Tips For Planning A Successful Business Event

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | Tips For Planning A Successful Business EventOrganizing a successful business event takes time and careful planning, whether you’re holding a small event for 20 people, or arranging a huge company-wide conference for hundreds of attendees. Whatever your reason for holding an event, here are some top tips to help you plan a successful business event and ensure that everything runs smoothly on the day.

Consider your budget

Before you can start planning your business event, it is vital that you determine what funds you have available so you can create an event budget. You need to plan carefully to ensure that every necessary element of your event is covered. For example, you could consider cheaper catering options to allow you to invite more guests to your event. However, on occasions where brand image is essential, you may choose to host fewer attendees to allow higher-end catering at the event. Remember that your budget should include things like catering services, venue hire, guest speaker fees, equipment rental, and supplies. You can look online for advice on how to create an event budget.

Choose the perfect venue

Remember that first impressions count, so wowing your guests with an impressive venue is definitely worthwhile. For instance, the award-winning Adelaide Hills Convention Centre offers the perfect conference venue with its modern high-tech facilities and stunning views over the picturesque Mount Lofty Ranges. If you have a small budget, then you can always help dress up a simple room and create an atmosphere with a few finishing touches like flowers and lighting. It is also important to carefully consider the location of your venue; try to choose somewhere that is centrally located and convenient for all attendees to get to. Make sure that you also check for things like free onsite parking and public transport links in the area.

Provide food and drink

When people are attending an event, they will expect some food and drinks to be provided. The style of catering you offer at your business event will largely depend on your budget and number of attendees, but it’s important to remember that quality is generally preferred over quantity. For instance, champagne and canapes will usually give a far better impression than a cheap 3-course meal. Whatever you decide to provide, be sure to make your attendees aware before the event. People are likely to be unhappy if they turn up to your event expecting to be fed, then find that no substantial food is being provided. You should, therefore, include a quick line in your invite outlining what food and drinks will be served at the event.

Think about the guest list

Planning a guest list can be a challenge, and it’s important to think carefully about who you’re going to invite to your event. Remember that the size of your guest list will largely depend on the budget you have available, so make sure you consider which people are your priority. If leaving certain people or groups of people off the guest list is going to cause problems, then you could look for ways to cut back on other areas of your budget to allow you to increase the guest list.

Top 5 Benefits of Business Cards

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Business Cards|Top 5 Benefits of Business CardsWhether you’re a small business or large organisation, spreading awareness of your brand is crucial. The more people who know about your company, the better, so using the right marketing tools and techniques can make a big difference, helping to secure new interest from customers and clients.

While many businesses use social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram as a way to connect with their followers, using the old school approach of business cards can be just as beneficial. With that in mind, here are the top five benefits of business cards.

Affordable

If you run a small business, working with a tight budget can be tough. However, what you may not realise is how cost-effective using business cards can be. Instead of purchasing one or two cards, make sure that you buy in bulk, where you will be able to save a ton of money. You may want to consider checking out websites like https://theallinprinter.com/ who can help you design the perfect business card.

Versatile

Although business cards are small, that doesn’t mean you can’t fit a great deal of information on them. Instead of just putting your contact information on your business card, you should consider putting some advertising material on it, or offering a deal or coupon to lure new customers in. It’s important not to put too much information on your business card though, so finding the right balance is key, helping to avoid overwhelming the recipients.

Convenient

Another great benefit of using business cards is that you are in charge over how it looks. What’s more, you have discretion over the content too, as well as what marketing strategies to use to promote your brand. Business cards are small enough to fit inside a purse or wallet, meaning customers are more likely to take a card from you and keep it in their wallet or briefcase.

Networking

There are all sorts of places where you can use a business card. For example, if you’re attending a networking event, having a stall promoting your brand and equipping yourself with plenty of business cards will mean that customers can take a piece of your business away with them, helping to secure new interest. Remember, anyone you meet can be a potential customer, so handing out as many business cards as you can is crucial.

Never Stop Working

Unlike a television advertisement that only lasts for roughly 30 seconds, a business card and its message resonate and stays with the customer. Each time a customer checks out your business card, they will be reminded about what your company is all about, helping to increase the likelihood of them engaging with your brand. Unlike using email marketing where customers may not even check their inbox, having a physical record of what your business is all about can help stick in consumers minds more.

Instead of relying on social media and the internet for your marketing strategy, using business cards can be a great way to attract more customers to your brand. Not only are they convenient for the customer, they never stop working, and they’re affordable to buy too, especially if you buy in bulk. How your business presents itself is everything, so make sure that you spend time designing a business card that stands out from the crowd.

How to Create Strategy-Driven Branding for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Branding|How to Create Strategy-Driven Branding for Your BusinessCreating strategy-driven branding is a matter of creating marketing materials that are simple, easy to remember, and effective. Creating a great logo, however, is only just the beginning. You need to be strategic about where your branding is found, and think about how you can use your branding as more than just an image. You can create a movement surrounding your brand by making your company into something of a cult object. Not every business will be appropriate for such a move, but every business can benefit from using these steps to improve their branding and marketing efforts.

Create a Brand Identity

First things first, you need to either create or remake your brand identity. A brand identity is comprised of a few key components:

Logo

Your logo needs to be easy to recognize, simple, and it needs to have the ability to stand out. Consider some of the top brands today, and the logos that they use. Their logos are, in most cases, so recognizable that brands can use just the logo on their advertising.

Personality

The brand personality you use will be how you speak. How you sound in advertisements, social media, on calls, and on your on-site copy.

Design

Take your logo and your personality and choose design elements like symbols, colors, fonts, and more that will work as a way to reinforce your brand.

Packaging

Put the design onto packaging and make it beautiful. You can sell a lot off the shelves with beautiful packaging, and you might even be able to benefit from social media marketing if customers feel compelled to photograph your product and its box.

Store Design

If you run a physical store, then it’s time to work out how well it is designed. Start first with the layout. Ensure it is easy for multiple people to get through the layout, ensure it encourages as much organic browsing as possible, and then figure out what design elements you can add to really make your store pleasant to be in.

Work On Providing a Clear Workplace Culture

A clear workplace culture can help in many ways. It can help boost the workflow and efficiency of your business. It can also give your employees the groundwork on how to behave so that your customers can enjoy a familiar, professional experience every time they visit.

Ethos

Your company ethos is the goal you have for your workplace culture. It is the expectation that everyone needs to follow. It could be hard work and great laughs, for example, to promote a workplace culture that is productive and enjoyable to be in. By deciding on an ethos, everyone knows better what to expect and can work together to make your workplace culture goals into a reality.

Teamwork Building

You don’t want friends working together. You want a team working together. Investing in teamwork building will give everyone a basis on how to behave so that work can get done, ideas can be challenged, and collaboration can thrive without fights.

Team Unity

Team unity is fundamental when it comes to building up a strong and healthy working culture. There are so many ways you can do this as well. If your business deals with animals, for example, a kennel or a groomer, then you can treat all of your employees to an animal lover’s license plate frames. These custom license plate frames suit all types of professions and can give your employees a sense of community that is personalized to them.

Adapt and Tweak Your Brand

It’s okay if you don’t get your brand identity right off the bat. The goal is to create branding and then tweak it as you go. This way you can use what works and discards what fell flat, both for your customers and your employees. It’s how you will create a uniform, quality company that everyone will enjoy.

The Take Away

You want your customers to recognize your brand instantaneously and to feel like your company is familiar no matter who they interact with or which store they visit. It’s what makes fast food restaurants so successful, especially to those who are traveling. A guest to a food chain can expect the same quality of food and service as they would get anywhere. This is how you build brand loyalty and repeat business.

Accomplishing such a feat means using the right design, and instilling the right company culture so that all of your employees work well together and can provide your customers with the same professional experience.

Developing A Better Standard Of Marketing

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|Developing A Better Standard Of MarketingDeveloping a better standard of anything is essential when improving your business. Just like a house, it can grow cobwebs, slowly experience a state of disrepair and generally fall to dust should you fail to maintain it. What might work this year might not work the next year. The team you might have now could be stifling your progress, and fresh faces with brand new ideas might be needed to inject life into the firm.

Marketing is perhaps one of the most important elements to update within your business strategy from year to year. Trends, expectations and the means in which customers interface with firms have changed since 2010, and it’s astonishing to realize that was almost ten years ago now.

But how can you develop a better standard of marketing? Doesn’t it take time to read your audience, put together a coherent package, and only then realize that the trend might have been missed? How can you continually stay up to date and elicit awe, not groans, from your audience?

We think the following efforts might help you:

Hire The Professionals

There’s no worth in simply trying to market your brand without knowing your target audience, how they respond to certain stimuli, what you have to say, your goal for the marketing campaign, or how to best reach all avenues of accessibility when exposing a message. It’s essential that you know how to do all this, and for small businesses, that’s a big ask. With services such as Your Marketing People, all of this work can be expertly crafted and specialized, keeping you in the loop at all times. If you manage that, then you can expect to overcome the issues that plague so many first-time business marketing themselves and instead step onto the scene with a cohesive and worthwhile stratagem.

Measure

It’s essential to measure your marketing via every metric through which that can be found. Consider your engagement rates, your sales, where those sales come from, how social media comments reply to your marketing, your YouTube ad dislikes to likes, or perhaps how many ‘follows’ you gain as a result. Without all this information you can repeatedly market to a brick wall even after ten years of business development.

Take A Risk

Every single world can be poured over, copywritten again, approved, discussed, rejected and then the most baseline phrasing chosen if you overanalyze everything. The essence of marketing is being seen, so don’t be afraid to make bold statements, to take a risk, to be bigger and better than the competition. Just imagine if you saw a fragrance advertisement that didn’t feature a half-naked male or female model dressed in silk, filmed in black and white. You’d likely look just because of the originality of the piece in question. Take this ethos and apply it elsewhere, and you might just be exponentially compounding the effect of your marketing prowess.

With this advice, developing a better standard of marketing will be a worthwhile aim.

What Is Accessible Marketing?

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Accessibility|What Is Accessible Marketing?Accessibility is a crucial topic in modern business life. However, accessibility tends to refer to the width of your corridors, and the absence or presence of staircases. As a result, countless shops and small companies have added wheelchair-friendly modifications to their brick and mortar businesses.

However, when it comes to marketing activities, accessibility refers to different issues. Indeed, making your marketing strategy accessible is about reaching a broad and diverse audience and offering alternatives for those who may not be able to perceive your message in its standard format. Molly Burke, a blind Youtube vlogger, is especially vocal about visual impairment and how brands often fail to target people like her. Burke has made many videos explaining not only how she uses technology in her everyday life but also how some of her favorite brands could transform their online presence to tackle accessibility issues. If you haven’t considered creating an accessible marketing strategy until now, this is the time to renew your communication!

Flash info: Metadata are NOT just for SEO

On-page SEO should be your top priority as a small business owner. Indeed, Search Engine Optimization can make a significant difference in boosting your online traffic, and therefore driving more leads to your site. Aside from keywords and informative content, creating useful metadata is typically part of every SEO strategy. Meta tags are read by search engines such as Google and Bing and used to gain a better understanding of your content.

But they can do a lot more than SEO improvements. Indeed, metadata are not visible to your visitors, but they are accessible to screen readers. Blind or visually impaired users rely essentially on their screen readers to navigate the web. The readers convert the digital text found in the metadata and the HTML code into speech. You can add valuable information for screen readers, such as the language used – which is useful if you quote foreign words in your text, like the French saying ‘c’est la vie’. Additionally, using specific meta tags lets you structure the text, making it understandable in a speech format.

Provide the same information through different channels

It can be difficult for marketers to pursue the creation of the same piece of content through various formats. However, you can find helpful tools that can do the hard work for you. A text to voice messaging tool is a brilliant solution to target users who may be able to read written messages. It can be helpful to collect information regarding your users’ communication preferences at an early stage so that you can adjust your campaigns to their requirements. Additionally, blind users such as Molly Burke rely on an accessibility-friendly function that converts the content of their smartphone into speech. In other words, your SMS is likely to be read if you accidentally forget to use voice messaging. However, you should avoid drawing your smileys as smartphone voice-over tools tend to read each punctuation sign separated. Colon. Right-hand side bracket.

Can the blind hear my images?

Molly Burke is not only vocal about the issues faced by the visually impaired community, but she is also a fantastic role model for businesses who want to boost their accessibility. Indeed, Burke’s Instagram account features accessible image descriptions that help all users to understand what the picture is about. She provides a summary of the objects and people in the photo, their names, the animals, the surroundings, and the emotions that are expressed. In short, anybody with a screen reader can know what your images display even if they can’t see. For websites, the function is in the meta tags; it’s the alternative text that serves as a translation of the picture. On social media, you can write an accessible description in the caption content.

Sure, videos are great… unless you can’t see/hear them

It would be foolish to pretend that focusing on the blind community is enough. Deaf users struggle a lot less online, as they can access most content without difficulties. However, if you are using videos on your site or if you’ve created a vlogging channel, you should consider the addition of caption subtitles. Indeed, subtitles make the video accessible to those who struggle with hearing impairments. However, you can also create content for screen readers to ensure that your videos remain meaningful to those who can’t see them.StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Accessibility|What Is Accessible Marketing?

What about less confident users?

Finally, creating accessible online content needs to offer simple solutions for all your users. Users who are less confident about digital communication should also be a target with simple and straightforward processes to unsubscribe, purchase, or create an account online. Don’t let them wander what to do.

Accessibility has to become part of your everyday marketing strategy. You can’t afford to make it an afterthought anymore without risking to lose a valuable part of your audience.