Hosting an event can be a great opportunity to show off your business. A lunch and learn can be a good way to educate your customers about new products or important concepts. An evening dinner could be a good way to make your top customers feel important. An open house could help bring in brand new customers and to build word-of-mouth buzz. However, to make your event effective, it’s important to ask yourself these important questions.

1. Who Is Your Target Audience?
Do you want to encourage your top customers to continue using your business? Do you want to create more sales by bringing in prospective customers? Knowing what audience you’re targeting for your event can help focus your plans and ensure that you’re talking to the right people.

2. What Do You Need?
Once you’ve decided on your audience, make a list of everything you’ll need. Do you need to rent a sound system for a lunch and learn? Do you need to send invitations to your customers? Do you need to prepare a talk? Do you need to have catering or book a venue? No matter what type of event you’re hosting, take some time to make a list of everything you need to do before the event can get started.

3. What Else is Going On?
Have you ever scheduled a trip, only to find out that there was a big event going on at the same time? You will want to avoid creating that kind of challenge for your customers, so it’s a good idea to consider other events that might cause an issue. This will help ensure that your customers don’t have to deal with excessive traffic or challenging parking because of another event in your area, and it helps ensure that they won’t have a conflict that prevents them from attending.

This isn’t just local, though. Consider whether there are out-of-town events that your customers will be attending that might make them unavailable for your event. For example, if you work largely with schools then you wouldn’t want to schedule your event on the same weekend as a state education conference.

4. What Are Your Limitations?
You want to host a great event, but it’s important to know what you can or cannot realistically do. If your schedule is tight, hosting an all-day event might be beyond what you’re able to do at the moment. If your budget is tight, a catered lunch might be more challenging than a coffee hour event. If you have a quick turn between planning and the event itself, you might have to keep the guest list small and the event itself simple.

5. How Are You Going to Get People Through the Door?
Getting people to attend an event is all about how you pitch it to them. If you want to bring in the community, marketing in a local paper could be a good option. If you want to bring in your top customers with a feeling of exclusivity, you might want to invest in an announcement to invite them to your event. And for some audiences, an invitation or marketing pitch might not be enough; you might need to offer food or freebies to get them interested. Whatever your audience, it’s good to plan how you will encourage them to be at your event.

Do you plan events at your business? How do you ensure that they are a success? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

You’ve made it past the initial elevator pitch. Your new customer is interested. You’ve scheduled a meeting. You might be tempted to create a big presentation that will take most of your allotted time.

Then your customer calls. Maybe their day just got a lot busier. Maybe the weather looks like it is going to take a turn and they need to be out the door earlier than expected. Maybe they simply needed to shorten your meeting. It’s time to create a presentation that will pack a lot of sales punch into a limited time frame—and Navitor is here to help! Here are our tips for creating a great presentation when time is tight.

1. Start With What You Know—What Challenge are You Solving?
Whether you’ve had a chance to talk with your customer about the challenges their business is facing or you only know a little bit about the market they do business in, focusing on what need you’re fulfilling is an important way to bring focus to your presentation. If the customer mentioned that they are rebranding, for example, take a moment to discuss how ordering updated stationery pieces can help establish that brand. If they are moving to a new location, talk to them about updating signage. And if you’re going in blind, consider using our vertical market kits as a guide for which print pieces might be a good fit for their market.

2. Get Visual
You know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words? When you don’t have time for those thousand words, embracing visuals can be a great way to pack more information into the presentation. Wherever you can, use graphs to illustrate data or diagrams to illustrate concepts like bleed. Not only do these visuals help your prospective customers understand the information you’re giving them, but they do so at a glance. And if your customer wants a more detailed discussion of the data you’re sharing, consider having a printout of the full information on hand.

And speaking of visuals…

3. Use Samples to Reinforce Information
Samples can be a good way to show your customers what final printed pieces will look like, and having print pieces to look at can help reinforce the information you’re discussing in your presentation. They are especially important if you’re going into your presentation without having had much contact with your prospective customer—samples can give them a great idea of what you can do.

4. End With a Call to Action
Especially when time is tight, having a clear next step in place is key to keeping the conversation going. Whether you’re going to call them in a week to discuss their needs further or they are going to send you their designs for business cards so that you can place the order, make sure that you end the meeting with a clear next step.

How do you create a great presentation when time is tight? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

There are a lot of ways to approach your marketing strategy. You can lean hard on online marketing. You can advertise on television, on the radio, in magazines or newspapers. But all of these methods can be expensive. So how can you market your business when your budget is tight? Here are some effective—and low-cost—marketing strategies that you can use to get the word out about your business.

Work on your Public Relations
If you can make the news, it can be a powerful way to promote your business without making a big impact on your budget. A news story can help raise your profile in the public eye, and a news story feels more authoritative than an advertisement.

How can you get started? Consider a press release. Even if you only distribute the release to local news outlets, a press release is a good way to spread the word about big news at your business. From new locations to new products, there are a lot of pieces of news that could help you connect to the press. And, if you’re looking to make a splash…

Give Back
Giving back to the community is a great way to create a positive reputation for your business and to make the news. Sponsoring an event like a cancer walk, having a collection jar for the local food shelf at your storefront, or even taking some time as a business to volunteer for a good cause can be a good way to give back and to generate goodwill with customers and prospects.

Use What You Already Have
One of the best ways to save money in your marketing strategy is by using what you already have—and you might have more than you think! When you creatively use your existing resources, you can build a strong foundation for your marketing strategy and make your budget even more effective.

If you have a storefront, you have many promotional possibilities before you. Your storefront’s windows are a place to showcase samples or banners to advertise special offers. Your door and windows are a great place to display your logo and store hours. The sidewalk out front is an opportunity for A-frame signs to bring in walk-in traffic.

Talk to Your Suppliers!
One important thing you already have is your suppliers. From free sales kits and samples to digital resources like catalogs and flyers, your supplier might already offer a variety of pieces you can use in your marketing strategy. Navitor does—and we create new flyers every month!

Use Your Budget for What’s Important
No matter what your budget, saving money by using the previous tips can give you more wiggle room in your budget for more expensive marketing options. For example, using supplier sales tools might allow you to invest the time and money you would have otherwise spent in designing your own flyers in advertisement in a local publication instead.

How do you save money on your marketing budget? We’d love to see your tips and tricks in the comments below.