By design, you’ve got customers and lots of them – because they are attending an event that you are hosting or sponsoring. They are a captive audience. Now what?
How do you hold on, keep the edge, make the big event pay off? It’s all about “Leveraging the Boom.”
When you have a dense customer population in your small business – a.k.a. a boom – you MUST make the most out of the event attendees literally while it’s happening in order to grow your business for the long-term. This is the only way to truly get the most return on investment from your event.
To make the most of the bump, you must make smart use of marketing tools to do two things:
- Capture new customers.
- Educate them about the benefits of using your company.
There are a lot of ways to accomplish these things, but here are three easy ways to connect that are extremely easy and efficient to accomplish – and fast – ways to turn a short-term boom into long-term sales and business growth for your small business:
1. E-mail. Get that e-mail address! It might not be a hard fact, but it seems like at LEAST 50% of folks have an e-mail enabled smart phone. For example, here’s a fun way to gather a bunch of e-mail addresses at a large event venue: Ask attendees to send an e-mail to you during the event. Then, announce the winner of an immediate prize: move to the front row, get a chair at the chef’s table, win a free dessert, receive an upgrade to the super-duper best package. “Just e-mail us, and we’ll pick a winner… right now.” Taking the 3-5 minutes at an event venue may net you 15 to 100 email addresses – easy.
2. Facebook + TEXT (SMS). While there is a lot you can do with text messaging, here is one free way to gain a connection to your new prospects and customers so that you can sell them more stuff over and over again for a long time.
Start by looking at the number of Facebook “Likes” or Twitter followers you have before the event begins. During the event, post signage and also just ask folks to text “LIKE YOURPAGENAME” to FBOOK (36556). For us we’d say “text LIKE RESULTSREV” to FBOOK on your phone right now. Guess what — you just got a new like! Live events can produce huge bumps in the like numbers for a Facebook Page.
3. Twitter + TEXT (SMS). The same thing holds true on Twitter. Have attendees text FOLLOW RESULTSREV to Twitter (40404). Yep, that’s all it takes to start tweeting. They’ll get your tweets on their phone – even if they’ve NEVER signed up for Twitter before.
But at the end of the day, did that ring you more sales? Probably not today – but it did make sure that you made contact with the people who attended your event. Now, tomorrow, you can stay in touch with them and get to know them better and expose them to new elements of your business – and yes, increase your sales accordingly. It will blow your mind. I promise.
What about you? What is your best method to turn an event into long-term customer relationships (and sales)?
Photo Credit: mastermaq
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[...] does this all turn readers or viewers or listeners into sales? Again, as in the first edition of Leveraging the Boom: Turn Events into Sales the goal is to make new connections – to capture contacts that you can turn into relationships [...]