Business Partner Magazine

Tips and advice for entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs

The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Event Marketing

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No matter what kind of event your organization is holding, it needs people to be successful. Even an event with big-name guests, attractive branding or noteworthy activities will be a failure if people don’t attend. Fortunately for marketers and event organizers, it’s never been easier to get the word out about an event to a broad audience, thanks to the rise of social media. With social media, marketers and event planners can let millions of people know about their events with relative ease. What’s more, they have greater control over the message they want to deliver than they could with traditional marketing tools such as print advertising and radio spots.

Yet the sophistication of social media relative to traditional marketing methods means publicizing an event through social media channels is a bit more complicated. When used properly, social media can be an essential tool for featuring an event. However, if social media isn’t utilized the right way, it’s just as good as having no promotion.

For example, marketers must understand how to use the interactivity of social media to their advantage when promoting an event. Responding to people’s questions about the event promptly or sharing relevant content generated by others can go a long way to building awareness of the event — as well as loyalty to the brand. Marketers also must understand how to take advantage of social media’s built-in metrics to measure the reach and scope of their messaging and its impact on the intended audience.

Social media makes marketing an event easier and more effective than ever, but only if the marketing professionals involved use it correctly. The accompanying guide contains some important information about social media event marketing. Take a look to make sure your next event leverages social media to its full potential.

The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Event Marketing created by AttendStar

About the Author 

Gary Bradshaw is CEO and owner of AttendStar, an online event ticketing software company. He has 17 years of experience in the industry and focuses on blending ticketing with event marketing to help events be successful.

A Guide to Choosing the Best Digital Channel for Your Business

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The availability of digital channels is now more widespread than ever. From one standpoint, this phenomenon can make marketing services easier for marketers. It’s not only faster to deliver your message through digital marketing channels, but it’s also a convenient way to measure the results of your marketing campaigns through data analytics.

 On the other hand, having too many digital channels may also present challenges to your marketing team. It could get confusing and overwhelming to develop an integrated digital marketing plan, where you’re able to leverage every piece of digital marketing technology out there. Some companies, however, end up spreading themselves too thin in their earnest desire to establish a strong presence in the online marketing space.

While it’s important for your marketing strategy to include the use of digital channels, it’s equally crucial for you to identify where to focus your efforts and resources. Take note that digital marketing channels may use varied tools and systems on their platform. Therefore, you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of how each one works vis-à-vis the goals, budget, and desired results of your team to help you match the right platform for your business.

Use the accompanying infographic as your starting point.

Infographic by Connext Digital

How to Create Custom Business Cards Online in Minutes

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When it comes to running a small business successfully, some would say that having a strong online presence is what counts nowadays. However, traditional marketing tools such as business cards are still an important element when it comes to establishing your business brand identity and communicating with public. Business cards make a great first impression, reflect professionalism and build trust between you and your potential associates and customers. Their design, shape, font and paper choice can tell a lot about your products, service and your creativity. Now, imagine that you can choose how your business cards will look like, from the beginning to the end without even leaving your home. If you like this idea, then Labeley online custom business card creator is a right tool for you.

 

Labeley business card creator is a free online tool for creating high-quality business cards for various industries. With Labeley, anyone can create custom business cards completely free and get them professionally printed and delivered to any destination in the world. It might sound intimidating, but rest assured that with this tool you don’t need any design skills to make unique, professional-looking business cards that best reflect your company.

Labeley Business Card Maker Quick Overview

  • Create and download unlimited number of single-sided or double-sided business cards for free and without registration
  • Choose among 200+ industry specific free templates
  • Upload any image and completely personalize your design
  • Order premium quality professional printing at reasonable prices

How to Use It?

The very first step of using Labeley business card creator is choosing whether you want to create single-sided or double-sided business cards under the Shape category. Continue by adding the Background of your choice and finish it with the appropriate Graphics that you want to represent your personal information which you will later fill in under Text section.

Keep in mind that you can also skip these creation steps and go straight to the Templates category, choose single-side or double-side template that best fits your industry and simply add your contact information before clicking on Save. Some of the industries available now are real estate, architecture, law, hospitality, dentistry, catering and many more. This way you can save time on designing your business cards while still making sure they look the way you wanted. All these templates are originally designed and completely free for commercial use.

Once you are all done you have several options to go with:

  1. Save and download your design without any sign-up
  2. Save and keep your designs on cloud for future use; you need to create an account by providing only your email address
  3. Save and order professional business card printing on prime quality paper

Those interested in high-quality printing can order from 50 up to 2000 business cards on six different paper materials and a very good value for money. Either way, with this handy online tool you will get unique business card design in minutes. So, if you haven’t really thought about having custom made business cards before, then this is a good time to consider it.

Article by Labeley.com

Why It’s Better to Outsource Market Research

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Market research is the most powerful tool for finding out the deepest desires of your target market. You are able to find out everything you ever wanted to know about these people – from their preferred job to their age, but most importantly, you’ll learn how they behave when choosing a business. Market research requires a very specific skillset in order to gather the right information, so most businesses will find it beneficial to outsource this service.

The market has shown a growing interest in new companies today because they feel ignored by large corporations. Leaders are being forced to become better communicators in order to learn as much as possible about their target market. That’s why so many businesses have started outsourcing their marketing research. It has too many benefits to ignore.

Advantages of Outsourcing Market Research

One of the main advantages of outsourcing your marketing research is that it provides an outside, objective point of view. Roger Dooley says that third-party outsourcing of market research will eliminate the risk of the investigation being jeopardised due to biased views and confirmation bias.

Outsourcing providers have access to the best tools on the market and stay up-to-date with information about market research. It’s their full-time job so they are going to have a huge advantage in terms of skillset. Since market research requires very specific knowledge and tools, outsourcing providers are going to be much faster and provide extensive data acquisition. Plus, their information will be more accurate.

Market research can be an expensive endeavour to take on within a business. Yes, dedicating an entire team to marketing and bringing in a data scientist to lead the charge can provide some huge benefits, but it’s going to be expensive. Small businesses are not likely to have the resources to build an in-house market research team, so outsourcing is their best option. Having providers working for your business will spring forth plenty of opportunities.

Having a group on the outside that is dedicated to handling your marketing research will open up a much larger volume of data, meaning that it will be much more accurate. It brings a lot of diversity to your findings. It also frees up your team to work on core business tasks that help your business grow. Customers change their buying habits so frequently that businesses have to stay on top of market research, which can be time-consuming and quite expensive.

Partnering with a market research provider ensures that you will get a quick turnaround on your reports. Having quick access to marketing data is essential for small businesses because it allows then to compete with larger brands.

I saved the best for last. There is a big difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Most businesses are content with being effective since it means they can be more productive with as little effort as possible. However, outsourcing gives you the best of both worlds. You can outsource from a diversified pool of talent so that you are still being more productive with minimal effort, but it’s also more efficient since it’s usually the most cost-friendly solution available.

Any sized business need to focus their marketing on a very specific audience. Marketing research is how that market is defined so it must be accurate. That’s one of the biggest reasons that large companies continue to outsource marketing research. They could afford to build their own in-house team, but the skillset of outsourcing providers is just too tempting to pass up.

What is the biggest factor you would consider with outsourcing your marketing research? Feel free to share it in the comments below.

About the Author

Jacob Haney is a content marketer presently working with Research Optimus, a business research outsourcing company. A writer by day and a reader by night, he is loathed to discuss himself in the third person but can be persuaded to do so from time to time.

5 Tips for Producing a Memorable Small Business Event

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Events play a crucial role in establishing brand identity and promotion for both the small and the large businesses. But for small businesses they play a phenomenal role in brand endorsement and make your business a household name within a very limited time.

Workshops, conferences or networking events – all can be a great way to introduce your brand and market it. But for that you must be able to host an event that the attendees won’t be able to forget anytime soon for all the right reasons.

With the cut-throat competition out there how will you be able to make sure that your event will be able to create the desired impact? To help you with that here are some tips that will be able to make the small business event memorable.

  • Make it Appealing to the Target Audience – Think about the lifestyle, area of interests and daily challenges of your customer base while deciding what type of event to host. For example if most of your target audience wear suits then you can host a workshop on high quality suits. You will find that unexpected number of attendees have turned up. You can host something targeting the same demographics as most of your customers. Not only that, you can also bring in new demographics with the help of events. Brew tastings can be offered by retail stores to bring in men customers more while a sports bar can offer makeovers to enhance their female following.
  • Try to Rope in Other Businesses as Partners – Both the businesses can benefit if two non-competitive businesses with more or less the same customer line come together. Each company can endorse the event to their own set of customers and that will allow them to create new customers for the other business. Many businesses have benefitted from such a strategy.
  • Create an Expense Budget and Stick to It– Especially in regards to that of the food, venue and beverage, events tend to cost much more than the usual small business owners think. You should also consider the licenses and permits that you may need. Once you have created a more or less comprehensive list you can pick out the things that can be improvised by taking something in kind from the sponsors. The more you can work with the other brands the more you can save.
  • Promote Your Event – Marketing is the key to the success of any event. You should state out the good reasons why people should show up in your event and make it official. Don’t just assume that the benefits are obvious. You should use email marketing and make the social media your platform for letting people know about what you are up to. You can also invite in journalists by letting them know about the event well before time as they are always on deadline and won’t be able to turn up if not informed in advance. Also use online social pre-events for the event promotion.
  • Make Your Attendees Feel Special – If you want people to talk about your event then you must stand out. For that you must make the attendees feel special and welcome in your event. You should let them enjoy to the core so that they don’t regret coming to the event. You can ask your attendees what kind of flowers they like and can greet them at the entrance with the same. This will add a personalised touch and will be a warm welcome for them. You can also arrange for a fun photo booth where the attendees can have the time of their life by depositing small funds that can be used for charity. The best part is that your event will be covered this way and you can share the pics on the social media that should portray what fun it was to attend your event.

The above are suggested by the top event agency that has created its own niche in this domain by organising a number of successful events for both the big and small businesses.

About the Author

Sawoni Chowdhury is an aficionado of writing. She is an expert writer and blogger and shares her views and opinions on a range of topics such as Lifestyle, Business, Entertainment and lot more. She works with Wonderland Agency, which is among the best event agency in the UK.