5 Steps to Having a Successful Promotional Event

Recently I worked with an insurance agency, the local fire department and the local school district to put on a Fire Rally to teach Fire Prevention to elementary aged kids. The community, the school district, parents, businesses, the local media – in short everyone was invited; it was a large promotional event. Events like these are great because the insurance company did something really great for the community and the schools, but on the other hand when you invest a lot of time, energy and money, there should be a payoff for your organization as well. The insurance organization spent thousands of dollars and got a limited amount of return on her investment in the way of sales and advertising. Below are ways of getting started to having a successful return on time and energy.

1. Plan the Logistics in advance
If you are planning a promotion and you have never done one before take some time to talk to others who’ve run a similar promotional event in your community. Check local newspapers, community bulletins, your local government, the internet, etc. and see who’s done something like what you’ve done before. Email, call, talk, take them out for a cup of coffee and listen to what was successful and what where their road blocks along the way. Promotions are a lot of work and to be successful, planning is the key. Make a list of everything that you think that you will need – equipment, personnel, signage, promotional material, vendors, advertising and so on.
I always tell people to draw a work flow of their promotion. Most people are surprised to what they don’t think of until they actually look at it in the form of a picture.

2. Make a budget, then spend the money
This is one of the most important parts to any event. Any promotional event whether it’s for a non-profit organization to a large corporation needs some sort of return on their investment. Whether it’s for positive public relations, positive advertising exposure, building awareness, collecting information on your customers, throw support for a politician, or to increase sales – it’s important to have a solid cost associated with achieving those goals.

Next, after you come up with a number and then you’ve figured out the logistics to make your promotion occur, associate each aspect of your promotion with a price. Figure out the cost of equipment, personnel, advertising, promotional materials, outside vendors and so on.
Use a system to track each aspect of promotion so that you don’t go over budget as well. Personally I’m a believer in using tools such as Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel and accounting software like QuickBooks. Each organization uses their own tools, but it’s really important to write everything down and continue to recalculate as you make purchases and returns along the way. 50% of events or promotions go over budget due to the person not properly monitoring or tracking purchases. Doing this can what you believe a successful promotion into a full fledge nightmare in a matter of seconds.

3. Use the right staff to get the right result
I see this frequently in most retail businesses, I show up at one of my customer’s sales events and instead of their top sales associates on the floor, they have high school students “working” their event or people who are not customer or sales focused.

First and foremost it is important to always hire the correct person to work for your business, but at an event where you are spending more money than average to increase your sales, then you need to schedule the correct staff to do so.

In addition, most really great sales members have a list of their preferred customers who they constantly keep in contact and will try to lure their customers to your organizations event and increase the bottom line.

4. Take a dose of reality
I have done some truly amazing things in my lifetime. I have fed 500 customers in the middle of the desert when the vendors failed to show for clients, I have convinced major news media to cover smaller nonprofit organizations and I have gotten large organization to get on the band wagon to make a promotion successful. But there are times that you really need to look at what you’re doing and check to see if it’s really possible. How realistic is it to achieve your targeted results? I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go out there and try to raise the bar and make something amazing happen, but on the other hand, have you justly broken down the numbers to if this is feasible?
Think about this, how many customers, vendors, members of the community, etc. are needed to come to your promotional event and if it’s a sales event, how much do they need to spend or how many certain items do they need to purchase to make this pay off.

Last year I worked with a large farming equipment manufacturer who were flying farmers from all over the world to Las Vegas to attend an agriculture expo for 10 days with the goal of them purchasing large equipment valued from $380,000 – $890,000.

I was in charge of the group of Australian, New Zealand and other Asian Rimmed Communities and brought 60 members to Las Vegas, NV. My goal was to entertain them, have them attend the expo, have them spend time with the sales associates, make sure that they had a wonderful time while visiting the US and ultimately have 10% or 6 of those guys purchase machinery.

So we did all the steps above – Plan the logistics, set a budget, use the right staff, and then step back and see if what we were spending was realistic and made adjustments to spend more money in certain places and less in others.

It’s not bad if you look at what you’re doing and see that it’s really unrealistic and make changes to make it profitable. In fact if you don’t do it then you will never improve.

5. Advertise, Market, Brand, Brand, Brand!
If you and your staff are the only ones that know about this promotion, it’s not a promotion, its turns into you spending unnecessary money on your business.
There are several inexpensive ways to promote your business – get a press release out over the wire, put it out on your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter About it, Put it on your MySpace Page, use external promoters, email or text people, put up signs, ask your neighboring businesses if you can put up signs, tell your neighboring businesses and ask them to tell people and refer them money for every customer they send your way, have your staff call the customers, etc. If it’s an event that costs money, offer money or an incentive to purchasing tickets in advance.

In addition, I really recommend spending a little bit of money into creating special advertising or promo materials for your event before and at the event. Last week a grocery store was offering free Earth Day Reusable Grocery Bags before Earth Day and a $5 off discount if you shopped at their store on Earth day with their reusable bag. I was amazed at how busy the grocery store was on earth day and how many bags I have seen around in the community since then giving the store free advertising.

Laura Baker is a business specialist consultant for LMG Consulting.  Laura has worked with major fortune 500 companies, boutique firms, non-profit organizations and individuals from the food, insurance, financial, medical and service industries.  For additional information, questions and or comments about your business or organization to Laura@LasaraMgmtGroup.com.

LB Fire Department at the Keller Fire Rally with Laura Baker

Keller Elementary School Fire Rally 2010

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