How to Boost Your Business with a Special Event

One great way to make your business more interesting and attract customers is to

arrange a special event now and again. There are endless ways to do this and it can even work for  Internet based businesses. The only limiting factor is your imagination!

The vital ingredient in this is to add value and make it interesting. How about some ideas that have been proven to work…

Hold an open day

This is a great opportunity to showcase your products and services. Hold an open day or an open evening and invite everyone to come along. Make it fun and interesting and invite some other appropriate business along to join in. This is good for cross promoting and tapping in to other business owner’s lists and their marketing power. You can advertise the event directly to your customers via email and with some cheap and cheerful leaflets and a modest advert in the local press you should attract some new customers. Get people to spread the word by offering freebies, trials, vouchers and so on.

Hold a charity fundraiser

It’s a great thing to do and also helps people remember your company if you help charitable organizations and worthy causes. Make your event whacky or different in any way you can to attract attention.

Offer a live experience

Could your products or services lend themselves to live experiences? If you sell cars, you could offer free test drives. If you sell swimming pools, you could invite customers to swim in your pool and try it for real. How about a wine tasting evening if you sell fine wines, or a food fair to try your delicacies. There are lots of ways to turn your products and services into live experiences…

Hold a demonstration

Demos are a great way to show your products and services. You can miss a lot of sales when your potential customers don’t quite ‘get’ what your products are all about, especially if you are offering something new or unique. Demonstrate to your prospects live and also post a video demonstration on your website and on You Tube.

Offer a workshop or seminar

Another great way to introduce your products and services is to hold a workshop or seminar that will nurture your prospects through to a buying decision. You could start with a free talk, then offer a paid seminar and then introduce your products.

Let me give you an example…

Let’s say you run a holistic therapy center for a variety of complementary therapies such as reflexology, aromatherapy massage, yoga lessons and so on. You want to attract new clients so you offer a free workshop on ‘Healthy Living’. Your attendees enjoy the workshop and they sign up for a paid seminar which goes into more detail and adds even more value. Ultimately, they sign up for a course of treatments at your clinic and become long-term customers.

Hold a celebrity launch

Everyone seems to love a celebrity and people are fascinated by what the celebs are up to. So why not capitalize on this and get a local celebrity to launch a new product or service or make an appearance at your open day. If you tie this in with a charity fundraising event, you could even get a celeb to do this for free…

Sponsor a summer fair

This could be a bit more involved than an open day – you would sponsor a bigger event. You could hire a venue or use a local park and hire out stalls to a variety of other businesses. This would make you a profit in itself but as the organizer of the event, you would create a lot of publicity and could potentially tap into the marketing power of all the other business there as well who will be trying to attract new business. Make sure your business is well promoted in all the marketing for the event and put a system in place to capture the contact details of everyone that walks through the door!

Internet based webinar

Even if your business is purely Internet based, you can arrange a special event to promote your business. Hold a webinar. This is similar to holding a seminar or workshop as I mentioned above but held over the Internet.

You could supplement this with a video demonstration or offer a course – free or paid. It could attract new business and costs very little in terms of the financial investment.