Marketing with Meetings
Rohit Talwar is a global futurist and the founder of Fast Future Research. His Foresight Director is Tim Hancock. These two futurists recently made some interesting predictions about the meetings industry. What will these predictions mean to you as a business owner? If you use public speaking to promote your business - and you should - it means a lot. First, let’s look at why public speaking needs to be an integral part of your marketing campaign.
You’ve heard it before, people like to do business with people they know. Your potential customers get to know you when you deliver a speech. They observe you performing under pressure; they see how you’re dressed and how you interact with people. An audience member may ask a controversial question or you may make a statement that causes some friction. This will give your audience an opportunity to see how you handle yourself during conflict. In addition, they see how enthusiastic you are about your product or service. If you believe in it, so will your audience. You can make an instant connection by staying around after your speech and answering questions or engaging in dialog. You can begin to build relationships by collecting business cards and adding more people to your database. Marketing by speaking is one of the tools that you need to add to your mix of maximum marketing with minimum money. Now back to our friends Mr. Talwar and Mr. Hancock.
Meetings are going to have shorter planning periods to implementation. What does this mean to you? It means always having a prepared program packed with useful information for your target audience at the ready. In other words, be prepared. While there will be fewer meetings, the concentration will be on merging meetings and expanding the number of attendees. So don’t be afraid to speak to larger audiences. Understand how to engage bigger crowds and have plenty of materials with your contact information for handouts.
The authors suggest there will be a hybrid of meetings including more virtual meetings. What this means for you is keeping up with technology. Learn how to put together powerful PowerPoint presentations for virtual meetings and programs. Be sure you understand virtual meeting etiquette. Social media will play a large role in promoting meeting events. For you, this means understanding the ins and outs of social media. It means understanding how to use social medial to interact and connect with your audience before, during and after the meeting. For example, if you don’t think Twitter has any impact, just wait until you see some negative comment being tweeted during your program by an attendee with 15,000 followers on his or her Twitter account. Ouch!
The Futurists offer that face-to-face meetings will not disappear completely. However, nowadays we might quip back, define face-to-face. Will face-to-face be only in the flesh or will Skype or Go to Meeting encounters fall into that category? Again, technology may be playing a heavy roll in even face-to-face meetings.
The important thing to bear in mind is that your marketing campaign needs to include several tools that work for you. If you are not a good public speaker, you can learn. If you’re social media challenged, you can learn – or hire someone else to do it. If you’re not using meetings to market, don’t panic about meetings or marketing, you can get past the learning curve. If you’re already using meetings as a marketing tool, now you can better prepare for the coming changes.
