Archive for May, 2008
Setting targets for your event
Set your targets first
I see a lot of people make the mistake of planning their launches or events without looking at the end goal first. I’d say, reverse the cycle. It’s important to set your event’s goals and targets before diving into the sea of planning and promoting it. Every such activity has to benefit your business in some way or another; whether in terms of increase in bottom-line, increase in brand value, greater outreach, more hype, more profits or more sales. All of these are good business objectives, but you need to narrow them down to one or two objectives. These goals set the stage for everything that follows. So always make sure that you get this right.
Measure the end-results - were the targets achieved?
Measuring increases in sales or profits is relatively easy to calculate, so I won’t get into that detail right now.
However, some targets are qualitative in nature and cannot be directly calculated. For example, if the purpose of your event is to build brand recognition; then measuring the success of the event goes through a different process. You may want to hold on-site surveys to gauge how your audience feels about the activity and brand. The survey will help you decide whether you planned the right activity to meet your branding objectives and whether the event is affecting the audience’s affinity.
A few tips for online surveys are to approach the people in a friendly manner without bribing them with gifts - lest you want skewed results. Start with simple ice-breaking questions (e.g. about parking) before moving on to the actual survey. Make sure that you place the open ended questions at the end and ask for their names and contact info for follow-up surveys.
These surveys should help give you a better understanding of the impact your event had and how you can plan other subsequent activities accordingly.
Summary:
Everything that you do is business. If your activities are not helping your business grow, then there is some missing element in your planning. Setting your targets and goals from these activities helps put your team on the same page. You should never deviate from the target and should use it as a baseline touch-point for all decisions. This is important for making the most out of your events. Your events should be followed by ROI calculations to see if those targets were met. So the next time you are planning, put on your business cap and think objectively.
Creating high impact launches - with minimum investment
For most businesses, launches are important determinants of the future success of a venture. However, if you’re new in the market it’s often difficult to build that level of interest in crowds. Lets expand on an example that I mentioned in one of my previous posts of launching night-clubs. As a night-club owner, you want to attract the right audiences and create a lot of buzz at launch. The problem is that if people haven’t heard of you before, they will be skeptic about attending. If they don’t attend, your launch wont be a success. If your launch isn’t a success, it may never catch the popularity wave.
Lets face it, a $200,000 a year lawyer will not risk attending an unknown club launch if they believe the event will be full of railway workers. Likewise railway workers would rather walk on fire than attend an event full of lawyers.
The key is to create a story of the event being filled with the perfect crowd in the perfect venue for a perfect night out. When you know your crowd you will know what this story needs to be, and all you will need to do is get the story out.
Now if you know what you are doing, all of this can be achieved by using online social tools that are an ideal platform for leaking your story to create buzz. Lets take an example of how you can use Facebook in this scenario.
Target the early adopters. These people are the first to catch the fever and are usually the most active online.
If you get them on your lists, you’ll invariably create an environment of excitement around your nightclub launch. Of course, they won’t be easy to convince unless they see the value in it for them. Make it all about “them”.
Step 1: So, the first step is to create a virtual group on facebook of a cool usergroup who have great parties every now and then. You don’t have to mention the venues or details of the parties these people attend, in fact you can build a culture within the group where doing so is considered a taboo. Focus on group member’s party experiences & stories after a weekend, build excitement, promote their pictures — and the fun they all have each weekend! You want new viewers of the group to think two things: 1- these people are cool. 2- the parties they go to rock.
Step 2: You want to keep updating this group page with new activities, party ideas, themes, photos and all of the things that would attract your targeted audience as much as possible. Remember its taboo to mention a party venue, date or time. Promote the story pertaining to the event: 1- get people to start following the group in anticipation. 2- get them to share it with their friends. 3- get them to add stories and photos of their own nights out, in the lead up to your event. Remember the emphasis is always on non-disclosure of your venue or the date of your launch, though you would want to indicate a month. You may also want to promote personalities within the group as being the kind of people you want at your event. (always create that feeling of scarcity wherever possible).
Step 3: Suggest a “anything goes” policy (within the law), release parcels of information over weeks not days. Remember you are getting the crowd excited, by telling them the story where they can become the stars (if lucky). The story must reflect the perfect night out for these people. The key is to engage them into a conversation by having them participate in it. Get them to answer survey questions online (use survey monkey) about the entertainment or dress regulations, even crowd selection, make the group feel like they are organizing the biggest night out since the Beatles. The thought leaders, people who can move other people will rise to the top of this group through natural selection.
Step 4: As each thought leader puts their hand up you can leak a little more information to these people only, give them more detail regarding plans than you do for the rest of the group.
Remember don’t let them or the group know when the event will be held or where it will be, but you can leak details like the capacity, ticketing & how the selection process will play out. Give these people some ownership, give them something that sets them apart from the pack, its what they live for and you are going to need their support. Get your target audience excited about the concept of your launch party and begin syndicating this story through microblogging, use link baiting, photo tagging and other strategies to drive traffic to the group while the buzz builds momentum. Keep building the suspense until you have the group publicly asking how they can get tickets.
Step 5: When you have the numbers you want buzzing around the launch, outline your plans. Give the group a location but not the venue (address) and give them the date. Send out electronic invitations along with the party ticket capacity ensuring the number is well below the number of active members you have attracted to your Face book group (say 600 people). Be prepared to partition walls if you have to, ensure the venue size matches what ever crowd capacity you end up with. You are telling the story that everyone has bought into for this big night out, at the end of the night what you said will and must go down at all costs. You need to put your reputation on it and come out the other side.
Inform the hungry crowd that only people who RSVP as interested are eligible to attend. Make it clear that people are not to RSVP as confirmed, you don’t want to build walls around your story that you cant tear down if you need to. You want the group knowing that everyone wants to come without them knowing who will be there. Anyone who RSVP’s as confirmed is instantly deemed not-eligible for entry.
Step 6: If you have done everything well to this point you will have at least twice as many people that have indicated an interest in attending the launch than the number of people you have declared to be your capacity. Communicate the situation of scarcity to the group with concern for those who look like missing out. Do not allow yourself to become the door bitch whatever happens. Ask the group to decide on a door policy, have them fill out a quick survey about how to deal with the problem.
Now this is a multiple choice survey, so whoever writes it will want to make sure the group gets an option to vote for the lead personalities in the group to hand-pick a certain number of guests each from the list of people marked as interested. Most people in the group will know one of these leaders directly or indirectly which gives everyone a better chance of getting a ticket than your promotions team implementing a door-policy, its the choice I would pick.
Let everyone know that the leadership group will decide who receives tickets and these lucky people will receive text messages on the night of the launch event. Messages will go out between 9.00pm and 10.00pm and it will include the venue, directions & instructions for the midnight launch.
Included within the text message will be a pin number that can be used to open a locked doorway in a back alley (preferably) that leads them into a chamber where security will greet them.
Timing is everything in this game. Pick your launch night when the groups interest peaks - if you delay the hype may begin to wane and the result may even be a flop.
Its a fine line between getting this right and getting it wrong. Time your launch well, hit the right emotional triggers at the right time and you will see the results.
Your event launch will not only be full, patrons will have paid top dollar to get in. The marketing will have cost less than the security pin pad at the front door and all the people who couldn’t get in will spend the following week telling everyone about your club. More importantly you have already established a second tier of early adopters who all feel like they own the club, ensuring long term success.
Of course all of this is virtual instigated hype - some may consider it manipulative even. But again, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything against their will. If you want high impact launches without investing in promotions or losing out on ticket values or sales revenue because of freebies or discounts - this is the way to go. I’ve been involved in massively huge club launches based on this tactic alone. If you already have a market presence, creating online traction won’t require any virtual or artificial hype. A good example of that is how Techcrunch markets its conferences.
Having the right team means everything
In any business, especially event management, it is important to have a great set of people around you. People with skills that complement each other can help you achieve much more.
Here is how you can get started;
1- If you run your own business, first map out your roadmap for the next few quarters before hiring anyone.
2- Once you have your roadmap and goals in front of you make a list of resources that you require in order to meet your goals in time.
3- Work out your budget and see how many of the resources you can realistically fit into the budget. Any extra resources that you can make do without can be cut out from the list.
4- Next, categorize each of the list resource into one of the following: on-site, off-site, can outsource. You can try to outsource as much of the work as possible to make sure your onsite management overheads are minimized. However, I would recommend you to keep the core work within your control and outsource the rest.
5- For your permanent employees (onsite or offsite) go through your regular hiring process. Make sure you do not compromise on quality and try to get the best you can given the budgetary constraints. Remember, a bad team member pulls the whole team down. For the outsourcing projects, spend some time to build work brief documents and then post jobs online for bidding. Choose providers who are professional and have a track record of good service. There are countless online job platforms to choose from, such as Elance, oDesk, Peopleperhour.
The best teams are those that have a good blend of creative and practical thinkers together though this creative collective needs strong leadership. If you are launching products, managing events or running a business; the more the creativity - the better you can use social media for marketing. Creativity is about exploring new ways of doing things - its about thinking outside of the box - its about setting your own standards. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing - you need such people on your team!
Lastly, you need to make sure your team is on the same page at all times. A focused, reliable and results-oriented team achieves goes a longer way to making your business a success. Keep them motivated, and keep the work challenging and rewarding.
I have a magnificent team with me and I have also outsourced work to professionals around the globe. I usually run a very tight and planned schedule and I’m extremely busy most of the week. I have weekly meetings with all of the different outsourced service providers to make sure everything is always on cue. I have found ways of making myself more productive using online tools for conferencing, time management, resource management and working.
Take a step back and evaluate your team’s progress - are there any slackers? If you think your team isn’t good enough, reshuffle them and give everyone a chance to find what they are good at within the realm of sustainability within the business - but do make sure you don’t compromise on lower quality while your money is being burnt out in payroll. Negative energy spreads and grows like a cancer in the same way positive energy can see ordinary individuals achieve extra ordinary results as a group.
Event marketing - step by step guidelines
We come across many people who keep asking about ways of leveraging social media for event marketing. Its always great to have hours of exploratory discussions leading to sparkling eyes, great ideas, active minds and whiteboards full of brainstorming diagrams.
I guess that’s where posts like these come into place - we’ve worked, consulted, tried, tested, experienced, experimented and want to share that knowledge with you.
Part of our team has introduced a whole series of posts dedicated to event managers on how to market events using social media tools and how to use different online platforms to their advantage during the planning phases of the event. Its going to be great journey for them, and you can definitely participate in the discussions there. Heres a link to the blog.
Selling yourself short? The business owners paradox
Pricing your products or services well is important for business sustainability. What happens when you lower your standards or sell yourself short just to get to your markets? Well, you get to your markets alright, but you don’t leave a lasting impact on them.
Take the example of a nightclub owner about to launch his first club in town. Nobody knows about it yet, and so he fears there wont be enough attention. The better the launch, the more successful the club will be in that part of town. To create a good launch, he may have to come up with clever group discount packages, sell drinks at a cheaper rate, he may even resort to giving away free tickets to everyone. All of this for the hope of attracting larger crowds and creating excitement. Hope. This may seem like a perfectly reasonable approach to marketing, and it is. But, if he can create a larger buzz, without having to lose out on potential $$, why shouldn’t he? After all, a high impact launch results in lasting memories and a consistent traffic flow thereafter.
The question is, can his approach ever generate scarcity? Can it ever generate exclusivity? Aren’t both of these important factors in the success of a nightclub? In the fear of having an “empty club” launch - where nobody wants to enter, the owner sells himself short. All he really needed to do was understand what would make his potential customers pay BIG $$$ and cue in line for: It may be an attractive crowd. It may be seeing the excitement and buzz. It may be interesting stories. It may be the thrill of anticipation. It may the chance to meet successful people. It may be a combination of all of these.
One solution for this is to throw parties with modeling agencies during launch to get the attractive crowd at the venue. Next, you could get people to cue up to create an illusion of scarcity. If you can artificially create an environment conducive to what your market perceives as “popular”, you can kick-start your club from nothing to being the hottest in a matter of days.
Translate all of this to the online world and your options increase considerably. Here are a few gorilla marketing steps I’d recommend (I’ll write a more detailed example of this in another post)
1- Target the early adopters.
2- Get them excited about the event.
3- Get them to bring their networks to the event. Frequent customers would stay with you for years.
4- Build a community. Treat them royally. Let them spread good things about you through WOM.
5- Use online social media tools to share this excitement with other untapped potential customers. Let this excitement sell itself.
Make everything into an event
Every little instance or occasion in our lives is an event. A teleconference meeting with your staff, is an event. A new purchase, is an event. Hearing sad news, is an event. Going out to watch a movie, is an event. All of these different events make up our life experiences.
You’ll notice how when we try to think back to our earliest memories, we just remember glimpses of different situations or feelings. These glimpses were once events (whether recurring or one-time) that stayed on with us as memories.
This observation has two important sub-thoughts that we can learn from:
1- If we react to different situations in our real-life just as meticulously as we plan large-scale events, imagine how it will effect the happiness quotient in our lives.
2- We don’t have to be marketing big events all the time, we just need to figure out how to create traction around smaller level things as well. This can be great for the relaunching strategies that we discussed earlier.
Event launches - whats your attention magnet?
I am sure most of you would agree that we can’t just expect people to get excited about our events just like that - they need to have an incentive to. These incentives are based on basic human feelings - joy, thrill, excitement, suspense, comfort. Understanding what causes these emotions and what effects they have on the moods and actions is important for creating the right kinds of incentives for your audiences.
When you have built the brand of your events, you will know exactly what emotional bracket you want to trigger to build hype. Different events play on different human emotions - new years eve at Times Square plays on thrill, happy family picnics play on joy, the Macworld plays on suspense and curiosity, concerts play on fun, soccer matches play on excitement, talk-shows play on comfort.
Once you figure out how you want your audiences to feel before your event, you’re already half way to creating hype. Lets call it the ‘event emotion’ for convenience. All of your marketing messages, communication, interactions, advertisements, letters - everything has to trigger the event emotion. If you manage to touch their feelings, they will form an invisible relationship with your event - whether they know it or not, you just managed to touch their heart. This will put them in a position where they will be more likely to attend the event or tell others about it. Thats your attention magnet!
This may sound like you are toying with people’s emotions - but thats not the purpose of this exercise. Always remember, the new year’s party at time square will thrill everyone present and give them a natural high. But what would happen if nobody knows what new year’s at time square is? What would happen if nobody knows what it ‘could’ potentially mean to them? Well, they’d rather stay home and watch TV. Unless you tell them what to expect from the event, you can not expect them to come. Thats it - you’re just setting their expectations straight using event emotions.
Next time you’re planning an event, make sure you find your attention magnet first. Good luck.
What we can learn from unconferences
What are unconferences?
First a little brief background. Unconferences are facilitated discussions that are participant-driven and are centered around a specific theme. It is the opposite of typical conferences where speakers and audiences are separate. In unconferences, everyone is expected to speak and pitch in to move the discussions forward.
You can read more about unconferences here.
Whats the big deal?
Unconferences gained a lot of interest and momentum in the crowds because of the following reasons;
1- Its a leveled playing field for everyone who is present;
2- Everyone is a participant and not just there to sit and listen;
3- It ends up being highly intellectual discussions where everyone learns something;
4- It demonstrates the power of collective wisdom;
5- When moderated properly, it delivers good results.
What can we learn from it?
As event marketers there are a number of lessons in these gatherings. First of all, it shows the importance and power of community driven discussions. Just like people are more responsive and energetic in these unconferences, they have the exact same behavior in communities online.
Secondly, it proves the power of collective wisdom. So, if you’re planning your events what better way to do it than engaging your community online? You can allow them to have a direct input in the event’s flow or proceedings.
Thirdly, because of its up close nature, the relationship with the participants grows deeper. The participants will be more likely to remember you, to remember the event and to have a good after-taste about it. In the same way, in online communities you can build that level of relationships through different ways of interacting with your community to build relationships of trust.
You can read up a good post on unconferences here (although it is a relatively old article)
Each event is a brand - Part II
This post is a sequel to my previous rant on the importance of building your event’s brand story. This topic is so important that I can’t stress it enough. A lot of people still don’t ‘get it’, so I thought I’d discuss it in a little more detail.
I see this mistake over and over again: People think that when they’re doing a launch the story is about them. They are WRONG! The story is always about their PROSPECTS.
This is something you have to get right. I’m going to walk you through the process of getting to your prospect’s story and tying it with your launch story.
I’m sure that this probably sounds all hippy-groovy granola right? Trust me it’s not - this is critical stuff and it’s all about creating a crushing event launch for you. In fact, this could even be the single leverage point that changes everything.
The first step is to truly understand the value of your product or service. This will involve answering questions like… “is it really useful?”, “who can benefit from it most?”, “how is it different from other options that already exist?”.
Next, based on the value, imagine the ideal prospect that can benefit most from your product or service. Marketing folks also call this step “brand personification” - but the idea is simple. If the brand of your product or service was a person, what would he/she look like and how would he/she feel. Understanding your market is key to being able to communicate with them effectively. Put yourself in their shoes.
Once you understand your ideal prospect’s story, link that story to your brand’s story so that its a perfect fit and see the magic happen.
More about lists
This is a followup post to never stop building lists.
I felt I hadn’t stressed enough on the importance of building lists in my previous post. I was thinking of writing detailed considerations and methods for building your community lists, but came across a great article that pretty much sums it up for us. You can read the Eugene’s full article here.
Give People a Reason to Sign Up
As soon as your web site goes live, try to get users to willingly volunteer their email. Just because there is a sign up usually isn’t a compelling enough reason for users to sign up. Users are very sensitive to giving their personal information away. Think from the perspective of delivering value. Do you have something unique that you could offer to entice sign ups? In the case of an event it might be an interview with a performer, advance ticket discounts, or highlights from the previous year’s event.Treat your subscribers like gold and don’t try to sales pitch them too early. Ask yourself, would you be more likely to purchase tickets to an event after 5 or 6 interesting and trustworthy emails? Or send a sales pitch out every time you send an email. Start with building trust and credibility from the beginning. It is important to remember that most people who visit web sites for the first time, never return to the same site. Collecting the user’s email is a good way to reengage your users down the road. It turns a visitor to your website into a lead, someone who is prepared to listen to what you have to offer. The next step is to turn them into a customer.
Advance Sale Tickets
Consider offering early subscribers the best price on event tickets. A few years ago I attended an air show conference in Belgium. One of the presenters outlined the ticketing strategy they used for their event. Their advance sale tickets were discounted by almost 50%. A number of event organizers might think that the process is counter intuitive,”We’re going to lose too much money by discounting ticket prices that much.” Ironically the presenters methodology worked. Their event was paid for before a single person walked in the gate. In addition, the event broke records for attendance and revenue.Remember the more people with paid tickets in hand when it comes time for “what should we do next weekend”, the more of their friends will paying full price.
The Best Event Marketing Investment
Helping your own targeted subscriber list to grow is the best single investment you can make in your ongoing event marketing. Even if you don’t have something to offer your consumer right now, think about the future. Lists can be used to target the people who have identified themselves as your target market. You can spend less on traditional advertising if you already have a qualified list of people interested in your event, product, or service. Use your subscriber list to your advantage.
Remember the cost of a gaining a new customer does not have to be spent time and again, a new customer is a one off cost. Your list building process should start by capturing a visitors lead information. You are asking them to invest time to listen to what you have to say in return for quality information or value. If after listening they determine what you had to say was worthy of the time they spent listening you are well positioned to convince them that by becoming your customer, they will be better off than if not. Once you earn the customer your focus should shift to ensuring they become a happy customer with a view to converting them into loyal, recurring customers over time.
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