Learn from event mentorship program expert May Silvers as she gives you tips on how to grow your business by being strategic with social media, networking and attending trade shows.
Several of the event planners I interacted with shared with me that they often run into a content rut. They ran out of topics to talk and write about. In their mind, the more content they push out, the more visible their brand will be. When I ask them who they are pushing out the content to, they looked at me as if I have 2 heads. “My followers, of course!” That’s their answer. When I ask how many of their followers have engaged them for their services, the answer is either “None”, or 1-2 people.
If you are thinking that the more content you create and share, the more people will buy from you when they see your wonderful content, I am so sorry to burst your bubble because that is NOT the entire truth.
People often mistaken that content equals visibility. To grow your brand visibility, you need MORE eyeballs on your content. More eyeballs mean more people are being nurtured by your content, which leads to more people considering hiring you for your services. At any point in time, only 2-3% of the people in your ecosystem is ready to buy NOW. That means the rest of the 97% will either buy later or won’t buy because they just want to enjoy your free content.
In order to grow your brand visibility, you need to NOT only continue to share content with your EXISTING followers, you MUST increase the number of followers you currently have so you have a LARGER pool of potential buyers who will buy NOW or buy later.
What happens when you are just sharing content to your existing followers? You start to deplete your BUY NOW followers by converted them into buyers. The average buying cycle for the buy later client is at least 3-9 months! No business is sustainable with no sales for 3-9 months..
In short, you need to know the difference between content and visibility.
Content: Created for people already in your ecosystem, such as your followers, people in your email list etc
Visibility: Being “visible” to your existing followers AND new audience
Pushing out content does NOT mean you are being visible. Content is great to nurture people ALREADY in your ecosystem. Your visibility is ONLY to these people.
Visibility means to share your content with your existing followers PLUS new audience, so you always have a group of NEW and EXISTING followers and increasing your pool of 3% “buy now” followers.
SO how do we increase your brand visibility? Here’s a few pointers:
-Engage/co-host in other people’s facebook group or instagram
Show up and share your expertise! Comment with USEFUL content that will highlight you as the solutions provider, and use other people’s platform to assert your authority.
When you show up and serve, people want more of you because you are sharing content that people want and enjoy. They will be asking how they can follow you on your social media to get more of YOU, how good does that sound?
-Attend networking events
You need to be growing visibility at ALL fronts. Not only should you be showing up digitally, you need to show up at in person events as well. Nothing compares to the in-person connections you make at live events.
Always remember, when you are at a networking event, make the focus THEM, NOT YOU. Do not go into a verbal vomit and start pitching what you do. Take the time to find out all about the person you are talking to, and based on where the conversation is going, you can segway into talking about what you do, who you help and how you help them. Set a goal going into the networking event how many people you want to connect with. If your goal is to connect with at least 5 people at each event, and you attend 4 networking events a month, you just grew your ecosystem by 20 people a month. Very soon, you will be known as the mover & shaker of the community
-Attend trade shows
I have written in my other blogs that one of the sales activities that all event planners must have on their sales calendar is to attend an event where we can have a mass recruitment of leads. Attending trade shows is one of them. Where can you do to mingle where the ENTIRE room is filled with your ideal clients?
At a trade show, you won’t have much time to have any in-depth connection. Therefore, it is extremely important to collect the contact details of the people who visited your booth. You MUST contact them within 24 hours to stay at the top of their mind and follow up to set up a face to face meeting or virtual meeting.
You also want to include them in your email list, keeping them in your ecosystem. Often, each trade show will yield at least 30-60 new leads which means you just grew your ecosystem by 30-60 new people each time you attend a trade show. Talk about growing your visibility!
At the end of the day, the person who is most successful in business is NOT the person who knows the most and produce the most content. It is the person who uses his/her content to create the most visibility, nurturing his/her existing and new followers to convert to buyers, AND increasing his/her followers at the same time.
If sales and marketing is what you are struggling with in your event planning business, you will be glad to know that is one of the 4 core pillars we teach inside our Unstoppable Eventrepreneurs mentorship program. Drop me a comment below and share your thoughts about how you are creating visibility for your brand, or schedule a chat with me so we can brainstorm other methods to grow your brand visibility!
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