I work for my University's event planning business, and my boss had given my coworker and I a new project. Due to recent drops in attendance from our usual conference groups, it is up to us to figure out cheap new marketing strategies to entice more people to use our services to host their conference. Since the state has cut of a funding for a lot of things, we really don't have a lot to work with in terms of marketing. Here is a list of possible ideas that might work. If you have any that are not on the list, please leave a comment with your idea. I could use all the ideas I can get.
- Get comments and suggestions from previous/former clients
- Write and circulate a conference office newsletter, describing events taking place, pictures, and description
- Make a virtual tour on major locations and services used by most conference groups
- Pens, pencils with info printed on it
- Leave business cards in prospective locations
- actively participate in professional groups. Attend meetings and network the office through these groups
- Ask current/former clients, casual acquaintances and prospects for referrals
- Put out a suggestion box
- List number in the local phone directory
- Place business cards around campus
- Network with local hotels and work together in working with groups. Have hotels refer any prospective clients to business
- Network, network, network!
- Make a blog
3 comments
Two great strategies in online marketing that don't cost you anything but time are:
1. Forum participation
Run a Google search to find forums in your niche, then check them regularly and make quality posts whenever possible. Try to answer peoples questions. You can also start a thread yourself, giving some helpful tips.
If you post a lot of good and helpful posts, people will gain trust in you and some will check out your service.
Make sure you always add your signature to your posts. This is where you can put text links to your site, like a small ad.
2. Article marketing
You write lots of 400-600 word articles about topics in your niche and submit them to an article directory where people go to search for free content to publish on their website, in their ezines or newsletters.
Each article will have a resource box at the end which contains a short information about your business and of course a link. A small ad as well. And every time somebody publishes your article, this "ad" must go with, that's your payment for providing free content.
I've tried several article directories and so far www.ezinearticles.com is the only one I found that's worth it. They give great service, article writing training and stats, and they are the only ones that really send me traffic.
Both methods take some time until they start paying of, but if you can rather invest time than money they are great options, and the longer and more intensive you do it, the more traffic you will get.
Thank you for those great tips! I'll fwd them to my boss :)
Another idea is to do online marketing as mentioned before on forums, but also on other peoples blogs etc. But using keywords that include your region and locality.
A research article said that more than 85% of people use the internet to find a local business or event, rather than yellow pages, or local papers.
Great social sites such as bebo, facebook, myspace etc, allow you to create a local group where you can invite people to that group and keep them updated.
Hope that helps :)
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