Hot Tips for Good Meetups
I received an email recently that I thought could be interesting for anyone running event marketing programmes. It was from a friend of mine Navin Arora, founder of Pheonix GMN, a company responsible for the IndiansinLondon.net social network, along with the recently launched UKbloggers.net and countless other excellent networks.
Navin has worked on the Meetup platform to organise and promote events here in London, as have I with the London Bloggers Meetup community. He took it upon himself to share some insights into how he has tried to promote and produce excellent Meetups, many of which could also be applied to general events.
Anyway, I asked Navin if he would be happy for me to share his email, so here you go. Thanks Nav…
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Hello Guys,
I have spent some time on meetup blogs and found out some top tips to make meetups even more attractive in current economic climate.
1) Urge your members to spread the word about your meetup to all their friends. Meetups are a great way to meet like-minded people in a natural and informal environment and attending most meetups are free or costs next to nothing.
2) Try to organise seminars and events with some speaker on some interesting subject. E.g. someone who has done English teaching holiday in Spain, someone who can share some tips about water sports, someone who can share some tips about job hunting and CV making.
3) Do try to tie-up with other meetup organisers in your region to have joint meetups to increase the attendance, which helps in obtaining bigger discounts from various venues. Always try to get group discounts from venues like Cinemas, Theatres, restaurants, bowling alleys etc.
4) Do mention in your newsletter, updates on some other interesting events of other meetups happening around you. This should be mutual and will provide boost to all the meetup groups in return because when your members go and join other events, they will eventually talk about your meetup too and that will bring in more audience and popularity to your meetups.
5) You can also start a “Service Directory” on your “About Us” page, where all members can post what they do and can do for other members. Someone who has already done this says “We ALWAYS look there first, for home repairs, dog sitting, any service work, landscaping etc! We take care of our own FIRST…and have thus created our own MICRO-COMMUNITY.”
6) You can create a dedicated forum thread/topic for job seekers where members can help each other by posting job tips and other insider information about jobs. In current economic climate, this has proved to be a very useful forum thread for many members.
7) You can create a dedicated discussion board forum for your members to post their wares for sale (i.e. free classifieds for selling things, roommates, etc.)
You can create a dedicated discussion board forum for Pooling-Resources like Cars, books, dvds, video games etc
9) You can create a dedicated discussion board forum for finding travel-partners for those Europe or around-the-world trips. Its always fun to go for travel around the world with like-minded people.
10) Use the meetup fee (or a part of it) to do a raffle for your members and award one of the first 10 door-crashers something nice to motivate others to attend and turn up on time.
Please share with me and other Organisers, any ideas of a joint meetup by mailing to the emailing list of this group.
That’s all for now.
Cheers
-Navin
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It would be great to hear some tips from others who organise successful Meetups..!
Tag:Events
How to Avoid Advertising Disasters
I’ve been working with small businesses for long enough to know that most standard advertising is fairly ineffective for generating sales pipeline. Sadly I have learnt this the hard way, by wasting money on adverts that have generated a negative return on investment - the negative element being the loss of cash and moral! So why then do I occasionally get caught out by advertising sales reps?
A question I had to ask myself recently when I booked a quarter page ad in a publication in London that turned out to be a bit of a toad. The reason I would hazard a guess is twofold:
1. the skill of the sales rep in presenting a compelling opportunity, and
2. the client’s real need for new leads in these difficult economic conditions made me think twice
Of course when I learnt my advice on this one was a little wayward, I did the only decent thing and offered to cover the cost of the advert should the promised sales leads not appear. Watch this space to see if I have to get my cheque book out.
The other result is that I’ve decided to compile a checklist of questions I must ask and fully understand before I place an order. With the aim of helping everyone to get a better return on their advertising investment, I thought I’d share this here.
- Is the publication readership the same as my target audience / decision maker? (note it is important to really understand your target audience first!)
- Do I clearly understand the target audience description provided by the publication?
- Have I heard of the publication or is it launching?
- What is the format of the publication - A4, A5, glossy, newspaper, portrait, landscape, colour or black and white etc?
- Exactly what size will the advert be?
- Can I secure a guaranteed right hand page? (important as an advert placed on a right hand page generally outperforms those on the left hand page)
- Are any of my competitors advertising?
- What is the publication date?
- What is the publication’s reach - not just the circulation, but total reach?
- Will they offer any guarantees - cost per enquiry for example? (unlikely but worth asking)
- Can the publisher help to put together the creative?
- Have any of my competitors / peers advertised in the publication and if so what results did they achieve? (also, could I have their contact details so I can talk to them and find out about their experiences?)
- What is the total price?
These questions will help me to better understand whether the opportunity will present a return on investment i.e. a value of sales greater than the cost of the advertising. Ultimately, there are lots of other factors which will impact the success of the advert which are not the responsibility of the publication.
In particular, the quality of the text and images used in the advert and the strength of the call to action. For some guidelines on good advert copywriting, check out this post by freelance advertising copywriter John Kuraoka.
I’d very much like to hear the experiences of other small business advertisers as to how you measure and interpret whether an opportunity will present good value?
Tag:AdvertisingThe Art of Competitive Intelligence
I started to work with a new client recently and they asked me to prepare a marketing plan for how to take their new software product into the UK small business space. It was particularly pleased with this project and certainly because the product seemed strong and relevant – it was all about increasing efficiencies, managing finances and essentially creating a smarter back office for your small business.
One of the first tasks I advised the client to work on was to look at the competition. It seemed to me the product was good, but it would be entering a hectic market place and therefore the positioning had to be spot on. By positioning I essentially mean which market segment, at which price point and selling what benefits.
Like most small businesses, the client had not even looked at this area, but instead had focused on developing a strong product and some solid client credentials.
So what is competitor intelligence and what should you do about it?
Well, first of all, it’s not spying on your competitors, it is gathering information you can use to make informed decisions. From a quick web search I found this great quote from Cipher :
“Competitive Intelligence is the ethical gathering and analysis of competitor and market information from open sources. This analysis is used by organizations to make better strategic decisions.”
I like another quote too, this time from oft quoted Chinese Philosopher Sun Tzu:
“If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”
Ok so this is from the Art of War, but none-the-less it is interesting to think about.
So as a small business owner / marketer, what should I do?
Well I’ll tell you. You could employ a professional and the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals has a useful directory.
Alternatively If you would prefer to have a go at this yourself, you might want to have a think about these core steps:
1. Set your objectives – what information do you want to find out?
You could easily spend a lot of time looking at every possible sphere of competition to your business. Be realistic, define your market first, for example if you are a dry cleaner in London, you can probably focus largely on the surrounding area without having to review every dry cleaner in the UK.
What is your unique selling point and how do you compete? If you are largely focused on price, this might be one factor you absolutely must learn about your competitors.
Could you learn from a related field? If you are a dry cleaner, could you consider another service business to get some insights and ideas, for example hairdressing, or vehicle valet services?
2. Define what you already know.
Simple enough, start by listing out the companies you already know about. Create a table and list as many of the following details as you can:
Name
Location
Website
Turnover
Age
Product range
Pricing
Key customers
Core strengths and weaknesses
3. Develop the Profile.
Once you have the basics listed, start to think about what other information you could or should gather and from where. For example, have you employed a sales manager that used to work for the competition? Could they provide some real insight into pricing and sales strategies which you may find useful?
You could also consider:
- Try to find their latest set of accounts (try Companies House in the UK) to help you understand their financial position
- Look in the trade press to identify if they have received any grants recently which you may also benefit from, or whether they have received any investor funding - this may give you a clue as to the money they have to spend on developing the product and marketing communications
- Look for any advertising or promotions they are running to identify their unique selling points, for example are they running Payperclick advertising? If so, which keywords are they bidding on?
- Talking to industry commentators and journalists. These are people paid to understand the market place you are competing in and will have an excellent knowledge of what is working and how the market is developing.
- Suppliers – who are they using and can you get a better price by using the same suppliers?
4. Translating information into knowledge
Once you have spent some time gathering this information and it probably won’t be a quick task, you need to translate that information into useable knowledge.
A good example is looking at price points and how this matches to your customer segments. Continuing with the dry cleaning example, a market which is probably fairly price inelastic (small changes in price will have little impact on demand), you might find your competitors are all more expensive than you.
What action could you take?
In this case you could probably consider increasing your prices a little without impacting sales volumes. This would have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Once you have taken this action, you of course need to monitor the impact and take additional corrective action as necessary. If your price increase does reduce sales volumes, you may wish to revise your stretegy.
5. A regular approach.
Competitive intelligence is not a one off activity. Keep a regular check on the core criteria and ensure this is something all of your team, especially customer facing staff, are involved in.
And that’s it. You don’t have to be a James Bond type to get to grips with competitive intelligence, but you do have to get to grips with it!
I’d love to hear what your experiences are of trying to keep tabs on the competition.
Tag:Reader Polls: Social Media Tools
I’ve been running a poll on this blog for a few months now asking the question ‘have you used any of the following social media tools to market your business?’.
The options and answers in order of popularity were:
• Blog 67%
• LinkedIn 55%
• Facebook 48%
• Other 39%
• Del.icio.us 30%
What does this tell us?
First of all it confirms the significance of blogging as a key business communications tool. It’s interesting to see how many different types of business have jumped onto this marcoms tool, with everyone from CEOs to technical R+D experts, professional services firms and more. Working with small businesses I find blogging can provide a good platform for demonstrating your expertise, creating a feedback channel for customers, providing a place to foster conversation with existing and prospective customers and much more. If you want advice or some ideas for how to get a blog going for your business I recommend reading the BetterBusinessBlogging blog written by expert Mark White.
LinkedIn is another great resource but for networking. There is a lot of debate in the blogosphere as to how valuable LinkedIn really is, but for me there is no question of its potential. A good example is an old colleague of mine who recently contacted me through linkedIn. She had recently started up as a business operations consultant and was looking to expand her network and service offering. There may now be opportunities for us to work together either on the same clients, or through referring business opportunities. For ideas on how to get the most from LinkedIn, read Guy Kawasaki and LinkedIntelligence.
Facebook needs no introduction. It’s amazing how frequently I receive marketing messages from groups I belong to on Facebook, from music bands to clubs I belong to. One of my clients uses Facebook to manage its alumni and as a source of recruitment. There are no end to the possibilities. For bigger brands you might even consider advertising on Facebook.
The main point that came across from the survey is that people are using a mixture of different social media tools to market their business. A blog is a good start, but develop your LinkedIn profile in parallel and cross promote both platforms. Once you have a blog up and running and your LinkedIn profile is starting to grow, look at Twitter, or start social book marking with Delicious.
There is a good argument that you should have an objective in mind before you start with social networking and some goals in place in order that you can measure whether your efforts have been successful. I agree with this entirely for blogging but for the less strategic tactics, like LinkedIn, I would suggest just getting started and trying it for a month to see what you can achieve, you may just be surprised how many doors it can open and the costs are tiny – in most cases just your time.
What’s the next reader survey then?
Well it’s online now in the right hand sidebar and I would like your help to understand the impact of the global recession on your business..:
What tactics have you employed to combat the global recession?
Increased marketing spend
Made redundancies
Cut costs
Changed strategic direction
Refinanced business
Other
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