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How 5 Simple Steps Will Grow Your Events & Functions Bigger and Better Each Time

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:35:57 +0000

The key to successfully growing bigger and better events is to set up what’s called the Marketing Cycle. The first part of the cycle is to promote your event in whatever way you can, such as traditional advertising. The next step is critical. You must collect names and addresses & email addresses when people book. At this point you should confirm their booking, but importantly from your point of view, use it to ask them to tell others.

As the event draws closer, in order to create anticipation of the event you contact people prior to the event who have already booked to remind them of the event and again ask them to tell others. This next step is again critical. After the event you actively seek feedback. This must seek constructive feedback to help improve your events. You need to know what people are thinking, and pick on the issues you can improve on. The feedback must also seek to collect positive comments.

You now have completed one cycle. Marketing the next event (marketing cycle) gets easier. You use the database of contacts you already built up to direct market to these “qualified” people. Most importantly, in your promotional communication you tell them (from your feedback) what has changed (to make it a better event), and you include the positive comments (testimonials) from people. You then continue through the remainder of the cycle.

As you can appreciate, for each subsequent event (marketing cycle) the information you generate gets more fine tuned to what people want so you can deliver events they will be more motivated to attend.

An online booking (& payment) service provides an excellent way to manage the Marketing Cycle as it will collect email and postal addresses (and payments), automatically provide confirmation emails and send reminder emails (plus use it to ask them to tell others). The most critical part is it will collect feedback after the event. This is the marketing gold of your Marketing Cycle!

For the next event you simply use your database to direct mail. Plus you also now have another valuable weapon as part of the Marketing Cycle. Most people will only respond to a promotional after several communications. You can now very easily use your on line booking system to send subsequent follow up promotions to only those on your database who have not yet registered.

The marketing cycle is how www.mybookingmanager.com, an on line booking & payment system operates. The big benefit apart from creating a valuable Marketing Cycle is all the bookings, payments, confirmations, reminders and feedback functions ar all automated leaving you time to promote bigger and better events and shows.

Published by MyBookingManager.com
The convenient, professional, time saving & cost effective way to accept registrations, bookings & payments for your next seminar, workshop, trade display or membership event

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Brand your Exhibition Stand for Maximum Impact

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:35:43 +0000

Rita Davenport had been given a free hand to design and manage an exhibition stand for her company. The Marketing Director had briefed her extensively on the overall idea and left her with an open brief to produce something that would attract customers, dealers and the trade press. Rita walked out of the meeting feeling inspired but not quite sure what to do next.

Once you understand clearly what the sponsor needs the stand to achieve, you can go about the business of designing and branding your presence. If your budget will stretch to the cost of a professional exhibition designer, you should commission a good one. Not only does it remove some of the more stressful elements of exhibition organization; gaining agreement to the design, arranging manufacture, checking quality, organizing transportation, assembly and disassembly; it allows you to be objective about making changes. In addition, exhibition designers will provide advice about the best position for your stand in the exhibition hall, traffic flow through the stand, lighting and audio-visual presentations.

If you don’t have an extensive enough budget to engage an exhibition designer, get together with a good graphic designer who can produce well designed exhibition panels that will impress and attract attention. You may need to provide a stand system (normally a metal framework that is assembled to hold the exhibition boards) but these are fairly lightweight, easy to assemble and come ready-fitted with a lighting system.

Other considerations for your stand should include furniture to rest your foot-sore customers, pamphlet racks for your product information and storage for the paraphernalia that you don’t want to clutter the stand.

Before you finalize the design of the stand, run it by all of the important decision-makers and influencers in the organization to make sure it has their blessing before you commit to expensive printing and photographic work.

Selecting and training your exhibition staff

When potential customers home in on your stand, they don’t really want to deal with people who only have a vague understanding of your products and services. They generally want very specific answers to very specific questions and it is in your interests to people the stand with carefully selected competent individuals who can work effectively as a team.

If you choose to use technical staff who have limited sales experience or sales staff with limited technical knowledge, it is vitally important to provide them with an opportunity to pick up new skills and information prior to the exhibition. Allow your own staff to train each other and to share tips and techniques in sales as well as improving technical knowledge on the products or services being exhibited.

Rita was fortunate, her exhibition budget allowed her to commission a talented exhibition designer who project managed the installation for her. The exhibition team was selected from sales, marketing, engineering and administration co-workers. They all benefited from a fun workshop where they compiled a stand data book to educate each other about the company, product and sales information.

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

What on earth are trade exhibitions for?

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:35:18 +0000

As a Sydney-based exhibition designer, Ove Prado often conducts his own survey of trade shows. He tries to work out, from what he sees, the purpose that each stand is playing in that company’s marketing strategy. All too often, he says, the message is confusing and some designs actually drive customers to walk straight past

Renting space at a trade exhibition, designing a stand, having it built and staffing it for the duration of the exhibition shares some of the essence of running other types of event but differs in some significant features.

To begin with, your audience is only partially captive. They may choose to attend the exhibition but, in the vastness of an exhibition hall, unless you have marketed your presence effectively, they could pass you by in favor of more visible, glamorous, noisy, exciting stands.

If and when they descend on your stand, their time is precious. There may be 20 or 30 providers they have decided to test out in their day. This means you may have 15 to 20 minutes of their time if you have the staff to deal with them and other visitors simultaneously.

Your potential clients may also come to you with either a very specific problem to solve or no problem at all, just general curiosity. You have to be ready to handle almost anything. You can’t prepare a single script as you can with a series of presentations, so your people have got to be gifted ad-libbers.

Working out the purpose of a trade stand

As with any event, deciding to exhibit at a trade show starts with the germ of an idea somewhere. It may be that your organization has always taken a stand at this particular show or this may be the first time you have cut your teeth on this audience. What you expect to achieve through your stand and your presence at the show depends on your answers to several important questions.

• Is this an opportunity to launch an exciting new product or service?

• Is this a showcase for your existing range of products or services?

• Will you be expecting to meet mostly new potential customers?

• Will you be expecting to meet predominantly existing customers?

• Do you expect to take orders on the stand?

• Will the stand be an information only exhibit?

• Are you planning to position your organization against the competition?

• Will your stand be about image or substance?

If your answer to all of the above is Yes!, then be very careful. By attempting to achieve too much with your presence at an exhibition, you may run into the problem of confusion and complexity. Like any marketing activity you must be clear about what it is you are offering.

Ove’s advice to trade show exhibitors is Remember that over a quarter of people who attend trade shows will actually formalize an order while they are there. Does your stand say We’re friendly – talk to us!

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Is an event over when it’s finished

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:35:03 +0000

As the last delegate left the conference, Quinne McLachlan sat down at her laptop and started to write a review of everything that had happened. She was the event organizer and all through the proceedings she had been taking scribbled notes about the main points of interest, delegate questions that had not been fully covered by presentation material and presenters who had been well-received or those who had courted controversy.

She found that her role as coordinator throughout the event gave her time to watch both the presenters and the audience. All of the carefully planned elements of the conference could be tested and she could gauge whether they produced the effect that was expected.

The results of a successful (or disastrous) event can be as much of a marketing tool as the event itself. Writing up the proceedings may be something that you have promised delegates anyway but don’t miss an opportunity to send a summary to trade publications and other interested media. If you have the opportunity to include case studies of delegates experiences before, during and after the event, this adds the extra human interest angle to the story.

Use the event branding and produce a range of versions of the event outcomes for different audiences.

Produce a one page press release that can be circulated to all of your chosen media contacts. If you don’t have any contacts yet, here is a short list to get you started:

• Editors of trade publications

• Editors of local press

• Editors of local current affairs TV and radio

• Editors of national press

• Editors of national current affairs TV and radio

If you have a marketing or PR department, they may want to manage this process.

• Produce an edited version to be circulated to delegates.

• Produce a full version for your company archive and also to be published on your organization’s website.

Celebrating success

The very last but definitely the most important task you will have is to celebrate the success of your event with your event team. Organizations vary in the way that they do this. Surprisingly, some companies don’t celebrate success at all but you will want to encourage your team to work with you again. So, make a point of popping a bottle of bubbly, having a blow-out meal, passing round the chocolates or chilling at the local spa. Whatever you choose don’t forget to say a big thank you for the long hours and the unending skill and patience everyone brought to the event.

Quinne typed the last full stop on her laptop. The conference summary made excellent reading. She was sure she could get some space in the trade press and get some good forward publicity for their next round of conferences.

Finding the rest of the conference team, she helped them with the last of the tidy-up, and, remembering that an army marches on its stomach, she invited them all to a blow-out supper at a local hostelry.

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

How not to review your event to death

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:34:51 +0000

Running a conference, a seminar or a workshop can be great fun. The day of the event is guaranteed to be a hive of activity with all of the arrangements coming together over those few hours. Problems will arise and be solved in one way or another and the delegates will leave in various states of motivation. If this is your first or your one thousand and first event you should never stop learning how to improve the next one. One of the most effective ways to draw out all of the learning points from the entire event is to hold a review meeting after some thorough data gathering including financial analysis and delegate feedback.

Running a review meeting

Once you have assembled the background data, it is time to hold your review meeting with the key players. This may be part of a general review that your organization regularly runs or it might be a special one-off to quantify the benefit of events like this and to justify future expenditure.

Who to invite?

Those attending this review meeting should be the event owners, decision makers and influencers in your company who will need to understand the impact of the event. It may not be necessary to invite your entire event team, however it will add value to your presentation if you have people in the meeting who can provide additional information that you may have forgotten, overlooked or otherwise omitted or who can support your data with additional evidence.

The Agenda

Thematicx Product Nationwide Roadshow

Review Meeting

15:00-16:00 on 12/12/09 in Main Conference Room

Agenda

Overview of Roadshow objective and Roadshow program

Financial report

Delegate feedback and results of Follow-up process

Improvement Plans

Successes

Next steps – A discussion about extending the program

Any Other Business

Always publish an agenda for this type of meeting to allow people to prepare their thinking in advance. A typical agenda is quite simple and looks like this:
Although this is a sensible and courteous precaution, don’t expect everyone to read and remember the agenda. Some will appreciate it; the others will muddle through and use their intuition as long as you supply a copy of the agenda at the meeting.

Rather than defining a strict timetable, have a rough timetable in your head leaving about 20 to 30 minutes for open discussions throughout the meeting. If the meeting lasts for an hour, each of the presentation topics should only take around 5 minutes which gives time for one or two slides (if you’re using them). The time will fly by and your attendees will be fresh and ready to discuss future plans.

Be prepared for surprises. Often events that appear to run well have hidden problems that are only revealed after close questioning of everyone involved. Conversely events that stumble along from crisis to crisis can be highly entertaining for the delegates and may cause them to pay closer attention because they start to look for errors that may not be there.

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Published by MyBookingManager.com
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Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Managing the reputation of your event

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:34:35 +0000

As a Consultant in Quality and Customer Service, Roberta Meier often attends seminars and workshops as a Mystery Shopper. As well as checking out how well delegates are catered for by the training teams, she also takes great delight in testing how tenaciously event organizers pursue her for her true opinion about their reputation.

If and when they do catch up with Roberta, how do they quantify reputation anyway?

The easiest thing to do is to use the happiness sheets (event evaluation forms) and the post event questionnaires, remembering that this is not a popularity contest but a search for factual information.

If your questionnaires ask for a numerical score against each question, finding the average score (adding all the scores together and dividing the total by the number of delegates who answered) is a useful guide. It is also constructive to look at the spread of results. Check how many people rated the presenter a 6, how many a 7 and so on. A small cluster of very high or very low scores can give a false average, pulling it up or down. You should be interested in what the majority (60%) of the attendees thought and usually these valid results are centered on the true average.

Stress Avoidance

Also consider which elements of the project were the most stressful for you, for your team and for the delegates. Events management will never be a completely stress-free activity but, on occasion, poor planning, poor preparation or badly selected people can cause unnecessary anguish. Think back over the event and identify situations that you would prefer not to repeat if and when you run a similar event in the future. Use a cause and effect grid to home in on the real cause of problems and identify a course of action to avoid this happening again.

Effect

What actually happened?

Cause

Action Plan

Guest speaker was late arriving.

A rail strike was called on the day and we had to fly her in at the last minute.

We tried to save money by avoiding an overnight stay.

In future guest speakers will be put up in a hotel the night before the event.

One of our key delegates had to leave because of an allergy to marker pen solvent.

The interactive sessions of the workshop required lots of flip chart work and we only had solvent based markers with us.

We didn’t ask and he didn’t tell us about the allergy.

Only use water based markers in future and update the registration questions to include all allergies.

The statistics of customer satisfaction can make distressing reading, however, if you have a proactive system, you can track down the 60% of delegates who found it difficult to tell you they had a problem. If you then listen carefully to them and attempt to resolve the issue; you will convince a large proportion of them to do business with you again and you will prevent them from damaging your reputation through non-recommendation.

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Evaluate your event to accumulate profit

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:34:08 +0000

If you are running workshops, seminars or conferences like Oslo , Norway based Ulrika Fredrikson you won’t be doing it as a charitable act. Let’s face it, even if you were a charity, you’d have to cover your costs somehow. Ulrika runs a combination of sponsored and paid-for events which improves the ticket price for delegates but increases the pressure on her to fill seats to satisfy the advertising benefit for her sponsors.

Whether your event cost $10 or $10,000 to stage, you should, for business reasons, calculate your return on investment. This is not as straightforward as making sure that the gate money covers your costs, although that is, in itself, important. To be rigorous you will be drawing information about all of the positive and negative effects the event has had on your bank account, your reputation and your graying hair both now and in the future and you will be making it available to whomever needs to know in a form that is easy to digest.

Compiling event information

To properly compile all of your event information you might want to put some time aside to revisit all of the details about the design, development, running and follow-up activities associated with the event.

Financial Information

Put together the financial information and split it down into:

• planned expenditure

• unplanned expenditure

• direct income

• indirect but related income

Planned expenditure is everything that you predicted you would spend on the project from the first including purchases, rentals, staff hours and expenses. Unplanned expenditure is anything else over and above what you originally thought was required. You are splitting this out, not because it is in some way wrong to incur unplanned expenditure but because it is part of the learning and self-training process. When you next run an event you will have a better idea of the contingency costs you ought to be planning.

Direct income comes from ticket sales and any other sales like promotional items, books or products associated with the event. Indirect income covers any additional products or services that have been purchased since the event and the sale of which can be attributed to running the event. This is where the water starts to get a little muddy, as it is highly likely that some of your delegates will have been approached by your company many times in the past and it may become difficult to attribute a sales success to this event alone. By far the best thing to do here is to count the sale, or a proportion of it, say, a quarter and highlight it as being influenced by a combination of marketing tactics including the event.

Ulrika has been in the conferencing business for around ten years and she knows that almost 50% of follow-through sales for her own company and for her sponsors can take twelve months or more to reveal themselves. Her advice is to acknowledge this but not count it as part of this event’s income.

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Follow up to get quality event feedback

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:33:35 +0000

- Well, how did it go? – asked the CEO as he wandered past Siobhan’s desk on his weekly tour of the offices. He was referring to the conference Siobhan had organized and run to involve their industry in standardization guidelines. Although her first impression was that the conference was a real success, she knew that she only had a small proportion of the total feedback. I’m still in the middle of collecting feedback data, admitted Siobhan,but the initial data looks more positive than we hoped. I’ll have the full results at next week’s review meeting.

Seminars, roadshows or workshops are held for a very specific reason and they will belong in one of the following categories:

• To generate sales opportunities for your products or services

• To spread information or increase productivity throughout an organization

• To raise general awareness about a topic

• To gain support for a change (political, legal, social or environmental)

It may be tempting, once the event is over, to sit back and wait for a reaction but, because you have invested time, emotion and money into developing and running an event, you ought to be pro-active in testing its effectiveness. Events are like all other products, some do everything they were expected to do whereas others fall short and need to be improved either by modification or enhanced design, if they are to be repeated.

With an event you cannot expect to satisfy everyone 100%, but you can get close by understanding what worked and what did not. As you will see, not everyone is prepared to give their true opinion during or directly after the event and some degree of post-event follow-up will be necessary to draw a balanced picture of audience perception.

Because your delegates have different learning styles, you will not have seen a complete and considered reaction from all of them during your event.

Delegates, whatever their background, can be pigeon-holed into 4 categories:

• Activists

• Pragmatists

• Theorists

and

• Reflectors

The activists and pragmatists are most likely to have responded immediately to the information or activities that you provided as they enjoy interaction. Activists and pragmatists, by nature, have a strong tendency to engage and take on board new ideas. Pragmatists will test the realism of the new idea whereas activists just enjoy the thrill of the new.

Theorists, as you might expect, like to take time to break ideas down and think things through step-by-step. Reflectors prefer to gather information, stand back and consider things from different perspectives. Both of these learning types may need a little more time and space to assimilate what has been said and would probably respond well to a follow-up process.

Siobhan was right to hold back on boasting about her success. Some of the later feedback demonstrated that there were real practical problems that would take time and money to overcome. These had only surfaced once the delegates had returned to base to analyze the in-depth business implications for themselves.

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Event etiquette

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:33:19 +0000

The workshop was over. The delegates had long gone and Margaret Kerr was recovering with a cup of coffee. The room was strewn with sheets of flip chart paper, the debris of the buffet lunch and countless empty coffee cups covered every horizontal surface in the room. Margaret was drained. The workshop had been a tough one for a trainer; the delegates had all been sharp and smart; they had challenged her knowledge and demanded long explanations of the reasons behind the theories she was asking them to buy into. She looked at the bomb-site that was once an orderly training room and knew she didn’t have the energy to do much more than crawl to her car. After all, she reasoned, the conference center cleaning staff would tidy up, wouldn’t they.

Once the rooms are clear of delegates and you have bathed in the glory of a successful event, it is time to dismantle everything that you came with. As with the assembly process, it is useful to assign specific responsibilities to members of the event team and to manage the process as smoothly as possible. For larger events, keep a checklist of everything that needs to be done on a flip chart and, as items are completed, score them out. Using a clearly visible list like this gives everyone involved an easy reference and allows them to decide themselves how they can best help others once they have completed their own tasks.

If events are to be a frequent part of your life, you will want a venue to welcome you back with open arms. To make this a certainty, try as much as possible to leave the venue rooms as you found them, litter-free and ready for the cleaning staff to prepare them for the next users.

This may seem like common sense but you will be surprised how easy it is, at the end of a particularly stressful event, to follow the impulse to cut and run. Your reputation is worth more than a few sheets of paper.

Providing venue feedback

As you leave with the last load of equipment, make a point of contacting your conferencing contact at the venue. Show them your feedback from the evaluation forms; if they are worth their salt, they will be eager to read it. Add any feedback of your own, positive and negative but always leave a nice, juicy positive comment to the last and tell them you’ll be back.

If you’ve had any particularly excellent service from the conferencing staff, make a point of following up your feedback with a thank you letter to the venue manager. A little careful attention to detail now will buy you royal treatment on your next visit.

Margaret was about to slide quietly away when her colleague Ben, walked in looking full of energy. Where do you get the energy, Ben? she asked. I pace myself he stated in a matter of fact way the day ain’t over till it’s over

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com

Event management, body language and qualified release

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:33:03 +0000

Stuart Burns was having a bad day. Not only had he arrived late for the seminar because of the server problem at work last night, he was finding it difficult to concentrate because of the stream of text messages coming in to his cell phone. He couldn’t bring himself to turn it off just in case something catastrophic was happening back at base so he set it to mute and tried to keep an eye on it while he listened to the presenters. Now the effects of his disturbed sleep were catching up on him and his extreme body language shouted that he was in the wrong place.

Audiences suffering from information overload will give very clear signals that they are ready for a break. Their eyes start to glaze over, they slump in their seats and when you ask them questions, it is as though you are rousing them from a deep sleep. Bladders may be straining, nicotine and caffeine cravings may be kicking in and vibrating text messages are surreptitiously being viewed. It’s time to declare an unofficial break! If you push on regardless you may lose your audience completely.

This situation can often happen on hot, humid days when the air-conditioning is underperforming or in windowless rooms where the lack of outside views can have a profound psychological effect on your delegates.

A ten minute unscheduled break in these circumstances can make the difference between success and failure for your event.

Manage the coffee and meal breaks rigidly as a few 5 or 10 minute overruns can soon lose you half an hour from the program.

Managing early departures

It is a fairly frequent occurrence that a proportion of your audience will be unable to stay for the entire event. This is understandable in these times of full schedules and instant communication. The more polite amongst them will forewarn you of this and tender their apologies. Some will make a dash for the door with their heads down and others will mumble an excuse as they walk sideways past the presenter towards the exit.

If you have prior warning, try and sit your early leavers close to the exit even if they have been sitting elsewhere during the event. That way, when they have to take their leave, they can do it with minimum fuss and interruption.

Whichever exit routine your early leavers use, make sure that they have an opportunity to give you some instant feedback before they leave and take the time to thank them for however much time they have been able to spend with you. Their early exit is unlikely to be an insult to your organizational or presentational skills. More likely they have a plane or train to catch, so treat them respectfully.

Stuart was so relieved when one of the seminar administrators approached him during a coffee break to ask if there was a problem. She listened and, promising to book him on the next seminar, helped him organize a taxi.

Obtain your FREE report “20 Steps To Running Successful Seminars Roadshows Workshops And Events Report” at MyBookingManager.com