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Client Building Strategies for Tech-Savvy Event Planners

Finding new clients is one of the biggest challenges for many novice event planners. Aside from having a relatively thin portfolio, they also have to market themselves in a very competitive space. This is also true even among experienced planners, particularly those who have not adapted to modern technology. But for many tech-savvy event planners, there’s no limit as to the number of new clients they can generate using sales and marketing automation and building an online presence.

We’ll go through some of the ways you can grow your clientele much faster by adopting a technology-driven approach to building your events business.

Combining Web Presence and Automation

Event planning websites are a game changer in the events industry. Clients can quickly make decisions based on the information found on your website – events you specialize in, services, price range, hourly rates, event planning packages, and so on. You can also schedule a call or meet-up with your prospects any time of the day through your website.

Phone calls are pretty much a part of the business, even in this digital age. But by using sales and marketing automation, you’ll only have to deal with prospects who’ve been through your website after providing you with a little bit of information. Let’s take Small Business Dream as an example.

Say you have a visitor who had gone through your event planner landing page and you want to be able to categorize your prospective client according to event, budget, and tentative dates. Typically, you’re going to need a separate service for your questionnaires and emails. However, Small Business Dream is a complete system that comes with its own survey builder and email autoresponder to automate a number of tasks for you.

For instance, you can set your questionnaire to segment your visitors according to their chosen events and set a priority for each one based on their tentative dates and budget. This becomes especially important when you’re dealing with multiple clients. You don’t want spending a lot of your time on a low-budget client who is months away from the scheduled event if you have a high-end prospect who has an upcoming event in two weeks.

Small Business Dream simplifies the task by prioritizing each contact to make sure you don’t miss out on a big break or big opportunities to grow your business.

Building Your Credibility Online

Event planners spend hundreds of hours crafting the best experience for their clients. They understand the value of establishing a good name – not only to impress their clients but to turn each one into brand advocates. Customer referrals and word of mouth advertising still rank as some of the most cost-effective marketing tool to this day.

Experienced planners usually have the advantage over new ones when it comes to credibility. But there are workarounds for those who are still struggling to grow their client base. People are now moving towards online search and social media, so it only makes sense that we spend more time building traffic to our site and be able to network with other businesses.

First, you need a stunning website to showcase your previous work. If you don’t have a large portfolio and want to attract more clients, you can make your own templates by taking photos of your mockups in your front yard or lawn. Play with different angles and lighting conditions. You might also want to invest in a professional high-definition camera or take short online courses in photography and photo-editing software (preferably, you have someone on your team who can handle this task).

Next, connect with other businesses through LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Small Business Dream’s social connect allows you to find potential partners for your event planning business such as hotels and accommodation, resorts, catering services, florists, and ticketing services like Eventbrite. Network-building will help grow your business much faster than trying to do it on your own, especially if you need a little boost from long-established companies.

Adopting a Mobile Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Mobile marketing has shown a lot of promise for many businesses, thanks to the rapid growth of mobile users in the past few years. Business directories and mobile apps such as Small Business Dream business finder app enable small businesses to become more searchable. The likelihood of having new clients increases as more people download and use the app. We’ve figured out a way to encourage mobile users around the area to come to you after downloading our business finder app.

Aside from getting more eyeballs, it can also help establish your credibility for being top of the line in terms of aesthetics and quality service. Clients can rate their experiences with you as their event planner and help attract other users who might need your expertise. And finally, you can make use of Google and Apple’s push notification service to send messages on your clients’ phone screens in real-time. For instance, you can notify your prospect about your scheduled call or meet-up and ask for confirmation.

Conclusion

Finding new clients is a lot easier these days through sales and marketing automation. Small Business Dream can save event planners hundreds of hours for more productive and creative endeavors by doing most of the heavy liftingfor them. Learn more on how to get more clients at Smallbizdream.com and become a tech-savvy event planner today.

Creating a Digital Customer Experience for Your Small Business

Digital customer experience (DCX) is a buzzword among tech businesses and online marketers. Oftentimes, we associate the phrase with online shopping and e-commerce websites like Amazon. Nowadays, it’s becoming more popular among traditional businesses to have a web presence and connect with potential customers.

Let’s look at how customer experience has evolved over the years, and later we’ll get into how business owners can modernize customer experience to meet the demands of digitally enabled customers.

Customer Experience Then and Now

Customer experience typically starts with a customer walking by and getting a sense of what’s inside our business. Does it look nice and tidy? Do store people greet customers by the entrance? What about the customer service? Does it make them feel comfortable, important, and cared for? It’s the overall perception about the business during the customer’s journey. A great customer experience can be the turning point from being just a casual buyer to a lifetime source of revenue for the company.

The influx of mobile technology and subsequent growth in mobile users takes customer experience to a whole new level. Innovation gave rise to digital customer experience as businesses take their brand into the virtual space and create a seamless experience for both digital and physical customer engagement.

Bookings for hotel and accommodation are a classic example. A good digital customer experience meant customers could easily find their hotels by price range, ratings, and location, and be able to book their stay and make frictionless transactions all within the app or website. Moreover, they should be able to redeem their points and make cashless transactions through the app on-site and in-store.

Small Business Dream is built around the concept of providing users with the best digital customer experience through its digital marketplace (business directory) which also doubles as a mobile wallet.

Digitizing the Customer Experience

Here’s some way you can create a digital customer experience for your small business.

1. Engage with customers on multiple channels

Multi-channel marketing has a lot of advantages compared to just one type of customer communication. Traditional advertising is pretty much a thing of the past. Today, we need to grab people’s attention through social media, providing useful content (blogs, tutorials,etc.), and using top-of-mind strategies.

Your customers’ journey begins when they pause at your catchy post on Facebook, watch your videos on YouTube, subscribe to your mailing list, or click your page on Google’s search engine results. Webhosting sites, content management systems (CMS), and sales and marketing automation enables small businesses to build an online presence much quicker and easier at a very reasonable cost. Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation provide business owners with a little bit of everything from micro-sites, landing pages, autoresponders, follow up series, Facebook and Twitter integration, and so on.

2. Focus more on inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is more likely to succeed in this day and age compared to outbound marketing particularly among millennials. According to survey it may take around 3 to 18 months from initial engagement before they come up with a decision. It’s a continuous process of educating, following up, and sustaining their interest all throughout the journey.

Outbound marketing still has its place, although they’re still pretty much “hit-and-miss” even on the web. How many times did you have to skip a YouTube ad or got distracted by a Google ad because it failed to reach its intended audience? We call this “interruption” marketing. On the other hand, inbound marketing pulls people in (not push) by giving them exactly what they want, when they want it, and how.

One of the most commonly used methods include content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), as well as using customer relationship management (CRM), and sales and marketing automation tools. Say, you want your potential customers to receive updates specific to their own interests. Small Business Dream’s survey builder will enable you to segment your contacts, as well as sales funnels to quickly assess their levels of interest.

3. Get your business listed on a mobile marketplace

Your small business needs to be searchable. You can work on improving your Google search ranking through SEO. But if you want a faster way without having to wait for months or years to rank, business directories is the way to go. Unlike Google, you’ll have better chances being listed on business directories like Small Business Dream Business Finder app as it allows users to find your business through local searches instead of getting buried underneath in Google search results.

Mobile marketplace appeals to mobile users and digitally enabled customers who want fast and easy way to find businesses around the city. They also help in making buying decisions based on ratings and comments from customers, creating a much better digital customer experience for app users. It can also take advantage of Google or Apple’s push notification service which would allow you to have direct access to your mobile users’ phone screens.

With Small Business Dream, you can have your business listed in the Business Finder app or be able to send push notifications to app users as a Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation software subscriber.

Conclusion

Creating a digital customer experience is more than ever within reach for many small businesses. With better technologies in sales and marketing automation and more people getting access to mobile services, we can bring our businesses closer to people and level the playing field for everyone. You can take your first step by visiting Small Business Dream and learn how you can create a digital customer experience for your small business.

It’s Tougher Than Ever To Advertise on Facebook. What Should Small Businesses Do?

Facebook offers more control to users on what they want to see on their newsfeed; it will start filtering out ads and content they’re not interested in. This came as a response to the growing concern with regard to social media’s role on our society’s well-being.

In this article, we’ll talk how putting more emphasis on community-building over competition for viewer’s attention on social media can benefit small businesses.

Why a Change in Focus is Vital for Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have changed the way people interact with each other. They paved the way for communities of like-minded people to share life’s experiences and interests over the internet.

Since then, users have always thought of getting more people to like their posts, and it wasn’t long before sharing became attention-seeking. Internet marketers quickly saw its potential for marketing and spared no expense getting more ‘likes’ and comments to stay on top of everybody’s newsfeed.

Other businesses won’t just stand and watch while competitors get all the attention on social media. Facebook ads, page boosts and paid ‘likes’ soon became the norm in social media marketing, and staying on top became increasingly difficult (and expensive) as more and more people and companies fight for user attention.

Ads were just one of Facebook’s many problems. They also have to deal with fake news, scams, clickbaits, and viral posts which doesn’t serve its users. Changing Facebook’s algorithm gave users a much better experience. (Notice how your friends’ most recent posts always come first. Same goes for more informative posts; irrelevant posts are demoted or removed completely.)

Facebook is getting more serious about its purpose as a company. Mark Zuckerberg is a little concerned and vows on “protecting the community” which he believes is “more important than maximizing profits.”

Facebook’s Focus on the Community

Most of us can only look back when YouTube was totally ad-free before Google bought it for 1.65 billion USD in November 2006. It soon turned into a money-making social media platform with ads taking the likeness of TV commercials but with some degree of user interaction. Remember how quickly you skipped the ad as soon as it starts, or piqued when forced to watch all 20 seconds of it?

Facebook went down the same path when it started Facebook Ads, paid likes, and page boosting. However, after dragging users into countless hours of endless scrolling and passive consumption, they’ve decided to redeem themselves by giving more attention on things that matter most – meaningful social interaction.

This might cost Facebook a lot of money, considering most of their income comes from advertising. To get around this, Facebook might give users the ability to choose ad-free subscriptions on a monthly basis for a fee which is approximately the price per user paid for by advertisers on Facebook. Another option is to provide premium accounts the ability to fine-tune their viewing experience and exceed certain limitations not accessible in free accounts.

From the standpoint of a social media marketer who rely on Facebook ads for traffic and customer acquisition, this can be somewhat unappealing, since most of their high-end clients and potential customers who can afford ad-free subscriptions would be out of reach by then, and they would have to settle with what’s left of Facebook’s free user base.

Having an ad-free, community-centered Facebook for users is much more complicated than we think. Facebook’s intention to take away distractions from the user experience is a noble one, although much of it remains to be seen. As with any kind of business, it has to somehow generate income in order to survive, i.e. by giving “free access” to services, paid for by advertising.

What This Means for Small Businesses

One of the biggest advantages of small businesses over large companies is the community that was built around it. Creating and maintaining customer relationships is much easier on a tightly-knit group of customers than having to deal with a very broad audience. Instead of social media being used as the battleground for people’s attention, it will become a truly engaging, interactive space where real businesses and customers with common interests can share their ideas.

Paid advertising will always have its place in the marketing mix, but social media is not really about throwing your ad into a prospect’s face. Be genuine with your customers, speak to them on a personal level and they will refer you to their friends. That’s the power of Facebook, not trying to outspend the competition.

Big businesses who rely heavily on advertising might have to take their outbound marketing strategies elsewhere. And what better place to advertise than Google? This way, we won’t have to worry going against these giants on an ad-free social media. We can devote more of our time and resources building a community of customers and growing our businesses through customer referrals, word of mouth, and other networking strategies.

Having your own site where you can take your customers for a brief tour of your goods and services is the next big step after you’ve accumulated enough audience from social media. This is where your business starts experiencing exponential growth through organic searches and visits driving more traffic to your site.

As a small business, we need to start somewhere, and social media could be one of those places where we can grow our audience. Creating and maintaining customer relationships has always been the key.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Improving Customer Acquisition with CRM

The biggest challenge facing small businesses is how they can get more customers and maximize their return on investments.

Fortunately, we can easily find ways to improve customer acquisition without having to spend a lot of money on traditional outbound marketing strategies. It only takes a little bit of creativity and trying out new ideas.

There are two main ways – offline and online. We will talk about both ways here.

Promote Your Business Offline

Everybody is online so why not try the personal touch. A lot of customers still like and require the personal touch.

Some offline customer engagements are as effective as a marketing strategy today as it was 100 years ago when the majority of businesses didn’t have a website. These include:

going to networking events
taking your business outdoors
sponsorship & giveaways

Meeting up with people in a friendly, non-selling environment like networking events increases your exposure without spending too much on paid ads. However, to be successful, you have to present your business in light of the customer’s needs, pain points and how your products and services can provide a solution to these problems.

The idea is to go and help people, and to show how your company can create value for them. It may not always lead to an immediate sale, but it can help grow your network and develop good relationships with potential buyers and customers.

Whenever possible, bring along something that reminds them about your business. It could be your business card, key holder, bunker ring, or any small gizmos you can carry along. I always carry bunker rings with me to networking events. Why? Because my potential customers will stick my bunker rings on their phones and every time they glance at their device, it will remind them of me.

Another way to help you with customer acquisition is to take your business outdoors by having your own space during special occasions or community events where people can find your company, products, or services. Talk with the organizers and make some arrangements to have your own booth set up.

Event organizers might also look for sponsors to reduce the overall cost of running the event. You can take this opportunity to have your company name or logo displayed in conspicuous areas for a few hundred dollars’ worth of donation.

Once you have talked to them and exchanged business cards, then it’s a good idea to put them into an online follow-up series so they don’t forget about you.

If you want them to get to your sales funnel, you can use Small Business Dream’s Customer Acquisition tools and have your landing page address or QR code printed on your Sales Funnel Card.

Most importantly, always make an effort to follow up with them as soon as you can.

Take Your Business Online

Promoting your business online is a sure way to improve customer acquisition using cost-effective marketing tools over the Internet. However, it’s tough to get noticed. Some of the best ways to increase customer awareness about your business include having a blog or website, a social media account, and a sales funnel.

Your blog or website can serve many uses for your business. It helps educate people about the benefits of using your product or service, provide useful information about the subject they’re looking on, and can be used for earning residual income through affiliate links, Google AdSense, etc. But most importantly, it helps maintain people’s interest and lead them closer to your goal – to get more customers.

Social media can also be used in customer acquisition, but because marketers have been using social media the wrong way, business owners have started to lose interest in it. They don’t have a system to follow up with fans and followers in a realistic way. Most of them aren’t even real, so business owners end up using auto-responders (‘robot secretaries’) the whole time. Most businesses don’t think strategically when it comes to social media but use a shotgun blast approach, hoping to catch somebody or something.

Small Business Dream is an inexpensive tool that helps business owners manage their social media contacts more efficiently with their Social Connect, and the Social Series in the Action List. Social Connect gives them the option to curate and import fans and followers to their contact list.

Since we don’t want our customer database to be stuffed with unwanted (fake, pseudonymous, or artificial) contacts, we need to screen them out of the social contact list, and leave the ones who show genuine interest to learn more about the company. This would allow sales people to work on the Action List’s Social Series more efficiently and get real results from using social media to get more customers online.

Sales funnel is a very useful tool in customer acquisition when used with offline and other online methods. With Small Business Dream, business owners can easily create their own sales funnel like a pro without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and use the link for their Social Series and opt-in subscriptions online. They can also use the link offline through Sales Funnel Cards, tent cards, signboards, or directly through an iPad or tablet set up to the sales funnel in-store.

Build a Customer Base to Promote Your Business

Your first customers constitute the core of your business from which you can grow more customers. Coming up with a loyalty program, customer specials, customer referrals, offering discounts, and commissions, can help accelerate your business.

Although it might cost you a little bit of profit, you’ll have greater gains in the long run as your business gains momentum. Looking at it from an angle, think of it as being a part of your marketing expenses. But instead of them going to paid advertisements, they go directly to your customers who will benefit from them. The result is a happy customer base who will talk about their experience with your company to other people, and your business becoming an instant success.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

The 4 Content Marketing Steps To Increase Sales

Content marketing is one of the most successful methods of customer engagement used by businesses for centuries. Although the buzz around content marketing is new, it’s been around way before we had the Internet or the very first website in 1991.

Content creation is probably the most challenging and time-consuming aspect of acquiring and maintaining customer engagement. Rules have changed quite a lot since Google Panda, which now favors quality, substance, and relevance over quantity.

This gives users a much better experience by providing them only the most relevant information from online searches, and, from the standpoint of online marketers, an incentive to create high quality, shareable content throughout the Internet.

Defining Your Target Audience

Content marketing revolves around the target audience, customers and clients, who are the main source of revenue for nearly all kinds of businesses.

Defining you target audience should always be the first priority before starting off with any business venture. Over time businesses may expand or evolve to include additional products or services which could also mean redefining the target audience in every stage of a company’s lifetime.

For a small brick-and-mortar business the target audience could be just the people within or around the city who might be interested with what the company has to offer. However if the brick-and-mortar business has an online component then it could include a national or even international audience.

Setting the Tone and Purpose of Your Content

When you’re absolutely certain about your target audience, the next step is to determine the purpose of creating content. Depending on which stage of the sales funnel you’re currently working on, you could also set a different purpose in creating your content. Some of these include:

• To stimulate interest
•    To inform or educate
•    To entertain
•    To persuade

Content creation, to be most effective, should be a part of a larger system which works hand in hand with every aspect of the business instead of being a separate strategy on its own. Most sales funnels rely on a systematic approach to content creation to lead their clients from one stage to another.

During the initial stages of client acquisition, the purpose for creating content is usually to stimulate viewer’s interest.

Writing copy for landing pages is one great example of how content can be used to start a conversation with the clients. This may also include subscription to a free monthly newsletter or a quick survey for collecting relevant customer information.

Potential clients respond differently to different content. If they want to know more about the company, its products or services, your purpose should be to inform or educate the audience about the benefits and advantages of using or applying them, whether it’s in a form of free content, an informative blog post, infographic, or YouTube video.

The latter part which involves your prospects taking action requires a more persuasive form of content or writing. Content creators needs to be able to make the final push to lead conversion by conveying a sense of urgency and what they stand to lose for not taking action.

Following-up with your prospects is essential to lead conversion at this stage of the customer’s journey.

Being able to define the purpose of content creation allows businesses to accomplish their sales and marketing goals more efficiently.

Maintaining Interest

Holding viewer’s interest is the next important aspect of an effective content marketing strategy. It not only helps with lead conversion, but in the long run, it would also help increase the company’s visibility through online search or social media.

When creating content, keep the following characteristics in mind:

Usefulness – Viewing or reading content will use up some time from your target audience. Creating content that is useful is an incentive to spend more of their time viewing or reading them in the future.
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Relevance – What’s in it for them? Creating content that is on point to the viewers or readers is a sure way to keep an audience. This applies to email sequences where clients receive updates based on how they respond to a given call-to-action (CTA) or data gathered from subsequent surveys.
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Timeliness – Proper timing is also key to maintaining interest. Blog postings, for instance, should follow a certain schedule or pattern where readers could expect something new from time to time. This applies to any type of content whether it’s a YouTube v-log, new findings or research, press release, etc.

Improving Online Visibility

Online content can be used to leverage your marketing efforts due to the fact that it can be viewed or shared across multiple channels. This is particularly true with high quality, shareable content.

Marketing experts have already developed some of the most effective ways to increase visibility through search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, and social media.

Each method has its own ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ but for most startups with limited budgets, improving visibility can be achieved through social media and email marketing.

Some CRM services incorporate these two features to enable small businesses to communicate with their clients at very little or no expense at all. Link-building through SEO or paid inclusion in search engines through SEM, although quite effective in extending reach, could entail higher expenses.

A Better Alternative for Small Business Startups

Having a good sales and marketing app that goes hand in hand with creating content that really speaks to your audience is by far the most reasonable, if not the only way of starting up and growing a small business.

Small Business Dream goes beyond by offering client acquisition tools through its survey creator and landing pages along with sales and marketing automation features. Find out how at www.smallbizdream.com.