Obtaining funding and corporate sponsorship is fundamental to the success of many events. However, it can be challenging and sometimes downright frustrating to secure funding for your event. Here are some tips to make the process a bit easier.

Setting the Foundation

Before you begin looking for sponsors, you should construct a foundation for sponsorship. This includes a list all the details of what does and does not constitute sponsorship, and any issues that may come up as you seek sponsorship, such as companies and industries you may need to exclude.

Some key issues that should be addressed include:

• Defining the purpose of the sponsorship (marketing, fundraising, establishing long term partnerships)
• Who will be responsible for seeking sponsorship and to whom they should report and how frequently
• What benefits will be provided for each level of sponsorship (number of participants that can attend, policy on company promotional materials, invite to speak at event)
• Policy for payment and deadlines for any materials such as company logo and speaker bios
• How will the sponsorship funds be used? What are the fundamental costs? What are the monetary goals for sponsorship?

Define Your Target Audience

While your marketing plan should be targeting people that may be interested in your event, your sponsorship strategy should focus on obtaining sponsors who wish to communicate with your target market. This may mean focusing on a brand area for a specific product within a company instead of going directly to the corporate sponsorship department, which is usually swamped with requests for sponsorship. Keep in mind that the company itself probably sells many different products with a target area far greater than the one you are providing, so if you can offer niche marketing to the marketing department of a specific brand, they may be more willing to sponsor you.

Research Potential Sponsors

Before you contact potential sponsors, do some research via business magazines, websites, annual reports, etc. It is good to know what each company’s current marketing objectives are, what new products they’ve just released, who their competitors are, what their current sponsorship policy is, and if they’ve ever sponsored an event similar to yours. Many companies do publish sponsorship guidelines, so make sure their policy fits with your conference objectives and benefits. You may even want to talk with a potential sponsor either by phone or in person to obtain more information and to establish a personal relationship with the company before presenting a sponsorship request.

Sell Your Organization

Some things to heavily promote when asking for sponsorship:

• Having a strong brand associated with your event really aids this process greatly, so build your brand and promote awareness as much as possible!
• State your purpose and objectives for the event as clearly as possible.
• Include all sponsorship levels and benefits you’ve defined including marketing and promotion, hospitality, public relations and media, special access to events, number of attendees invited, category exclusivity, networking opportunities, speaking opportunities, if the contribution is tax-deductible, etc.
• If you’ve held events in the past, use past speakers, topics, sponsors, and past success to promote your current event.
• Don’t just stress who will be attending your event, but to whom you will be distributing pre-event advertising and promotions, and the amount of publicity you expect to obtain.

Setting Sponsorship Levels

There are a couple of different strategies for setting levels of sponsorship. Ultimately, you want to offer your sponsors a choice, but you should make sure that when developing levels, you are not offering all levels the great benefits with the lower levels receiving less of the supporting benefits. The most common approach to sponsorship includes “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” or something similar, with gold receiving the maximum benefits offered. Another approach may be to offer two completely separate packages of relatively equal price (one might be a marketing package while the other may focus participation & involvement in the event). A third option would be to provide a standard package with the opportunity to upgrade to a premium package. Don’t forget about media sponsorship - you can save yourself a lot of money by asking for free advertising from companies (especially on the web) in return for sponsorship benefits.

Developing a Proposal

A proposal should give your potential sponsor enough information to make a decision. You should include:

• A description of your organization
• Information about your event including date and location, speakers, proposed topics, sponsors, preliminary agenda, ticket costs, background information, and anything else you can include.
• An overview of your marketing plan and a profile of the demographics of your target audience
• Your list of benefits and their corresponding monetary values

Time Frame

Try to approach sponsors 6-12 months in advance to allow them to participate fully in the benefits you offer them. If you are offering your sponsors a timeslot for speaking, keep in mind that people plan their schedules well in advance, so ask early to secure a prominent speaker. Planning ahead is also very important in getting sufficient funding to continue with your event planning and marketing. You don’t want to find yourself falling short on funds early on in the game.

Event Marketing

As you begin to plan your event, ask yourself a couple of fundamental questions - what value am I providing my attendees? Why would they spend their time at my event when they could be doing something else? Those questions should always remain in focus as you proceed with the event planning process.

What is Your Mission Statement?

Before you begin to plan an event, spend a good deal of time thinking about what you hope to accomplish by holding the event. A conference should have a mission statement stating its intent, just as every business does. Don’t just throw ideas around in your head, actually discuss it with your conference planning team and work out a written statement of purpose. Some ideas for a purpose can include networking, building community, and being social, solving a problem or discussing a current issue, forming an agenda for a future project, fundraising for an organization, or educating your attendees.

Who Are You Targeting?

Picking a specific target group is essential to the success of your conference. You can’t market to everyone, and while some people will be very enthusiastic about attending, others will need some convincing. Unfortunately, the more you need to convince someone to come, the more money you will end up spending on advertising to them, so you should plan your marketing strategy carefully in relation to your budget.

What Does Your Audience Want To Know?

Once you’ve determined your audience, you can put yourself in their shoes. Your audience ultimately wants to know how the event will benefit them. After all, they will most likely be paying you to come to your event, so they want to know what they get for their money. If you have the opportunity, ask them. Set up a forum for discussion on your website, send a questionnaire, or conduct phone interviews asking them what information they hope to learn from your event. Otherwise, plan your event as if you were going to be an attendee. Why would you want to attend?

Have a Clear and Defined Purpose

As much as you may like to believe that your attendees will remember everything you told them the next day, week, or later, chances are, they won’t. They probably will only remember 5-10%, so make your message clear and concise, and repeat it several times throughout the event.

Schedule Enthusiastic Speakers

How many times have you walked out of a lecture and thought, “Thank goodness it’s finally over!” Enthusiastic and knowledgeable speakers add life to your conference, keeping attendees interested and engaged. Speakers only have a couple of moments to capture your audience’s attention, and if they fail to do so in that time, your audience will become distracted and wonder what else they could be doing with their time.

Keep Attendees Comfortable

Work out the logistics of parking, food, restrooms, breaks, room temperature, and other materials beforehand. If your attendees are not comfortable, their attention will not be on you.

Add Variety

Mix learning events with networking events, lectures, panels, or round table discussions throughout the day. People have a hard time paying attention when they have to sit through one lecture after another, so keep them engaged with opportunities to share their opinions, meet other attendees, and ask questions to knowledgeable speakers.

Make Every Minute Count

Organize your event so that it runs smoothly and logically from one activity to the next. Have questions or topics of discussion posted on an overhead projector or written on a handout for early attendees to ponder. Schedule breaks for networking and open discussion. End activities with a Q/A session for further consideration.

Ask for Feedback

After each scheduled activity, have attendees evaluate the quality of the speaker involved, the information provided and any additional questions and comments they might have. If possible, email respondents with answers to their questions after the event or post their questions on your website for further discussion.

Provide Resources For Further Information

Give out handouts or book and website recommendations for attendees interested in more information. Post speaker notes, conference proceedings, or a summary of the key topics on your website after the conference along with a message board or forum to facilitate discussion and feedback.

Event Marketing

Tips on Public Speaking & Making Presentations

Everyone has sat through painstakingly long presentations given by colleagues and peers that seemed to serve no purpose and lacked any kind of organization. Remember how you felt last time you went to an event where the speaker never looked up from his/her notes, never made eye contact or changed the tone or inflection of his/her voice, and never took notice of the audience’s disinterest in his/her topic? How you wanted to leave but couldn’t, so you stayed there bored out of your mind staring at the clock, slowly drifting off to sleep, thinking about what you were going to do this weekend, or what you could be doing right now if you weren’t at this event that just wouldn’t seem to end. Now think back to some of the more engaging talks you’ve been to, where the speaker was lively, knowledgeable, and interesting. Where time flew by and before you knew it, the event was ending, so you stayed to chat with some of the attendees about the wonderful time you had and all the stuff you learned. What characterizes a good speaker? And ultimately, how can you give an engaging presentation that will captivate your audience? Here are some tips that may help:

Have a Clear Central Message

When giving a talk, make sure you have a clear and concise central message that you can repeat throughout your talk. This message should be built around both your personal objective for giving the talk (to present info, to educate, to convince the audience of a point of view, to motivate the audience to make a call to action, etc), and the audience’s fundamental question “What’s in it for me?” This central message should be the main point upon which all supporting points refer. Remember, odds are that come the next day or week, people will only remember 5- 10% of what you said, regardless of how good you were, so make sure that percent counts.

You Have 60 Seconds to Grab the Audience’s Attention

Sixty seconds isn’t a lot of time, but it’s enough for the audience to judge whether or not you are worth their time and attention. Therefore, start off strong and full of energy. Tell the audience why you are speaking and what they will learn from listening to your talk. This includes explaining your central message - don’t save it for the end, as you never know who will be listening then. You can also open with an unusual story or analogy that will stick with the audience, but keep it relevant to your central message. Some people like to start with humor, but use your discretion concerning whether that would be appropriate with your audience.

Many people feel nervous or anxious when they are about to make a speech in front of a large audience. Keep in mind, you were asked to speak because you have knowledge that the audience doesn’t have, but is interested in. You most likely know more about your topic than anyone in the room. You also hopefully have prepared well in advance for your talk and have had the opportunity to practice beforehand, which should be reassuring. When you’re ready to speak, take a deep breath, walk out in front of your audience, and channel your nervousness into energy to start off with a bang.

Why the emphasis on energy? Energy can be translated into enthusiasm for your topic. It shows that you strongly believe in what you are saying, and adds an aspect of your personality to your topic. It demonstrates the strong passion you have for your topic and sparks interest in the audience to learn more about why this is such a wonderful idea. The two most important places for energy and enthusiasm in your talk are your beginning and your closing. You’ll want to tone down the middle section, or you may wear out both you and your audience. Keep it mixed, but always start off with as much energy as possible and remember that first impressions do matter!

Know and Observe Your Audience

Having a general idea of your audience’s demographics, psychographics, expectations, and knowledge of the topic will help you put together a meaningful and relevant presentation. Once you have a general idea of who you will be speaking to, you can research what types of things they would be most interested in hearing. If you know members of your audience, ask them what they would like to be addressed or how they feel on certain issues you will be mentioning. If you ask early enough in the planning stage, you can incorporate those ideas into your talk.

On the day of the event, greeting people as they come in may help if you are feeling a bit nervous beforehand. Meeting members of your audience not only helps you to create a more casual atmosphere, but also personalizes the audience’s experience with you.

During your talk, keep a close watch on what the audience is doing. Make frequent eye contact with several of the audience members, use gestures when appropriate to emphasize certain points, and in general, let your personality shine though. When making eye contact, try to be consistent. Find a pair of eyes and make a point. Pause briefly, and then find another pair of eyes and make another point. Never, ever read directly from your notes or visuals. That’s the quickest way to lose the audience’s attention. They didn’t come to hear you read your talk. They could have just as well read something similar on the Internet, paid for a book or cd, or requested the event notes and handouts. They came to see you, so treat your audience as you would your clients and give them your full attention.

If you look like you are losing your audience (they are no longer making eye contact or nodding in agreement), ask an open-ended question (one that requires more than a one or two word response) and take responses from your audience. Don’t just wait a few seconds and move on, but give it a bit of time, repeat the question if you have to, state a possible answer, and pose the question to the audience again. This time, they should be more responsive. Remember, though, this is not a Q/A session, so keep the responses focused on the question you asked.

Organize Your Topic

To effectively convey and/or convince your central message to your audience, you will need to organize your topic in a logical fashion. This should include your central message and three or so supporting points. Keep it to about three, though, as you don’t want to overwhelm your audience. Start with your central message and follow up with your three supporting points, making sure to summarize and remind the audience of your central message between each point.

The Closing

Like the opening, the closing should be full of energy and possibly even motivate people to take a call to action. You should again repeat your central message - the more you repeat it, the more likely your audience will remember it.

The Q/A Section

You should try to save 10-15 minutes or so for a Q/A session after your presentation. Specifically address the amount of time you are allotting to the session at the beginning. Whenever a speaker asks a question, repeat it loudly enough so everyone can hear, and rephrase it in your own words to demonstrate your understanding of what the speaker is asking. When you answer the question, make direct eye contact with the inquirer and then extend that eye contact to different members of the audience. Repeat this process throughout the session, and finish the session by repeating your central message.

Feedback

Once your presentation is finished, ask the audience to evaluate you and provide feedback for your talk. You can do this by creating a quick survey and collecting it as your audience leaves. Provide a few basic questions as to how relevant or valuable they found the talk on a scale of 1-5, ask what they thought the key point of the talk was, and any questions they may still have. This is an excellent way to gain insight about which areas the audience felt were very good and which areas that you may need to work on for next time. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of how well you communicated your central message.

Public Speaking

The Ad’s Objective

The first step in effective advertising is to set a clearly defined objective for your campaign. Remember, there are many, many other advertisements and articles in the publication your viewers will be reading, and that you only have a couple of seconds to capture their attention. That being said, your ad should focus specifically on your objective, whether that be building awareness about the event, making a call to action such as visiting your website or calling a phone number for more information, or informing viewers of features planned your the event.

Once you have an objective, stick to it. Don’t try to cram as much info as possible into a small space, but introduce only the elements you absolutely need to state your objective as clearly as possible. Your text should share its general intent with the headline, and any pictures you use should add clarity to the overall communication. Remember that the goal is to communicate your objective, not to use gimmicks to grab the viewers’ attention & leave them scratching their heads wondering what your picture has to do with your event. In general, the greater the integration between all elements of your ad, the quicker and easier it is for the viewer to take away the maximum impact of your objective.

So, what should you say in your ad? When looking at anything, viewers are continually asking “What’s in it for me?” so make sure you tell them. Your ad should specifically address who this event is for and how exactly they will benefit from attending. In most cases, viewers are more concerned with what they will take away from your event rather than a bunch of facts and “we are …” statements. Once you’ve gotten the viewer’s interest, provide them with sufficient information to make a call to action, whether that be visiting your website or calling to register for the event.

The Design Component

Nowadays, with desktop publishing tools like Photoshop and Quark XPress readily available, and with the ease of gaining fonts and stock photos, it is tempting to utilize as many elements as possible to distinguish your ad from everyone else’s. That’s not always the best strategy when trying to communicate a specific objective. A good design layout adhering to basic layout principles is key to making your ad readable and understandable. Some design tips include:

Emphasis

Make the most important elements of the ad the most prominent and the easiest to pick out at a glance.

Balance

Good ads can either be symmetrical or asymmetrical in layout, but they should be balanced in terms of elements that make up the composition. Try grouping similar content together and counterbalancing groups with another element of your composition. Stick with about 3 groups of text content - the headline, the bulk of the text, and a smaller group of text. Too many elements clutter up the ad and make the reader guess where to start.

Fonts

Pick 2 non-competing fonts for the ad. Competing fonts tend to be fonts that look very similar but aren’t - such as Verdana and Arial. It is much better to use contrast when picking fonts, such as a serif (with “feet” like Times New Roman) and a san serif (like Arial) font together, or a script font with non-script font. Use one for the bulk of the text and another for headlines. Keep the format of similar headlines the same style (bolded and underlined, for instance). Try to avoid vertically stacked text and large portions of rotated text, both of which are hard to read.

Alignment

Try to keep one alignment consistent throughout the document. For example, have the edge of a picture line up with the text of the headline or have the headline at the top of the composition line up with the text column at the bottom of the composition.

Evaluating the Results

As advertising is not an exact science, if you find your ad isn’t as successful as you had hoped, try something else. Repeated exposure of an unsuccessful ad will not improve performance rate. If your ad is working, repeat its usage a couple of times. Frequency will help in your branding strategy and will aid in the long-term campaign success.

Advertising

According to the Center for Exhibition Research (CEIR), trade show exhibitions come in second only to direct sales in generating new and repeat sales for most companies.

If you are like most people, you are looking to make your marketing dollars work harder, especially with current decrease in corporate spending that has allied itself with the downturn in the economy. Everyone is looking to improve their return on investment, and for some, unfortunately, that may mean cutting the huge expense of trade show marketing out of their budgets. Trade shows are a great marketing tool for those who take advantage of the benefits. So what are some ways to make trade show marketing work better for your company?

Picking the Right Trade Shows

Obviously, you need to start with the basics - who will be attending and who else is exhibiting? But you can dig much deeper than that. Start asking the trade show organizers questions like where do attendees spend most of their time, what specific product categories are they most interested in, and how the event compares to competing trade shows. Just knowing that there will be 5000 attendees may not help you if few are interested in your product category.

Choosing an Objective

Pick an objective and stick with it. “But I’m here to get leads”, you say. Absolutely, but trade shows can also help you do a number of other things like getting feedback and generating buzz for new products, educating potential customers on the benefits of your current products, finding new distributors and meeting people in other industries, and promoting your brand.

Pre-Show Advertising

Make sure your current customers and industry members know you are going to be at a particular trade show. You can do this by sending out teaser postcards with your booth number or advertising in trade magazines. If you are going to launch a product, gradually leak information about it in pre-trade show materials. Create a website that hints at what it may be and include the url in your teaser promotions. If you’re having a contest for free tickets to an event, let people know they need to come to your booth to sign up for the drawing. The more pre-show buzz you can create, the more popular your booth is going to be.

Making Your Booth Stand Out

Having a really nice booth can definitely attract traffic and media attention. You only have a couple of seconds to grab someone’s attention, and anything that may set you apart from the other booths will drastically help. Think of it this way. Having a creative setup for your booth means you’ve thought quite a bit about the event and put a lot of time and effort into making it happen. This enthusiasm will transfer to your booth staff as they talk to visitors. The more “into it” your staff is, the more leads you are going to generate.

Ask For Feedback

You have a huge pool of customers and potential customers available to you. Do some market research. Ask them what they think of your booth and presence at the trade show, your product, whether your sales staff has been helpful, and any other questions you’ve been dying to learn from your customers. Ask for feedback before you give them your promotional goodies, or give those people that have filled out the survey something better than what you hand out ordinarily.

See What Your Competitors Are Doing

Another major benefit of trade shows is that your competitors are there as well. Now you can check up on what they are doing, who their business partners are, and what kinds of visitors they are getting. You can also pick up some of their corporate literature to compare to your own.

Publicity - Give the Press a Story

Trade shows provide excellent opportunities to meet and interact with key industry journalists. If you can, set up a time to chat with them to let them in on how your company is innovating the industry or the success of events you’ve done. If you can, volunteer to be a speaker or panelist at the trade show to gain further media exposure. You may also look to sponsor a speaker or panel. While you’re at it, make sure you keep copies of your press kit in your booth, as you never know when members of the press might drop in.

Meet As Many People As You Can

Face to face interaction can really improve sales. Make sure your staff is well trained in answering questions about your product or service.

You should also do some networking yourself. You can meet a lot of people at a trade show just by checking out other booths and talking to their staff. Some of your contacts may become potential business partners. Some may bring new customer leads. And it doesn’t hurt to expand your working network in case other opportunities may arise in the future.

Measure Your Return On Investment

At the end of the day, you want to make sure your costs were justified. Did you generate enough leads to justify the cost? How did your numbers compare to previous years or other trade shows you’ve done? Why did people visit your booth - because you had a pretty booth design and promotional giveaways or out of interest for your product? How effective were your sales staff - what did visitors think when they walked away?

Event Marketing

You’ve put in the time, effort and money to create a successful meeting. Now you want to know what types of rewards your company reaped. Calculating the return on investment (ROI), evaluating questionnaires, and rating the services you hired for the event can give you a clearer picture of the gains and losses from the event. Being informed of your strong and weak points can help your business succeed.

Success Through Asking

Knowing the objectives of the meeting and where your business is headed are essential to evaluating your meeting. In order to compare and contrast each meeting, create a basic layout of questions and stick with them when evaluating of all your meetings. No, all your meetings won’t be the same, but setting different criteria makes it far more difficult to objectively compare one meeting to another.

When creating questionnaires to obtain feedback, make sure you keep your goals in mind, as you certainly want to know if attendees picked up on and retained your central message. Your questionnaires should include questions on the general program, presentation, location, services, and other aspects specific to your event. Give these questionnaires out to attendees after every presentation to receive feedback while the content is fresh in their minds. At the end of the meeting, give out another questionnaire for attendees to rate the entire program and obtain feedback as to what they thought was most beneficial or needs improvement. You can also send out questionnaires a week or two after the event to evaluate what attendees retained.

The Survey Says

Your first task in creating questions is making them objective. Be careful that your own biases don’t slip in - after all, you want to determine how the audience perceived the event, not how you wanted them to perceive it. The most common type of questionnaires contains questions with set answers. This allows you to calculate percentages and rank responses accordingly. The drawback of this type of question is that it does not give insight into why the assessor responded in that particular way. Therefore, you may want to have a few personal response questions that allow assessors to answer in their own words. Using a mix of both set questions and personal response questions can help your company get a greater feel of the success rate of the meeting.

The questions, themselves, should be informative and specific to your event, and quick for attendees to fill out. The easiest and quickest types of answers are basic rating scales. The three most common include

rating the performance: “excellent, very good, good, fair, poor”

agreeing or disagreeing: “strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree”

measuring satisfaction: “very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, very dissatisfied”

These can also be measured based on a 5- or 10-point scale. For example, on a scale of 1-5 with 5 meaning “extremely satisfied”, how satisfied were you with…

Another key issue to the layout of the questionnaire is privacy in sensitive issues. If you are looking to collect information such as age or income, group answers in ranges so the respondent doesn’t feel violated. You may also want to consider keeping assessments anonymous depending on the questions you ask to ensure greater openness and honestly with their answers.

You should also include your company’s contact information somewhere on the evaluation, and above all, don’t forget to thank respondents for giving you their opinion! You may also want to include a url or an address where attendees can view the results of the survey.

Reward and Analyze

Remember that people are taking time out of their busy lives to fill out your evaluation. Therefore, be considerate and show your appreciation in any way you can. For example, if you mail our questionnaires, sent a gift and a postage paid envelope for respondents to send the questionnaires back to you. If responses are not mailed, have a drawing for a prize or give out a thank you gift when the sheet is returned.

Once you’ve received all responses, it’s time to analyze the results. Basic math will calculate the means, standard deviations, and percentages you need to know to determine the success of the meeting. More advanced statistical analysis can include using Microsoft Excel to more advanced statistics tools such as SPSS. If you don’t have the time to collect results yourself, hire a professional survey or marketing research company to take care of the logistics.

Return on Investment (ROI)

So, now that you’ve calculated the overall opinion of the event, it’s time to calculate return on investment. This is easy if you have specific monetary goals - compare the numbers to determine if you’ve met those goals. If you didn’t create specific monetary goals, ask those that financially invested in the event what they expected the return to be and analyze those projections against expenses. Once you’ve calculated ROI, be sure to inform your investors of the financial results as well as the results of the opinion survey.

Giving Back to the Services

Services play a major part in making meetings successful, so if you’ve had a good service team, be sure to show your appreciation. Gratuity is sometimes added directly to the service bill automatically, but if you feel your service team has done an excellent job, show your appreciation by giving them a bit more. You may also want to consider sending a thank you gift. Sometimes, there is one person who just has a tremendously positive effect on helping your meeting run smoothly, so do something special for them to show your appreciation, such as letter of excellence to their manager or a special gift. Remember, there were a lot of people involved in making your meeting successful, so always try to give something back when you can.

Event Marketing

A typical event marketing campaign will generally include most of the following marketing communications:

1. Sponsorship letters/kits
2. Save the Date postcard or email
3. Website
4. Mailer
5. Posters/Banners
6. Advertisements in relevant publications
7. Press kits/releases
8. Flyers for students
9. Email announcements
10. Day of Event Brochure

Save the Date Postcard

A save the date postcard is a cheap way to let people know well in advance that you are having a conference. Ideally, it should be sent out about 4-5 months before your event, and should give details like date, location, and website address. Save the date postcards can also double as conference flyers, which can be given out at any other events or around campus.

Website

Along with the save the date postcard, getting your website set up during the initial planning stages is critical for giving potential sponsors and speakers information about your event. Often, conferences are hesitant to get the site up and running early because they think they don’t have any solid details about the conference to advertise. However, just having a web presence gives speakers and sponsors the piece of mind that you are taking the conference seriously.

Here are some ideas of what you should include:

• date/location
• region-specific logistics
• opportunities for sponsorship
• proposed topics and objectives
• tentative agenda
• keynote and panelist bios
• who should attend and how they will benefit
• information on past conferences
• information on your organization and its goals
• workshop details
• special events like alumni dinners or a career fair
• sponsors logos and links
• a press kit
• option to join a mailing list for more information
• online registration option

Your website is your means of informing your audience of any news about your event. That includes potential attendees, potential speakers, sponsors, and the press. You can even make this an interactive experience, setting up surveys to obtain initial feedback from potential attendees on possible topics and expectations, allowing visitors to join a mailing list for continual updates as the event develops and to aid in word of mouth marketing, or setting up a forum so visitors can establish a community presence before the event that will carry through the event and facilitate discussion even after the event has passed. Another critical function of your website is to provide online registration for your event. You can set up online payment processing through online event registration vendors such as Acteva.com.

Mailer

A mailer typically includes all currently known conference details including the benefits of attending, who will be speaking, the types of events planned, a proposed agenda, your sponsors, and any other general information. It should also emphasize date, location, and your website, and urge readers to register online.

The mailer is designed to build awareness of your event now that many of your key features have been confirmed and to urge people to register for the event before it is sold out. You will want to send it at least 6-8 weeks in advance.

Email Announcements

One of the cheapest and most efficient methods of marketing is email marketing. However, the newly implemented CAN-SPAM Act imposes a number of restrictions on your mailings. If your organization does not have a list of members who have chosen to ‘opt in’, you must include certain information in your emails. Some guidelines include:

• Don’t use misleading sender information or subjects
• Include a postal address
• Include a clear method for recipients to unsubscribe
• If your list isn’t ‘opt-in,’ include a clear notice that states the e-mail is an advertisement or solicitation

Typically, emails are sent out about 6 weeks before your conference to coincide with the mailers, and again around 2 weeks before your conference to remind those who may have put off registration. They should announce the event and drive people to your website for more information and to register. You may also want to send out a final email a day or two before the conference to those registered to provide general information such as driving directions, parking options, and opening registration times.

Advertising

Advertising in trade publications, local newspapers, and through Pay Per Click campaigns in search engines can be a good way to promote your conference and remind people to register. Where you advertise will depend greatly on your target audience and budget.

Banners/Posters

Posters and banners also aid to promote awareness of your event. You can hang posters inside your organization or by your ticket sales locations. Banners can be hung outside as reminders of your event. For the majority of conferences we work with, banners are full color, scrimm vinyl with grommets and are typically 6′x3′. Posters are typically 24″x36″ and mounted.

Day of Event Brochure

The day of event brochure is basically the program guide and summary of the day’s events. It should include all information related to your event, which can include a welcome letter, the agenda, the location with map, keynote pictures, biographies, and quotes, panel descriptions and panelists, other events such as career fair or cocktail reception information, sponsor ads and logos, information about the organization managing the event, volunteers and committee members, etc.

Event Marketing

There are a number of file formats out there. You are probably familiar with gifs and jpegs, but there are also a variety of others including .eps and .tif. Graphics are broken down into two kinds of categories - vector and raster (or bitmap).

Vector Graphics

These resolution-independent images can be created with Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand & are based on mathematical equations to display their image. This means that regardless of how you resize the image, it will retain all its information. Vector files usually end with the extension “.eps”. This is the ideal format for logos.

Raster (or Bitmap) Graphics

These images are based on square bits of information called “pixels” to build the image, where each pixel is a separate color & the entire picture is made up of a patchwork of these color pieces. This means that resolution is an important in how your image will look. If the original image started out at 72 dpi at 100%, at 200%, the dpi drops to 36 dpi. If you make the image 50% of its original size, the dpi will increase to 144. Graphics with the extensions “.gif”, “.jpg”, “.tif”, and “.bmp” are among bitmap images. This format is used for images on the web, photographs, scanned images, artwork created in programs like Adobe Photoshop or MS Paint

Web Resolution vs. Print Resolution

Computer monitor only displays images at about 72 pixels/dots per inch (ppi or dpi), so you only need that resolution for web graphics. Print, however, requires a higher resolution of 300 dpi to print cleanly.

Types of Raster Graphics

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) - This bitmap form is the best type of image to use in print for high quality images, especially for scanned images such as photographs

Windows Bitmap (BMP) - Another commonly used format for high quality scanned images

JPEG - This bitmapped format is probably the most common format for receiving photographs. JPEGs use a type of built in compression to reduce file size.

NOTE: Even if the image is a tif, bmp, or a jpg, that does not necessarily mean that it is 300 dpi. If you got the jpg off the web, chances are, it’s probably only 72 dpi. Most jpgs that are 300 dpi tend to be at least over 100KB in size. BMP and TIFF files that are about 300 dpi are almost always close to 1MB or more in size.

Never Use Gifs For Print

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) should NEVER be used in print. This format was designed specifically for on-screen viewing where quick download time was more important than quality. They are designed to display 8-bit color (256 colors) & are almost always 72 dpi or less. They will print very rough with jagged edges & nothing can be done to clean them up.

Printing

When many people think of marketing, they think of either selling or advertising. Selling has a bad rep - you might be reminded of that pushy ‘used car salesman’ or that annoying telemarketer that interrupted your dinner last night. You might think selling means pushing a product or service upon someone who has no interest in it and trying to convince them to buy. Advertising doesn’t usually fair much better. People think of advertising as expensive, impersonal, and often ineffective. Some even consider it manipulative.

While these are the two most well known areas of marketing, there’s good news! Marketing encompasses far more than that. You can increase your business without these hard tactics by taking a more strategic approach.

In a nutshell, marketing is everything you do from the time you conceive of a product or service to the time someone buys it from you. This involves activities like:

Consumer Research

This involves finding out if people like your offering enough to pay you a premium for it. It means segmenting your market so you can get to know who your customers and prospects are, learn what motivates them, and tailor your offering to their needs. After all, if you are solving a problem for them in a faster/better/cheaper way than they are currently doing it, they’ll be happy to pay for your product/services.

Industry Research

This involves looking at your competition to see what they offer and how it differs from you. I want to stress - EVERYONE HAS COMPETITION. Maybe it is indirect competition - someone will do it themselves rather than pay you. Maybe it is potential substitution for another product/service in a different industry. For example, Coca Cola is in the soft drink industry and their main competitor is Pepsi. However, milk would be a substitute beverage. Or most likely, it’s another company that advertises a similar offering to yours.

Company Analysis

This involves looking internally at your company to pick out and emphasize your company’s strengths. This means asking yourself and your employees why you and they believe in your company and your offering. It means looking at not only your strengths, but also your weaknesses and making sure that what you are offering is something that you are good at. Using that information, you can emphasize the benefits of using your offering vs. another.

Strategic Analysis

Once you’ve done extensive research - you can evaluate everything you’ve collected. You are looking for an overlap between what you offer, which people might buy, and how you can leverage that to find a niche that your competitors can’t easily copy.

Telling Consumers and Prospects

Now that you have an idea of who would be interested in your offering, you need to tell them about it. You can do this via a variety of means - advertising, direct mail, networking, websites, promotions, email, etc - but the goal is to research only those prospects that will have an interest in buying your product. Start putting together a marketing plan that details a schedule of when and how you will reach your prospects each month. It usually takes at least 7 contacts over the course of 1-1.5 years before people start to recognize your company, so maintaining consistent marketing is crucial.

Marketing

Understanding the difference between CMYK and RGB is crucial when trying to match your colors for printing purposes. Colors that may display brilliantly on your monitor may look differently when you get your document back from the printer. Here’s why.

RGB - Mixing red (R), green (G), and blue (B) can produce a large part of the visible spectrum. When these three colors overlap, they produce white, and hence this is known as an additive color model. Computer monitors produce colors by emitting light through red, green, and blue phosphors. But that only explains part of it. Your monitor settings can be customized depending on your preference and hardware such as your graphics card.

Monitors have various display settings, such as 256 colors (8 bit), high color (16 bit), or even true color (32 bit). If you’re using true color, you’ll notice a world of difference when compared to 256 colors. You can also adjust settings like your monitor’s brightness or play with the color levels pretty easily - processors very similar to changing the brightness and color levels on your tv set. Therefore, a color on one computer can look completely different on another computer.

CMYK - This “subtractive” model is based on combining the colors cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y) to produce black (K). However, this is never quite achieved during printing because all printing inks contain some impurities & the end result tends to be a brownish color that must be combined with black to form a true black color. Because of this, not all colors that can be mixed on the computer in RGB mode can be made in real life.

Another major factor in the difference between monitor display and print is the direction the light is coming from. Your computer illuminates the screen by displaying a light from inside the monitor and projecting it outward so the colors are actually being lit from behind. With print, obviously, you’re not holding your paper up to a light source and looking through it to see the colors - the light shines down and the paper absorbs/reflects color - so the type of paper you use also plays a major role in how colors are displayed.

This is why you always need to allow enough time to get a printed color proof from your printer before you print your final piece. (Using CMYK for printing is known as 4 color process.)

Pantone - If you are determined to use one specific, unvarying color, then selecting a Pantone is going to be your best bet. Pantone provides a number of inks that you can use alone or in addition to your CMYK printing. Keep in mind that the more Pantone colors you choose, the more expensive your document is going to be. (If you decide to use a Pantone color in addition to CMYK, that’s 5 inks instead of 4.) However, you will be able to guarantee that your color will be identical throughout all your printed pieces. More information on Pantone colors can be found on their website.

Printing