How Do You Market Your Meeting?

Last time we talked about the importance of face to face meetings and how other means of communication just doesn’t match up.  But what does all this mean for your members?  It’s time to get out there and start meeting again.  But how do you market your event to potential attendees with tight budgets and increasing budget restrictions?

Encourage your audience to come to your meeting by offering them something they can’t get anyplace else:

1. specialized education sessions addressing the unique issues in their field;
2. the latest in products, trends, services and technology aimed at their business;
3. an opportunity for peer to peer networking;
4. make connections; and,
5. discover new ways of doing their job.

Since the beginning of 2010, the meetings MMG has managed experienced an increase in attendance, exhibitors and sponsorships.  Targeted marketing campaigns, coupled with a broader outreach, provides a significant impact in these areas.

What can you do to increase participation at your meetings?

1. Clearly determine the meeting’s purpose.
2. Take a strategic approach to your marketing campaign.  Understand how your audience likes to be reached (direct mail, social media, tele-marketing)
3. Prepare targeted messages to your different audiences.
4. Make your meetings accessible (easy locations to reach) and desirable.
5. Provide an agenda that meets the professional needs of your audience.
6. Make them more interactive with specific case studies.
7. Offer incentives (half year free membership, register on-line and receive $25.00 off, etc.)

These are just a few tips.  How about your experiences?  Let us know some creative ways that your organization has marketed your meeting.

Face to Face Gets Results

Welcome to the MMG blog!  We are very excited to share our experiences as meeting planners with others and hopefully get some good conversation going with you all!. This isn’t just a blog for meeting planners.  It’s for anyone involved in any aspect of meetings….from program content to logistics to heads of corporations who want to hear and see how others are putting up successful events. We’ll be featuring the latest trends in event planning and hope you chime in to let us know what you think.  

Have a topic we should cover?  Feel free to comment on our posts or send us a message at info@mmgevents.com.  We want to hear from you.

Today, we are thinking about face to face meetings.  The end of 2008 through 2009 was probably the worst time ever for the meetings and exhibition industry.   We experienced a decline in member attendance, exhibitors and sponsorship dollars.  Associations struggled with declining membership, attrition from unsold sleeping rooms and cancellation penalties like we’ve never seen before. We had to reevaluate why we were holding meetings.  The most common reason to have a meeting is to discuss something face to face. It could be a new idea, a new opportunity, a problem, to brainstorm something, reach a decision about something or any number of things. But it all comes down to discussion and face to face interaction. 

The meetings and hospitality industry fought back by arming themselves with facts--facts that had financial implications. Facts like these…

1. For every dollar invested in business travel, companies realize $12.50 in incremental revenue.*
2. More than half of business travelers stated that 5-20% of their company’s new customers were the result of trade show participation. *
3. According to business travelers across all industries, 25% of existing customers and 28% of revenue could be lost to competitors if customers were not met in-person. *

It is time for all of us to promote the value of Face to Face Meetings to our membership! *According to Meetings Mean Business.

Businesses, including associations, started seeking new ways to “meet” and looked for new forms of business communications—such as teleconferencing, email, and other informal means of communication.  But it didn’t net the same results for their members or the association.  Meetings Management Group (MMG) advises its clients that meetings are about finding, creating, and sustaining relationships.  The very best way to do this is in person.    
What do you think?  Is your organization moving away from face to face meetings or do you still find face to face really matters? Please comment below and let us know.  

Look for MMG’s simple ways to market your face to face meetings in our next blog post!