My philosophy is that events is an integral part of succeeding in entrepreneurship and it’s very essential for entrepreneurs with earning higher profits within business. I feel that entrepreneurs totally underestimate the power of events and the impact that it can have within their business and the need for it within their actual business model. Event planning doesn’t necessarily have to be hard. It is difficult obviously if it’s not your ministry, but it doesn’t have to be super difficult for you to do if you are not an event planner.
Most of the time event planning and hosting events don’t work for someone entrepreneurs because they are trying to DIY (do it yourself) everything without any sound direction and without any sound foundation to build from. Sometimes you’ll see these great events that pop up and you want to attend them and then as it gets closer to the date you’ll see that the event hosts are actually canceling the event, postponing it, or rescheduling it. This is typically because they have failed with executing it properly, they have failed with actually creating revenue and profit for the event, and they have failed at getting people to purchase tickets for the event.
So let’s discuss 3 strategies for service-based entrepreneurs that will help you increase your profits through events.
Events are proven to diversify your revenue. I’m sure you have seen businesses like Essence and Black Enterprise produce events and events aren’t even their expertise. Essence is a magazine focused on digital and published content for celebrities, hair, fashion, and beauty. However, they still do host events. Essence hosts the Essence Festival every summer along with other various events throughout the year. Black Enterprise has a ton of events for entrepreneurs throughout the year for both men and women. Also, a lot of beauty brands have events such as summits, conferences, pop-up events, or launch event. So this proves that you don’t have to be an event planner to host an event and the impact of hosting an event for your business can be huge.
Events help you to build, develop, and deepen your relationships with your audience. Most service-based entrepreneurs are online all the time so in order for you to be able to connect more with your audience, you have to have some type of face-to-face interaction with them. The best way to do this is through live events. Live events are not only beneficial to your audience, but they’re also beneficial to your brand as well. They add value to your brand, increase your credibility, your visibility in your industry, and add value to the individuals who are attending your events.
First things first, you have to be able to take a risk and step out and actually start hosting events, but make sure that you’re very strategic in doing so. Don’t get stuck on the fact that you have to have a huge following or you have to make thousands of dollars in your business before you can host an event. As long as you have a current following, no matter how many people it is, you are good to go to host an event. If you have a current engaging following of 50 people that’s great! You can host a small intimate event with 25 people. Let’s say that tickets are $100 and you get 25 people to show up for a 3-hour event, that’s $2,500 that you didn’t have had you not shown up to host the event. Let’s say you were to host a summit or 2-day conference and you charged $197 and you currently have 150 engaging followers and 25 of them actually purchased tickets. That’s $4,900. You don’t have to host big grand-scale events all the time. You can start with smaller events and allow them to grow your audience so that you can begin hosting larger events.
Here are 3 strategies that you can begin working on now:
- Develop a profit plan
You can’t make profits if you don’t have a profit plan. Without a profit plan you have no idea what your profits are estimated to be or what you need to strive to make in order to not incur any losses. This is why most people who host events are either breaking even, losing money, or only making a couple hundred dollar profit, if that.
Develop a profit plan and create some concrete revenue goals. If you don’t have any revenue goals, you don’t have a plan. If you don’t have a plan how do you expect to make large profits.
So start asking yourself:
What will it cost you to host an event?
How many tickets do you need to sell to reach a profit?
What are the different pricing levels for the tickets?
How many tickets of each level do you need to sell for you to reach your revenue and profit goal?
When creating a budget ensure that you include all your expenses. Even if you have to buy some pens for $5, it needs to go in your budget. Your total profit is your revenue minus all you expenses. Just because you make $5,000 in revenue doesn’t mean you made a profit of $5,000. This is why it’s so important that you track every penny made and spent.
Ask yourself, how many times a year are you going to host your event? If it’s a smaller-scale event where you can do it quarterly and make $5,000 each event that’s $20,000 for the year.
Make sure that you include your speaker budget, venue budget, branding budget, catering, and marketing budget within your overall budget as well. Most people tend to leave these areas out and it’s another reason why events aren’t working for them. Without a marketing budget, you probably haven’t taken the time out to create a marketing plan, which leads to the next strategy.
2. Create a marketing plan
You can not post your event flyer two weeks before your event and expect it to sell out when you haven’t built buzz for the event and you haven’t built a solid audience. If you’re new to your industry and nobody knows who you are and you’re putting a flyer out two weeks prior on social media that is not a marketing plan. You also can not post the flyer once a week and wonder why you are getting in ticket sale notifications. You need to create a social media plan inside your event marketing plan. Brainstorm on the content you will post on social media outside just posting the event flyer. You should have engaging posts, content letting them know what they should expect at the event, key takeaways that they can look forward to, who’s attending the event, who the speakers are, if the speakers are doing meet-and-greets, and all other details for the event should be included in your marketing plan.
You also have to make sure that you are marketing outside of social media. Social media should not be your only marketing tool. You should have an affiliates programs, sending text messages frequently, and email blasts. You have to dig deep when creating your marketing plan and get creative.
3. Use the assets you already have and leverage your current community
Use the assets that you already have in your possession. Don’t go trying to take out a business loan to host an event when you haven’t even tried to use your own funds. If you don’t have the funds start crowdfunding, fundraise, or do something on your own before you just go dive into borrowing money from people. If you’re borrowing money that’s just more money you have to make just so you can pay your loan off. The more money you borrow, the more money you need to make in order to make a profit. Instead use your savings or launch a new online program, a new workshop, or a new product, and the money that you make from one of those three you can use to invest in your event.
Also, partner with influencers and thought leaders within your industry or those who have a similar market as yours. If you don’t know any influencers and thought leaders this is the perfect time for you to start building relationships with a few. Start supporting them, start shouting them out on social media, and start referring people to them. If you see that they have a program that they’re launching or an upcoming event, support them by purchasing or sponsoring a ticket. Repost and share their content and start engaging with them more on social media. Then you can go ahead and pitch them to be a part of your event.
Leveraging your current community is something that a lot of entrepreneurs neglect. Stop trying to gain a bigger following and stop ignoring your current audience and focus on deepening the relationships with the people who are already in your tribe. They already support you so make them feel valued. Don’t lose the people you already have because you’re focused on increasing numbers. Add value to your current tribe by setting up a referral program, which will help with your marketing. They believe in you and they believe in the vision that you have so they will spread the word for your event with no problem.
You can give them 50% off of their registration ticket or waive their registration for every two people that they refer. Make them feel valued and give them something in return for their continued support. They are helping you sell more tickets, you’re able to increase your revenue, and you will be able to impact more people with your event.
What strategy will you start working on first and what areas are you struggling in when hosting events? Let’s hear it!
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