In our work with Kevin Daum to create a “Compelling Message”, Kevin shared with us that there’s two critical pieces to attracting, retaining and growing your customers.
The first I shared with you in my last blog - the need to gather information from current customers, potential customers and competitors, figure out their challenges and pain and how we either help them - or don’t help them - to overcome those issues.
The second is to tie what you glean from those conversations to your offerings - in this case - our “Un-Marketing” events. We’ve been doing them for several years now, bringing together fantastic speakers and accomplished CEO’s and business people to learn and network. It’s been wonderful to have people like Judy Wicks of the White Dog Cafe, Dave Griffith of Modern Group and Verne Harnish of Gazelles come and talk with us - and we’ve gotten high marks from attendees too for putting on great events!
But Kevin challenged us a few weeks ago. He wasn’t going to let us rest on our laurels and asked some hard questions:
1) How could we provide even more value to our attendees? (There’s a lot of competition for people’s time right now…how do we make coming to our events “a must” attend versus a maybe?)
2) How could we double our attendance?
3) How could we reach people who hadn’t heard of us before?
4) How could we leverage the event to attract great prospects for membership? and…
5) How could we use our events to create an Awesome Experience for our members and clients? (the reason we started doing them in the first place…)
The answer??? Leverage our network of course - and tap into the power of Social Media. So - that’s what I’ve been doing the past week or so -
* posting our Events on Linked In, starting discussions (thanks to Kim Levin of Teknuko for her help navigating the LinkedIn world!) and asking colleagues to publish the event to their networks,
* asking our members and advisors who are “tweeting” - people like The Emperor of Fun Dave Raymond of Raymond Entertainment and Phil Jaurique of Sabre Systems - for their help to get the word out to their Twitter communities…
* using our affiliations with the Mid-Atlantic Employers’ Association and the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce so that they can reach out to their member companies and…
* getting assistance from Jennifer Cohen of the MAC Alliance - they have a great website where you can post all sorts of information and events!
And that’s just the beginning…if I’ve piqued your interest - stay tuned - let your networks know about March 9th and what they could learn - and - sign up!
Tags: Business Improvement, Enlightened Executives, Executive Roundtables, Marketing, Sales and Marketing, Social Media
This is a great blog. I’m going subscribe.