You’ve recently reviewed your marketing plan for the year and decided to run a seminar to attract more clients to your business… so where do you start?
Here are seven top tips to ensure you have covered off on the planning and preparation required for a successful seminar series.
- Clarify who your target market are and do some research on how you are going to reach them. Look at why you want to hold the seminar and what you would like to achieve out of it. Eg. If you are running a financial services seminar and are looking for small business clients to attend, where are you going to find them?
- List all the places you can find to freely advertise your seminar and contact some of your key networks to see if you can advertise the seminar with each group.
- Consider the date, venue and budget you have available for the event. Include things like venue hire, equipment hire if you need projectors, lead time needed to plan and promote the seminars, advertising costs, printing of brochures, flyers or business, cards, and consider if other speakers would also add value. Also think about if the seminar should be free or as a paid event. (A paid event secures your attendees and your attendance levels are usually much higher)
- Begin an 8 week email campaign to your current database promoting the seminar. You can use newsletter and email programs such as mailchimp and aweber to set these up and set up recurring campaigns to occur fortnightly for the next eight weeks. (Remember one key marketing component is that people need to hear things or see things at least five times before they buy…)
- What type of content are you going to give your attendees and how are you going to present it? Do you need time to prepare handouts and product forms? Are you going to sell anything at the event? If so do you have enough product in stock or do you need to order more?
- Who is going to do the follow up after the event? This is an area where most people forget about and let themselves down. Plan ahead for the day after the event to call people and check if they need further details, book face to face meetings to give more information and also if the seminar is small (under 50) people a personal hand written note is a great way to say thanks and keep your potential clients keen on learning more.