Marketing Your Meeting
Are you in charge of filling the seats at your events? Here's a checklist designed to help you increase your potential attendees' response rate.
Marketing Tactics - Direct mail
- Telemarketing
- Online services
- Advertising
- Fax on demand
- Direct marketing
Increase Your Response (in descending order of importance)
- Concentrate your mailing list on past attendees.
- Use dramatic headlines in promotional materials.
- Cultivate inquiries with follow-up phone calls.
- Create an irresistible offer.
- For workshops, use a title that is the key benefit of attending.
- Consider the best time of week and best month for your audience.
- Use the active voice in all your copy.
- Use an attention-grabber as your P.S. in your cover letter.
Make an Irresistible Offer - Offer easy registration options: phone, fax, mail, e-mail, Web.
- Accept several different types of payment.
- Explain the cancellation policy.
- Name a specific person to call for more information or to register.
- Offer a guarantee, such as: refund plus guarantee; refund plus free registration in another program.
- Provide hotel contact details.
- Offer discounts: reduced hotel rates; volume (group) discounts, bring-a-colleague discounts; tuition agreements with organizations that send a large number of registrants each year.
Online Marketing Tips - Encourage participants to e-mail questions to speakers.
- Create a pre- and post-seminar listserv so registrants can network.
- Post upcoming events.
- Allow online registration.
- Offer site visitors an option to send e-mail requests for information.
- Create links with affinity groups.
Reduce Cancellations - Continue marketing after people register.
- Mail questionnaires to registrants asking what they expect from the seminar.
- Send follow-up thank yous.
- Send e-mail encouragement.
- Tell constituents what they will receive after they register.
Brochure Essentials - A title that suggests the key benefit of the conference
- A program agenda (at least 30 percent of the brochure)
- A summary of at least 10 benefits of attending
- A quantification of the benefits of attending
- Instructor(s) background
- A pledge (quote) from the instructor(s): "After you take this course, you'll be able to ... "
Brochure Copy Tips - Talk to your audience; use "you" statements rather than "we" statements.
- Stress benefits.
- Use short sentences with one idea per sentence.
- Paragraphs should be no longer than seven lines.
- Restrict two-thirds of your words to five letters or fewer.
- Use serif type for body copy; sans serif for headlines.
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© 2009 Penton Media Inc.
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