As marketing and sales professionals, we all know that the experience of your attendees is critical. Businesses need to differentiate themselves more than ever, and in-person events are still a great way to do this. For the fifth consecutive year, “in-person events” tops the list of most effective marketing tactics! However, for event attendees to get the most out of their experience (and for you to get the most out of your money!), it is critical that the event be planned well.
Running your own business can feel like a hustle. How will you make money? Where will you find clients? Is what you do unique? This mindset will seem familiar to long-time freelancers. They're used to the uncertainty of gig life and can manage the stress.
The very best are able to think long-term. They make sacrifices today in the hope that they reap the benefits tomorrow, next month, or next year. They have essentially become business owners, even if their businesses have one employee. You must shift your thinking from "the gig" to "the client" and focus on building lasting relationships if you, too, want to start your own company.
There are many questions you'll have to answer along the way. We've put together 9 that can help you build your plan. If this sounds like a journey you're ready to take, read on.
Well, that was fast. Like all events, even the largest and most complex, the 2016 Olympic Games took months of hard work and in the blink of an eye, they were over.
As the event organizers assess and debrief, it seems like a good time for other event planners to do the same. Yes, mostly from the sideline. But because the Olympics are such a public spectacle, we gain a lot of insight into the good, bad, and downright green (apologies, Olympic divers) that came out of planning the games. Here are 5 things we learned that can help event planners find success in their own events.
Quick question: when was the last time you got excited about the idea of building an event proposal? Sure, a proposal can be a step towards securing new business. That’s exciting. But even if you get the bid, the proposal process itself can feel exhausting; too much time spent on work that might never get you anywhere.
Let’s start off with a simple question: how well do you know your clients? I mean, really know. Not just what they spent on the last event but who are they? Where did they come from, what do they do every day, and what do they aspire to accomplish?
Suppose you specialize in corporate events. Are all corporate clients the same? Of course not. You could probably think of at least three off the top of your head that have completely different needs and challenges. And that’s just one sector of the event production world. You might also have clients in other market segments (weddings, live music, theatre, festivals, etc.) When you’re marketing your services, how specifically do you speak to each of these vastly different clients?
The term “freelancer” gets thrown around a lot these days. We do it, too. It’s an easy way to loosely define most of the people working in events. But “freelancer” isn’t a job title. It’s merely the method by which you conduct your particular business. There are freelance event planners, production managers, technicians, designers, and so on. With that in mind, let’s remind ourselves exactly what it means to use the term and offer some practical business tips for those that proudly call themselves “freelancers.”
Marketing your events and marketing your event business are two completely different challenges. And they require different skill sets.
It is safe to say that a good many of us create digital personalities that are representative of our real selves. Sure we may embellish. We may highlight the good and limit the bad (at the Propared offices, Eric thinks he is much funnier than he is) And there are certainly those who use the veil of social media to hide who they really are. But in general, we are pretty recognizable. We read stories that interest us, we comment when we are inspired, we "like" and "retweet" relevant and interesting content.
So even if we were misrepresenting ourselves to each other, we are certainly exposed to the companies whose services we use - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. They see everything. More specifically, and to the point of today's blog they are developing mechanisms that allow them to intuit everything as well.
Let me explain. Recently, Facebook revealed that it had manipulated hundreds of thousands of users' news feeds in order to determine whether the content users had access to would affect their emotional states, and ultimately, the quality of those users' future posts. Translation - does content that is highly skewed negative make you post more negatively? Vice versa? The answer, according to Facebook data scientists, is a resounding YES. Even third-parties are building tools to map user emotional response using "keywords" designed to capture the reactions around particular events.
Emotional contagion is nothing new. It has been documented in countless lab experiments but the idea that our emotional states can be manipulated through our social media profiles definitely raises new questions, especially if the only consent we have given is buried in the dregs of a Data Use and Privacy Policy.
What if that information is shared with other companies? How would they use such data? The first thing that comes to mind is target marketing. But open up a browser window today and we already see ads, offers, banners, panels, and who knows what else enticing us to engage with products. These are ads carefully selected to connect with us based on our shared social information. But these ads are generated based on our interests, buying history, “likes,” “shares,” websites frequented, and other hard data. Though that information may have an emotional component for us (for example, going online to buy a birthday gift for a family member), the ads generated were done so after the fact. This new research suggests companies would be able to influence our behavior before we even go in search of fulfilling such needs. This ventures into dangerous territory – consumer protection, informed consent…
Our CEO, Ryan Kirk, wrote a piece last week about Propared's values. One of those, transparency, crops up again here. In the many discussions about the "look" and "feel" of Propared, we ultimately decided to leave the marketing material outside of the program itself. We believe that if it truly is our mission to make work easier, more efficient, and more cost-effective for live event professionals, we must not interfere with their ability to get their work done. But outside of the application, of course we market. We market because we don't know everyone yet. We market because we believe that with your input and feedback, Propared will help you become a more effective manager.
We hope that excites you. We hope that it engages you and inspires a positive reaction to us and what we have to offer. But no, we won't be mapping your emotional state anytime soon.