Amid the coronavirus Pandemic, all the life aspects faced many adversities. Last year in March 2020 India suffered from a nationwide lockdown. This nationwide lockdown proved to be the reason for the huge downfall of the Indian Economy, along with that it punched hard on the face of Indian business owners. Many businesses faced bankruptcy, many businesses are already shut down, and remaining are still facing huge losses every other day.
Covid-19 is a communicable disease so it could easily be transferred from one person to another by getting in close contact with them, and hence, the government declared social distancing a must and also banned the celebration of any festival or event in public including wedding functions, parties, etc and this impacted the event management industry in the worst possible way. One of my family members used to run an event management industry but had to shut down his business because he was not able to get enough customers for his event management business, not just him many others are facing these kinds of issues in the Event industry.
Pandemic will go with the time but uplifting these businesses again and gaining leads for these businesses again is going to be a huge task.
Through this article, we are going to discuss 10 ways that are used by mostly all lead generation company in Delhi for your event management business and take it on its smooth path once the pandemic is over or to gain leads for your new event management business plan in India but before that, we must know what leads are.
Lead is basically an individual who is interested in getting your product or service and lead generation means getting potential customers for your business. Basically, there are two types of leads:-
- MQL-Market Qualified leads
An MQL is basically a person who showed interest in your product or commodity and is more likely than other leads of yours to buy your product or service.
- SQL- Sales qualified leads
These are the leads who passed the level of MQL and are now qualified from lead to your potential customer.
- Generate a website
- Referrals
- Know where your clients are and join them
- Social media optimization
- Paid Advertising
- Direct mail
- Hire Affiliates
- Make your brand visible
- Online reviews and testimonials
- Contact the owner of the popular blogs and influencers
Generate a website
Running a business needs you to change with the change in time. Nowadays almost every other business person is promoting their business online and almost every business has a website. These websites are there for giving your potential customers information about your business, making bookings for your business, sharing your or their information, etc.
A person lands on your website either directly from a search engine or by a click-through in any of your company’s advertisements or by a link to your website. By landing on your website mostly a form is displayed in which all the necessary information like name, phone number, and email id of the potential customers are taken for further communication purpose.
Website is one of the most basic needs of business but sadly running a website is not as easy as just putting a simple click-through button, instead, it requires a lot of professional and strategic approach to hold those customers to your website and make them your lead.
Some Ways to make your website much more effective:-
- Make a well-designed event planner website.
- Add the most relevant information on the landing page.
- Make them trust you by adding trust stories, customer reviews, photos of events organized by you earlier, etc.
- Make the contact forms clear etc.
Referrals
The best marketing technique of the lead generation process is getting referrals, getting referrals is free of cost yet the most effective method of getting valuable leads, as well as many marketers, refer referrals as the second effective method to get good quality and valuable leads.
People are usually friends with their own type so there’s a great chance that your customers must know someone with a similar interest as them, therefore provide them with the best possible service to gain their trust, To make your customers refer you first you must satisfy them enough to refer you to their friends.
You could create a “refer a friend page” with an option of filling in the name and email of the person your potential customer is referring you to or you could give demos or make a video and ask them if they know someone who could be interested in this then mention them below this way you could get their names and id. This will help you get many valuable leads.
You could get even more referrals by giving your cost reason to bring referrals to them, give them a profit for bringing those referrals. It could be something like getting a 20% discount on one referral or something like that.
Know where your clients are and join them
Prepare some business cards and a short verbal introduction of your business and attend events where you could find your potential customers. These people either could be directly interested in your business themselves or maybe they know someone who needs an event organizer for any upcoming agent.
This way you could build a strong network for your business which could help you fetch some leads later. Along with that, these people could also help you in keeping up with the new trends in the event industry so that you could update your business game according to that.
Fulfill some corporate social responsibilities
Doing your share for the benefit of the public and by doing your bit towards the social responsibility will help you gain the trust of your customers, this will work as a form of PR strategy.
You could organize some events for the benefit of society like a charity event, some competitions for orphan children, etc. This will not just help you to gain leads but will also help you to gain the trust of the public which will play a major role in strengthening the foundation of your business.
Social Media optimization
Social media optimization (SMO) refers to the use of social media sites as a catalyst for attracting the ideal audiences of a business or event.
For example, if you want people to know about your business then you can make pages on different SMO platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, you could use them by uploading your previous works, adding information about you, etc, by doing this you could make your potential customers follow you that will award you with some valuable leads.
It was first used by Rohit Bhargava in 2006 in his article “5 rules of social media optimization “during this time the key to attracting traffic was the use of social networking sites. In his new article, the prime focus of SMO was on linkability, portable content, and easy bookmarking. According to Wikipedia “social media optimization is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimization, as search engines are increasingly utilizing the recommendations of users of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to rank pages in the search engine result pages.”
Nowadays social media is one of the best mediums of promoting one’s business but this is only possible if you are using it wisely to attract more and more ideal visitors to your business. SMO is the best way of promoting a small business cost-effectively and all you have to do is to figure out what your audience actually wants and to fit in within their social media world by using content that attracts them the most. You can increase your business to any extent using SMO by just using it the right way and just by knowing its key.
Paid advertising
Through paid advertising, you could amplify your reach to the maximum number of leads. This strategy will work even better if you:-
- Know your target audience (through surveys, social media, ad word. Etc.)
- Know the number of people attracted by paid advertising by directing them directly to your website.
- Start small and then increase it slowly.
- Analyze all the results carefully to know the number of quality leads.
After that repeat, it again to avoid reducing the cost of bad campaigns or useless leads.
Paid advertising helps you in getting Instant reach to your potential leads which can help you fetch some really valuable leads and it will also expand the reach of your event planning business to more and more people and will increase your target audience. This could also make people refer you to their knowns who need to organize an event which will provide you some really beneficial leads.
Ad Placement
Place your advisement smartly as this can play a major role in getting leads for your business.
Try to place ads near the matrimonial section of a newspaper, or give your ads on matrimonial websites, wedding dress websites, or on the websites of party wear clothes or other such places to get more authentic leads.
Direct Mails
Direct mails also known as Email marketing is something that is getting used since the invention of emails. It means to do Marketing or to get customers that must be interesting in getting their event organized by you.
The first and foremost thing for email marketing is to pitch an effective list of people who could be interested in organizing an event, these people could be the ones who visited your website and filled your customer information form because they might want to organize a business and as a result, they visited your event organization website they could prove to be some of your beneficial leads and once you are done with that, start sending brochures, home journal or newsletters to them along with the call to action details, that means the person to whom they have to call if they want to get their event organized by you.
Email marketing helps your business by letting people know about your business. You could share your brouchers, contact details, success stories with these people.
Hire Affiliates to promote your event management services
You could hire affiliates to promote your business by giving them a certain percentage of your profit. Hiring affiliates is one of the necessary steps at the beginning of your event management business to get some very good leads.
Your affiliates could even be your friends, family members, relatives because they all have birthday parties, anniversary parties, wedding or any other type of parties, so you could just ask them to give that contract to you and You could give them a discount in exchange.
The percentage of your affiliates could vary from something around 2-10% depending on the overall budget of the event.
Online reviews and testimonials
No one in the business world mentions their own flaws and even your potential customers know that they might get a little influenced by you praising your own business but they are going to trust more on what your actual customers say. Your actions speak louder than your words so try to offer a good service to your customers to get positive feedback from them so that your leads could get attracted to you for organizing their event.
Generate a review page of yours or create review videos of yours because your potential customers do focus on the reviews and they will play a major role in making their decision. This could be done by using websites like:-
- Zillow
- Trulia
- com
You could get a referral from your happy customers as they will recommend you if they liked your service and if they had a positive experience from your business. Good reviews for customers will differentiate you from another event organizer.
Contact the owner of the popular blogs and influencers
No matter how good you are at promoting your business but still you need someone with greater credibility than yours to advocate for you. This is a trick that is used by even the biggest business owners and top event management companies to promote their business in a much better way and to make them reach a larger audience and we all know that these influencers have a wide reach.
So you could promote your business by collaborating with them or by organizing some of their events to get a shoutout from them as people actually show interest in using the things and services that were used by them because they have the credibility of their audience.
You could also pay famous blogs or websites for giving your reference in their articles this way you could also gain leads from their viewers and readers.
Those influencers have a wide reach and network they can play a major role in promoting your business due to their wide reach. You could also gain the attention of influencers by tagging them in your stories or by using hashtags of their or you could even pay them to promote your service business.
These were some of the most basic and most important tips of gaining leads for your event management business that are used by almost all the marketing and events coordinator but there are many other techniques to gain leads for your business like:-
- Conducting webinars– Conducting webinars is free of cost. You could conduct webinars regarding event management in colleges or workplaces and along with informing them about the world of event organization, you could also promote your business to them and the faculty members.
- They come to you– Host the events that you get with such a dedication that other people get to hear about you from other people or will just go and ask your client who was the event manager of such a bomb event.
- Make your brand visible– Always keep in mind to place a poster or the name of your event organization company with contact details at the place you are already organizing an event so that people could save your number for the future and they could be your leads in the future.
- Business cards– Whenever someone asks for your phone no. Just handle them with your business card so that they could get to know about your business along with that as well.
- Quora– Many people search for services on quora so just give answers related to event management on quora and along with that also attach the link to your website. Even this could attract some leads for your business.
- Talk more and more about your Business– Don’t worry you are not doing anything illegal so just don’t hesitate in telling people about your business and in telling that you are an event coordinator. Tell people you meet about your business.
- Ask people to share about your business– No one is going to tell people about your business by themselves not even all of your friends let alone your clients, until and unless you tell them to do so.
- Search engine optimization
One should never underestimate the power of Search engine optimization (SEO). People will search for you through some selected keywords and by incorporating those in your content, one could appear in searches more frequently than others. You could try to do the SEO online or by hiring a professional from the industry who will guide you in a much better way. Like if people need to organize an event then rather than typing the whole detail they will just type birthday party planner near me so if this keyword is there in your article then your article will appear above other websites that do not have this keyword.
Now as you know various ways of lead generation for your event management business you could get a lot of leads by your continuous efforts, so, just organize an event for them that they could never stop talking good things about.
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Thank you for the information
This post is very helpful and informative. Keep Posting such an informative post in the future.