TMCnet News
Marketing Success in the Meetings Business: It's Not About the Price Tag*!(Corporate Meetings & Incentives Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) During my quarter-century working in the international meetings business, I’ve come to agree with singer Jessie J*: Success doesn’t increase with the size of your wallet, especially when it comes to winning international meetings. In fact, often the dullest, least effective campaigns are put together by destinations and companies that are flush with cash. Today, most of us are faced with shrinking budgets and demands to do more with less. My advice is to use this as an opportunity to entirely change your perspective and upgrade your creativity. Take a fresh look at the assets you already possess. You might be amazed if you drill down deep enough. Here are a few ideas: • Find the unknown skills possessed by staff members and deploy them. I heard a great example of one company that discovered a junior staff member was an expert mountain climber. Now she’s in charge of developing and selling its teambuilding programs. Is one of your sales managers a great singer or jazz pianist or even a DJ? Use them during promotional evenings and save on the entertainment budget. One ICCA member who runs a small professional congress organizer is a fanatical classic motorbike rider: He turns up at every big sales pitch in his leathers with helmet under one arm, immediately differentiating himself from dark-suited competitors, and giving him an aura of authenticity when he talks about issues such as how to design meetings that are fun and engaging. Which of your team really understands social media? (Clue: they’re usually the ones who roll their eyes and keep texting with one hand whilst the VP presents the corporate social media plan.) Why aren’t they advising senior management on handling this effectively? •Extract every ounce of marketing value out of the meetings business you already have on the books. Most venues don’t pay attention to an event once confirmed until it walks through the door, missing a host of marketing opportunities. Use the organizers as powerfully authentic spokespersons in advertising and PR; use their delegates’ social media circles to promote the event and your destination or venue before, during, and after the event; use the top scientists, business leaders, or technologists in attendance to give lectures at local universities to help you build local relationships that can generate new bidding partners from your city’s academic institutions; find out if the delegates themselves have the potential to be future clients and market to them cheaply on site. •Fully exploit your partnerships, networks, and relationships. I’ve concluded that working alone is a recipe for certain failure. Think about how you can better contribute towards the success of Team City, Team Region, Team Country, or work with like-minded companies in other countries, and find new partners in the associations you belong to. If you belong to a multinational hotel brand, don’t just be a passive player. Find out which other hotels around the world attract the same type of business or have managers who are open to collaborative projects. Think about both long-term consortia and opportunistic project-based partnerships, and be willing to experiment: For example, the Washington, D.C., and Brussels convention bureaus work in partnership when each is running a promotion aimed at international association clients based in their partner’s region, with Washington phoning the U.S. clients for Brussels and vice versa—no more cold calls. Think of some of your competitors as potential collaborators. After all, you’re usually chasing the same clients, so why not team up from time to time? • Stop spending time and money on dumb stuff! This sounds easy, but the most common mistakes I see today are those that were prevalent back in the early 1990s as well. For example, cut down on generic mass-communication. (Stop e-mailing out brochures before trade shows—you know who you are!) Personalize every e-mail and mailshot to each potential client, making sure you’ve researched them carefully before spending money on them—hotels seem to be particularly guilty of this sin! Don’t produce advertising with pictures of suited executives wandering barefoot on a beach featuring a strapline saying “use our facilities and you won’t need to worry about your next meeting.” Most planners are female, meetings are about delivering business results, and (this next phrase is particularly true!) the vast majority of planners love running their meetings! Be choosy about the business you take and chase. There’s a simple reason why the most successful destinations boast win-rates in excess of 60 percent of the bids they go for. They avoid chasing business they aren’t likely to win! In these days of massive volumes of electronic RFPs and high costs of undertaking any serious bid for a major event, deciding what events not to bid for is one of the smartest ways to allocate resources effectively. •Give PR as much priority as advertising. Every meeting you host is an opportunity to generate great stories and pictures. But please, no more pictures of the hotel GM at some society page party. Put the clients on the front page, with a story about their event, told in their own words, about the business opportunities they’ve created, the knowledge they’ve transferred, the medical advances they’ve helped to progress. Once we determine that success isn’t linked to budgetary affluence, it’s clear that any cash-strapped destination or company can significantly improve its marketing results. It just requires effort, imagination, trust, and a fundamental change of marketing mentality—I didn’t say it was going to be easy! *Note for the confused older reader (like me!) who may not recognize a pop-culture reference when they see one: “Price Tag” was an international hit single for the English singer Jessie J. © 2014 Penton Media |