There is going to be a lot of tech talk in this article. The reason for this really is that marketing in today’s world means looking at data in software tools. If you have any questions about the meaning of things mentioned in this article, we recommend that you head over to use tools like ChatGPT or Claude.ai to do a deeper dive.
What isn’t being measured, can’t be improved
Much of marketing is experimenting with various methods, media, and channels to reach your prospective customers. During your exploration and work in this journey though, you need to measure performance of everything your trying. If you aren’t measuring performance, you will just burn through money and you won’t be able to find the things that are working.
In terms of measuring analytics on your website such as traffic and conversions, you should set up 1, or more, analytic tools like Posthog and Google Analytics. The goal with these tools is that you want to track traffic, visitor behavior (where do they go once they land on your website), and conversions. Conversions are really the main items you want to care about as these are worth the most. A conversion is an action or event that a visitor performs that bumps them to the next step of indicating interest. If you are spending on ads anywhere on the Internet that is then driving people to your website, you want to be using analytics to determine which ads are driving traffic, and more importantly which ads are resulting in what conversions.
The best traffic to your website is free traffic. If part of your marketing efforts are around SEO work that help you rank well on search terms, you’ll want to sign up for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. These are the official (and free) tools offered by search providers that allow you to see which keywords you are ranking for. If you really want to get uber technical on SEO and search performance, you’ll want to go for paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush. These even allow you to put in the websites of your competitors to track what search terms they are ranking well on, and even see what other websites are linking to them (backlinks from other quality websites is a huge contributor to search performance).
Capturing conversions and prospects
Once your able to capture eyeball time and hopefully have prospects complete a conversion, you need to try to capture their info/interest into a modern CRM. There are general CRM platforms and then there are ones tailored more for event companies. The ones geared towards event companies & venues are Tripleseat and Event Temple. But as you go about signing up for trials, you should also evaluate if general CRM platforms might be a better fit for your workflows. Some great general CRMs to look at include: Hubspot, Honeybook, and Pipedrive.
B2B Outreach
Much of what we covered so far are tools that can be used with for marketing that targets both consumers and business prospects. We’ll take a moment here to talk about some tools that you should try in regards to going after business prospects. In terms of marketing and selling to a more formal business prospect, the best way to find and reach people is on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has gotten a bad rap over the years, but if done effectively, some of your largest deals can come from outreach done in it. You can manually reach out to targets prospects using LinkedIn’s powerful search functionality (especially if you pay for LinkedIn Sales Navigator), or you can automate and scale your marketing outreach using tools like Phantombuster
Getting listed on directories
Besides the usual places on the Web where your customers might be (i.e. social media apps/websites), you also have to think about other websites they might be landing on when they do a Google search. These other websites, are often directories that pay a lot for Google Ads, or rank really well in organic search results. Oftentimes these high ranking, or high ad spend, websites are vendor or venue directories. There are quite a few directories that focus on the event industry. If you are an event vendor, you should take a look at ones like GigSalad, WeddingWire, The Knot, Yelp (just be prepared to block sales calls). If you are a venue, you should take a look at PartySlate, Eventective, EventUp, PeerSpace, and Giggster.
People do read reviews
When people are evaluating your company for hire, they are going to look for social proof, and this means they want to see what others are saying about you. Best way to achieve this is to get your customers to post reviews about your company on review websites.