What tactics are you using to raise awareness for your brand and help move people along in their buying journey? Do you blog? Post on social media? Dabble in paid search? While those are all extremely effective tactics, sometimes one of the best ways of reaching your audience is getting out in the marketplace and interacting with them face-to-face. So if you are looking for another way to reach your audience, consider doing some speaking engagements!
Do you offer a service or product that you are an expert on? If so, get out there and tell people about it. The catch is that you need to educate….not sell. It’s important that you take an Inbound Marketing approach to your presentation and offer up valuable information.
What constitutes valuable information?
Let’s say you are a local coffee shop that roasts your own coffee beans and you want to get more customers in your shop, so you can share your coffee expertise and get them to try your product. Instead of just giving away free cups of coffee, what if you hosted a speaking engagement or information session?
You could host a free information session with a title like, “Your Coffee Before the Cup”. During this session you can showcase your expertise in your area, and explain coffee quality standards and how your coffee options fall in those ranges. Talk about the how the soil, rain and other factors impact the taste of the coffee beans, and how these and other factors impact the quality and the cost of the different varieties of coffee.
People will leave the session informed about not only your product, but about the coffee industry as a whole. It empowers the buyer to make a choice based on the valuable information you have provided them. If I now know and understand the difference between a mid-grade and a high-grade bean and I appreciate the difference, it would stand to reason I would spend the extra to give myself the best coffee experience.
How do you measure the success of your event?
Well, there are several things you can look at when trying to gauge the success of your speaking engagement: the number of attendees, your social media engagement, the number of weekly sales and most importantly your average sale amount.
Since you took the time to educate your customer base on the factors that impact the price of a cup of your coffee at your information session, you might be able to convert a significant amount of your attendees to a higher price point. If your average ticket is $3.00, with weekly sales of 2,000 cups you are selling $6,000 worth of coffee a week. What if by educating your customers you convert them to a $3.50 average ticket with the same weekly sales of 2,000 cups? Now you would be selling $7,000 a week in coffee. That’s an extra $52,000 a year…that’s not small beans!
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