not making the most of this great opportunity to showcase their business.
We know that the focus at the moment tends to be on digital marketing, which is fantastic as we live in such a digital world and so it can be great to reach new customers, yes. Sending out press releases is also useful as it may secure you some press coverage. And you don’t need to let your staff know how much they mean to you as you take them out for drinks once a year, right?
Just take a minute and think about events though – and how they can bring so many benefits to your business:
Events can Help you to Sell More:
It is very easy these days in the digital world we live in, to focus on online marketing, SEO, Pay per Click and Social media and forget that people tend to buy from people. Getting out there and meeting your customers and potential customers between three to five times can result in you building a much better relationship with them than sending 100s of emails and setting up lots of landing pages. Nowadays, there are so many great events being organised that you can go along to for less than it costs for a good PPC campaign but nothing will beat actually organising your own event (as long as you offer a good incentive for people to come).
Spending a little bit of time putting together an event, considering food and drink, using the latest technology and offering an insight into something of value to your customers could be the best way to spend your marketing budget yet. This year why not try moving some of your marketing budgets to make an event budget and see what results you achieve?
Boost Employee Retention and Morale:
If you take a closer look at some of the largest business who have multi-million-pound turnovers, you will see that they spend a lot of time and effort on making sure their employees are happy – whether they be new starters or employees who have been there since the year dot. They will have programmes in place for recruitment, integration, training, and retention to make sure the people they have working for them not only are the right people but that they love working there and stay with them for longer periods of time than they would with other companies.
Now you may not have a multi-million pound budget, but you could organise a guided tour of your Headquarters, introduce new staff to the team they will be working with and the wider team, and put on a bit of a spread for everyone so that they start their career with you in a relaxed manner which encourages them to absorb new information more easily, and helps the team gel together more quickly.
You could also look at having external trips with your team, perhaps even an award show for your employees, and staff conferences in-house or at a local hotel. These are all great ways for your team to get to know each other better, for you to offer refresher training, for everyone to get involved in learning about the company and its goals for the future.
On top of this, you can also look at external events as well, which you invite your existing and potential customers too as part of your brand and marketing strategy. The opportunities are endless.
Brand Recognition
Talking of external events, we know that it is easy to think of event management London as a marketing tool in its own right, but actually, it can fuel lots of other parts of your marketing strategy as well. For example, social media can be a tough nut to crack at the moment, with lots of businesses pumping large amounts of money into paid advertising to try and get seen – but did you know you could use events to drive social media awareness as well?
You could offer your services as a speaker at events in your niche, and then use their social media handles and hashtags to help you to gain followers. Or set up your own unique event to capture your audience’s attention and maybe even go viral. We are not just saying this, but events are hard to beat when it comes to building your brand online and driving online activity.
Of course, designing a unique event and bringing it to life costs money, and it might be large amounts of money if you really want to stand out. But, hosting your own event not only gives you the chance to meet your potential customers face to face, as well as journalists and other influencers, but it also gives them lots of photo opportunities which they may be tempted to post online, and it will build brand loyalty for you in a way in which digital marketing struggles to.
As you can see, the opportunities that events can bring to your business cannot be ignored. If you want to find out more about how we can help with that, as well as our other services (such as our hotel booking agency) then please give us a call on 0845 351 9917 or send an email to info@conferencesgroup.com
