Joint Venture Partners & affiliate launches
Carefully thought out and implemented joint ventures and affiliates can add that extra oomph to the event you are launching. It is a great way of making yourself visible and increasing your revenue. Affiliates do marketing for you and bring you more visitors; this gives a boost to the income and makes everyone happy. It sounds simple enough but needs business savvy and effort on your part.
It is essential that you maintain uninterrupted communication with your venture partners and affiliates. You have to build a relationship with them and win their trust. You have to start by giving and your main focus while communicating with them should be to convey what is in it for them. Don’t make it all about you.
You have to motivate and influence them and for this you can employ mental triggers. Keep them updated about your progress and give them fair warning in advance about your pre-launch and launch. Though dates can not be finalized way before time, however, give them an estimate and make sure it’s realistic.
Keep in constant contact with them so they don’t forget about you. If you have a whole bunch of venture partners and affiliates, then choose your A-list. These are the ones who will bring you the most business so take extra care of them. These are the people whom you call more often, send special updates to.
I know it sounds unrefined but the fact is that if you scratch their back then they’ll scratch yours. It’s a two way relationship that is important for everyone involved and can result in profits all around.
Never Ending Conversation
Conversation is the key which opens doors to people’s minds and hearts. I believe that more than any business, marketing thrives on communication.
You have to get to know them and find out what they want. It is a false assumption that the more populated your lists are the more popular you are. Popular is not achieved just by adding people to your list of contacts. They should be able to recognize you and know you. Be one with the people, bond with them and most important of all LISTEN to them. From the conversations that you have with them, you can make each stage of your launch a banging success. Remember that “there is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for.”
Never talk down or be condescending in your conversations. Empathize with the people so they can relate to you and open up to you. Share your experiences with them as this will encourage them to do likewise. Show genuine interest, be engaging and relaxed yourself so you can put them at ease as well. Be upfront in your dealings and encourage queries as “questions are the breath of life for a conversation.” The answer to these will help you collect useful data which will serve as a launching pad for your vent. You would know in advance what people want and expect and this will give you added advantage. Keep them updated as everyone likes to be in the know and this will help you build the buzz around your event.
The main reason for you to engage in conversations is to build trust. If people don’t trust you they won’t believe you and you’ll have a hard time convincing them. Get them on your side. The basis of any relationship is trust and it is important for you to win it as it is a great defense against naysayers and competitors. Don’t put an end to this relationship after your event has been launched. You want these visitors who have become buyers to become permanent customers so don’t break the thread of this conversation.
Our conversations with our prospects started way before launch. We have 9 different email campaigns running in parallel, targeting different sets of groups. We have video tours walking interested people through the application. We have a presence on facebook, myspace, linkedin and all major social networking sites. We encourage people to follow us on twitter, friendfeed and of the likes. We have 3-5 blogs running in parallel to our launch campaign. We are open to feedback, discussions and conversations with people - as they are the most enablers of our business.
Seed launch tactics
If your pre-launch goes bust then you can say goodbye to an amazing launch. It is the pre-launch which determines whether your launch will do good or die.
For instance, at Events Listed, we pre-launch with a world class e-book about event launch strategies applying the latest and greatest strategies using social media and ubersyndication. Our launch campaign builds the perceived value of this book to be priceless as its content is cutting edge – the very best of the best.
We give the book away to some existing followers initially on the basis they offer us a video testimony of what they though of it when they have read it. We then contact event associations and industry leaders who have lists of event planners, club owners and marketers offering them a FREE copy.
Then we invite them to distribute the book to their list tracking which of their list downloads the book and setting a cookie that insures that these same promoters are signed onto events listed under the industry leader who initially introduced them to the books Events Listed account. We then give these industry leaders 50% of all revenue events listed charge these promoters in ticket sales commission throughout the life of their account with us. this earns the referrer a lifetime, in perpetuity royalty for introducing us to their lists, which in some cases have over 60,000 event planners on them.
This way we build our own prospects list through giving away our e-book which constitutes great value without a barrier to entry. The quality of content in this ebook earns us brand recognition and some authority to these professionals who are at the same time being subtly sold the events listed application throughout the book.
The industry leaders who generated hundreds and thousands of visitors to our FREE book giveaway page earn credence from their lists for sending them to a page that represented great value at no cost. At at the same time they discretely earn a recurring commission in the back end when these professionals move through our sales funnel from the book onto a free version of our application and finally onto selling tickets & merchandise off the page.
We charge a small 1.5% fee per ticket sales which constitutes our first revenue since launching our Free Line campaign all those months back.
Scarcity, exclusivity & our word is our word
It’s human nature that people in general like getting attention and feeling important. Also a part of human psyche is the fact the people fear scarcity. For successful marketing you have to build on these emotional aspects. Another important factor that I should mention here is that if you promise anything through your campaign then be sure to fulfill that promise. People may let you play with their emotions but nobody likes being taken for a ride.
Let’s start with exclusivity. Tell the people that it’s all about them and do this on an individual basis. I am not saying that you treat all the visitors to your website exclusively; instead go for the early adopters. You can give them special offers like sneak peak to videos or photos. Make sure these are the people who get any info first so they feel special. If you do this the right way and make them feel like part of your team, this select group will do wonders marketing your event for free!
Let’s discuss scarcity now. For this to work, you have to get the people excited about an event first. Build the hype slowly and gradually and don’t give away too much info. There are people who will be interested just because there is a shortage of tickets but you are catering to a wider market and for this reason you just don’t want last minute buyers. Get the people hooked from the very start so they know that missing your event would be a huge loss.
Once you have the people interested, you can subtly convey that there are not enough tickets to go around. This way they’ll queue up to get the “golden ticket” so to speak. This creates a sense of urgency and makes people take quick decisions. Another powerful aspect of scarcity is that it can help you increase the price. If you have built the hype in such a manner that people believe that the event is not to be missed at any cost then they’ll even pay more to get the tickets. Remember timing is everything, don’t be too early or too late or it will all boil down to nothing.
Final word of warning: keep your word. Don’t promise people something you can’t pull off.
When we open up our application for the initial set of users, only those people who know someone in the initial set will be able to request access instead of a full-blown public access. Anyone who is interested in trying out the application will have to find users to request access from. You can read our posts here and here to understand our strategies better.
Outsourcing
I’m sure most of you have heard of the four hour work-week. Is it really possible? Thanks to the ‘leveled playing field’ and ‘following the sun work hours’ it may be somewhat realistic.
So you like to be in control and keep an eye on each and every tiny wheel that turns and keeps your business running smoothly. Instead of burning the candle at both ends and killing yourself, it is better if you get other people to do the job for you.
Outsourcing is really cool because you can get area experts with special skills and training to do a million things which take up your time and resources. It also gives you an outsider’s view about your business. It can be a bit scary at first as you might feel that you are letting other people in your own territory but remember it is you who holds the reins and these people are just providing you their services.
There are some really good outsourcing platforms out there. You can read my post on an analysis of different outsourcing sites here. I have personally used Elance.com to find most of my team – everyone from designers, writers to SEO experts. I make sure I meet with them over Skype regularly to keep a tap on the work. Having a solid plan for performance measurement and deliverables helps in managing the teams better.
Outsourcing is a heaven-sent so do make your life easy with it.
Traffic through wikis, forums & groups
In Hawaiian, wiki means “fast” and this is how your marketing flourishes if you use wikis. The incredible thing about wikis is that people who can access them can also modify and contribute to them. It is a double-edged sword but if used cleverly can do wonders for a marketing campaign.
Wikis support hyperlinks, allow you to create new pages and link several internal pages – all this can increase traffic to your website so do tap into this resource.
A wiki is a powerful web 2.0 tool as it allows and encourages interaction and active participation. Therefore, we recommend that you set up a wiki for the promotion of your event as you don’t need IT masters to work it. The concept of “open editing” will draw in the crowds and all the visitors can collaborate with you and each other online. You can use a wiki to exchange and share content; to create a press section where you can write them in collaboration; to give details of your campaign; to give and review info about your competitors.
We also recommend that you make your wiki a niche one which focuses on one event. As collaboration and social interaction is involved, it will be vital for your promotion campaign. Be honest and upfront and don’t mess around with competitors’ entries. Make sure your information is not biased in any way.
To gain online visibility you have to be visible here, there and everywhere. Make your presence felt. You can do this by joining different forums and groups. We can’t stress enough that it is not merely joining and then watching the world go by. You have to be out there yourself. To market anything you have to market yourself first. You have to be proactive, take initiative, reach out to people, bond with them and win their trust.
Different forums allow you to leave links to your site – use this to the utmost to generate traffic for yourself. Remember, people are more likely to visit your site if you are an active participant yourself. This way they know you, trust you and are willing to have a look at what have to say. But participate with good quality content and give useful info if anyone asks a question. However, be careful that you are not taken for a spammer or you’ll end up with a closed forum account.
We also recommend that you use forums that are related to the event to the event you are promoting. Go for forums and groups that are populated by a sizeable number of active members.
Traffic through RSS Feeds
Back in 2006, it was reported by Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net that “RSS is currently used or is planned to be used within the next 12 months by 63% of consumer product marketers, 65% media and communications marketers, 37% retail marketers, 37% financial services marketers and 38% equipment and tech marketers.” This was two years ago and the trend has certainly not petered out.
Originally invented by Netscape Communications Corporation, one popular definition of RSS is “Really Simple Syndication.” Content distributors syndicate a web feed which allows users to subscribe to it. A web feed is a data format that provides updates on frequently changing web content. A number of web feeds can be made accessible in one place through aggregation; this is done by an internet aggregator.
The main question for us is how best to use RSS feeds to get traffic to our new online event management business site. To start with, we can submit our blogs to some of these feeds:
· http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
· http://www.feedsubmitter.com/
· http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/
· http://www.globalsyndication.com/directory-submit
You can find a more complete list at http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/resources/
But this is just a start. We have to tap into the endless resources of RSS aggregators which can be instructed to inform all servers in their feed lists about the updates. These aggregators can also be programmed to check for new content after a specified time period.
We can do safe marketing with RSS as unlike email, it doesn’t require people to submit their email addresses. This offers privacy and curtails the visitors’ exposure to threats of viruses, spam and identity theft. It’s easier to market to people when they feel secure and are not threatened by anything you might have to offer.
We have to build and cash in on the fact that RSS saves a lot of time as people don’t need to visit each site separately as each post gets syndicated across as many pages on the web as posted.
RSS feeds can also be aggregated by the blog search engines. Many aggregators take the individual blog entries from all of the blogs they index and make them searchable. This enables people to search for specific topics and find more information about them.
These RSS feeds can be pulled from the aggregation engines into other people’s sites. Another amazing feature is that these feeds can be pulled from different sites and aggregated on ours, e.g.
grabbing feeds from about 15 different sources is http://www.macosxunwired.com/
RSS feeds can be delivered to people in form of newsletters. This way, we can target a larger audience.
It all leads us to the vital question of RSS tools. This is still an area which hasn’t been fully explored as yet. The two winners at the moment are RSS and Atom. A word of caution at this point: several of the RSS parsing tools use JavaScript to do their work. I recommend against using those tools, because most of their results are not visible to the search engines. This will lower our ranking on search engines and that is not something we want.
Utilizing some of the following tools and strategies can help us put all the power of RSS to optimum use:
1. RSS Readers – are tools to view RSS feeds; these make it easy to mark feeds as read and flag important items that are important. Some of these include FeedDemon [http://www.feeddemon.com], FeedScout [http://www.feedscout.com]
2. Web Monitoring – these RSS tools can help us monitor the internet for particular news items and blogs related to our field. One of these free online RSS tools making web monitoring easy is PubSub [http://www.pubsub.com]
3. Google News Monitoring using RSS – a free online tool that turns a Google news search into an RSS feed.
4. RSS Graphic Tool – allows using colorful graphics as flags to indicate to surfers that RSS feeds are available for specified content. An example is the RSS Graphic Tool [http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm]
5. RSS Blogs – bring latest industry news as well as general RSS info, e.g. RSS Specifications [http://www.rss-specifications.com/blog.htm] and KbCafe [http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/]
6. RSS Related Forums – are useful for any online business online. These include 2RSS [http://forum.2rss.com/] and FeedForAll Forum [http://www.feedforall.com/forum]
You can check out some other RSS tools at:
CaRP: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/ and http://www.mouken.com/rss/carp/
GrabRSS: http://pugetsoundsoftware.com/grabrss.html
GodFatherBomb: http://godfatherbomb.com/
RSS is a free and simple way to promote our site and its content so let’s make the most of it and some more.
Traffic through the media
Publicity is one of the most uncharted and unexploited ways of marketing a business. It’s hard work but it leads to huge returns.
For any serious event manager and marketer, publicity is a MUST in their business plan. The amazing thing is that if you go about it the right way, it costs nothing yet gets your business across to thousands of people.
Along with hiring people for your ad campaign, you can use media as this will give you recognition and fame which you simply can’t buy through the paid ads. There is lots of space in local newspapers that is just crying out to be filled. The usual stories, columns and ads leave a huge gap that needs fillers and good stories are always welcomed by journalists.
Publicity done this way always generates sales as people come to recognize you. There are innumerable different strategies and methods that help you build on this and help you to take the next step so you can further draw people. We at Events Listed recommend a few basic strategies when using and dealing with media:
- Present a new offer whenever you give a story or an interview. This will make your audience feel special and more inclined to come back to you.
- Be ready for the media people. The first step is to make sure the phone is answered professionally. If you are answering it yourself, don’t be all excited and over the top.
- Have a list of brief questions and answers ready. These should focus on the main purpose of the event that you are promoting and should cover all the whys and hows.
- Have a brief bio of yourself as well as your company’s ready. Give only professional details.
- You can get media support through community work. If the event you are organizing in any way affects the local set up, highlight this point.
- Never stop publicizing – it is not just the event but what goes before and after it can all be turned into media stories. Keep the media updated, it will help you create hype and spread the word.
- Thank the media involved when your main event is done.
There’s no to the amount of publicity you can generate using simple yet well thought-out techniques. This also takes the limit off the revenues that you can generate as a result.
“Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.”
– Joseph Pulitzer
Traffic Through Press Releases
Press releases – well-written ones – draw people from all spheres of life and serve as a common ground where all are welcome. A well-worded release needs to be based on a story which is the key element.
We build stories around the release, covering all the key areas that we want to highlight. We know that the key point while writing such a release is to remember that it should be story-based and not announcement-driven. Stories make them interesting, easy to remember and easier to repeat.
An important step is finding a catchy headline. Catchy here means memorable and appealing and not some flippant and frivolous one-liner that undermines your story. Our headlines are worded so they bring instant notice to an upcoming event.
We build our announcements into the story. Our stories are the vehicle for our announcement instead of it being the other way round. We build our plot and link all the sub-plots and then develop the story. When the story becomes a good one then we work a way of hiding the announcement into the story. While writing the story for the release, we use keywords and phrases so they come up in search.
We believe in showing people that we are real and mean business. To do this, we give them basic facts, e.g. stating when was Events Listed established and what does it do. We are always looking for incentives to offer in order to engage interest. We like to support our press releases with quotes and back any claims we make by listing specifics in bullet points. It is more to-the-point and gives an organized look.
Marketing is all about spreading the word – we submit our press releases at sites like PRWeb, PRLeap.com, Webwire.com for more exposure. Newswire services play a crucial role in driving traffic to a site.
Follow up is vital; we don’t just do one press release and then forget about it. One press release every two weeks is sufficient but this time span can vary from event to event.
Traffic Through E-mail Marketing & List Buying
Lists are the key to your success in online marketing. If you have lists, you have contacts and relations and if you have those, you are bound to have money in the bank.
For lists, we recommend that you go to http://www.nextmark.com. There 60,000 lists for rent are available. It is a huge number and can be mind boggling, so make sure you search through the lists and qualify the list source before renting leads per thousand. Each list has a different price and we pay between $80 and $125 per 1000 or 8 cents to 12.5 cents per lead.
While qualifying a list, carefully check the source and exactly where it was derived. Do check if it has been generated through filling out or completing forms. If the people on it got there simply by clicking a link, then it’s not much better than cold calling. Were list recipients required to second opt in to confirm email addresses or was it just a fill out a field list in which case the quality of recipients will be low.
All this data is available to you when choosing a list so use your common sense and choose wisely.
E-mail marketing, if done right, is one of the best vessels for sales. It may sound outdated but it is anything but that. New ways of communication have been introduced but e-mail refuses to die. In fact, it is one of the building bocks that can ensure you success in your marketing and promotional campaign.
Two basic points that you have to keep in mind are:
· Ensure that recipients open the mail. Have a subject line that appeals to them and is about the value added for to THEM.
· The main content of the mail should be worth the effort and time spend in opening it.
Marketing through e-mail is not simply sending mails to people. It needs to be carefully thought out and phased.
Your initial mail should be an ice-breaker. Get to know the people in a way they can relate to you. Find a common ground related to the eventual event that you’ll market but do it subtly. Engage them in a conversation by asking questions and their views.
Phase two requires you to send them another mail after 3 or 4 days. It should have an excited tone as to you hoe great and helpful the response to your query has been. This will make the recipients feel important and sought-after.
Phase three requires you to email them quality stuff for free, e.g. to make them blend in; you can send a PDF containing all the responses you got. In the email, send a link to opt-in for the free offer.
In the next phase, send out another interesting email. In this one you can quote well-known people or authority figures and what they had to say. This will build a sense of association. While doing so, send them links to the landing page again. Basically give them a feel of what to expect from the event.
With the next email, send a link to a short demo video that highlights all the interesting aspects. This will get them excited, feel exclusive and build hype.
Always send an email every few days before the launch. Tell them how thrilled you are and are looking forward to their feedback. Do this in a way that they believe it would be a sin to miss the event and buy the tickets. Here you can show them another video clip to build social proof and enthusiasm.
Email them on the launch day and keep them updated about availability of tickets etc. Send another email as soon as you launch to notify them that your launch site is live
It’s vital to send an email afterwards telling them how cool it was and how it exceeded your expectations. Get their views as well and remember to thank them for their participation.
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