Mistake #4: Failing to select right facility. It’s location, location, location! Depending on locale of your attendees, proximity to airport, sleeping room costs, freeways, major thoroughfares and traffic patterns are critical. Meeting room location, meeting room size, and parking fees all affect your attendance.

Mistake #5: Failing to work out who should be coming and how to reach them. I can’t tell you haw many times I have seen events fail because of this one factor. Secure your entire list before securing your date in writing. Be sure your list has all names, titles, mailing addresses, fax numbers, and e-mail addresses. Your attendees can’t register if you can’t reach them.

Mistake #6: Failing to secure contracts. Here’s where you can really run into trouble. Do NOT promote your event without legible, signed contracts for everything including your speaker, facility, and other contractors.

Mistake #7: Failing to market event properly. Once you’ve created your marketing plan, stick to it! Once your event is booked it’s critical all of your marketing contacts go as planned. Remember to use every means to reach your attendees. One method alone doesn’t reach everyone because we are all different.

Newsletter - If you are not aware of it, newsletters are an awesome tool to communicate with existing customers and tell possible prospects about your company. This could be a printed newsletter that is mailed or available at your location or you could create one online or start an email newsletter. Start today to gather your customers email addresses so you can communicate with them.

Software - There are many software programs out there that tout that they will submit your site to hundreds or thousands of search engines. Buyer beware! Make sure to know what they submit to (search engines, link farms, FFA's, directories, etc). Do they update software to keep up to date with search engine scripts and algorithms? You will find that there are really 15-25 key engines/directories out there and then another 50-60 fringe engines to submit to.

Web Site Content - Your web site should have up-to-date, relevant and quality content pertaining to your industry and your company. Make your site somewhat resourceful and interactive with your customers or prospects with local/national news, weather, maps, related links, newsletters, specials, FAQ's, surveys, polls, questionnaires and list could go on. Give good quality content and people will continue to come back to your site.

Referrals - Make sure you have a referral feature on every page of your web site. This little feature allows users to click a button or link that sends an email to a friend or associate about your web site.

There are some technical areas that need to be addressed as well regarding making sure that your web site is search engine ready. We call it Search Engine Optimization and Submission. That is an entirely different and very extensive topic. This is an ongoing process in life of your web site.

There is definitely a need to have a Strategic Marketing Plan in place for your online presence whether you are going to take full advantage of above tips or outsource this project. If you want to make your web site have an impact on your business you have to make a conscious effort at getting it noticed. You have opportunity for your business to be online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year and available to an estimated Internet population of 149 million in United States and over 450 million worldwide (CyberAtlas), so why not take full advantage of this medium. Enjoy ride!!!

©2003 BMRW & Associates, Inc.