Karen Skidmore's Kick-Ass Blog | CanDoCanBe

Promote Less and Charge More

One of the easiest ways of making your business more profitable is to stop offering lots of choice and put your prices up.

Offer "affordable" and "low-cost" solutions to your clients and it is easy to get caught in the trap of constant promotions.  You can see this happening on the High Street at the moment.  Big retailers are offering pre-christmas sales and slashing their prices.  But the low margins mean that they have to get large numbers of customers through their doors to hit their sales targets.

When you run your own business, this is a strategy that rarely works.  It's hard to attract the high numbers of clients you need to make the profits you want.

Here is a simple example using workshops to show you what I mean.

Half-day workshop tickets sell at £45
Delegate rate & room hire cost you £10 per person
Gross Profit per person £35

To make a total gross profit (and remember you still need to take in to account all the cost of promoting the event, work book printing, admin support, etc) of £500, you need a minimum of 15 tickets sold. 

Full-day workshop tickets sell at £195
Delegate rate & room hire cost you £40 per person
Gross Profit per person £155

To make the same £500 gross profit, you only need to sell 4 tickets.  If you sold 15 tickets, you would make a gross profit of £2325.

You would have to run at least 4 half day workshops to make the same gross profit as running one full day workshop.

Which workshop programme do you think will take less of your time to make £2,000?

(Please note, these calculations are simplified.  Do make sure you work out your net profit carefully when running events and don't get caught out by focusing on your gross profit per person!)

Planning to run any workshops this Autumn?

I know, I know.  We get some nice hot weather today here in the UK and it’s summer time.  Why on earth would you want to be thinking about the Autumn already?

Well, if you are planning to run any workshops in September through to November, then you really need to be deciding on your dates, booking the venue and planning your marketing.

Don’t leave this until September because it will just be too late!  You need a minimum of 6 weeks to market a live workshop and have all your places booked – and if you don’t have an existing database to market to then you will need even longer.  I recommend at least 2 months, preferably 3.

So come on – get your diary out and sort out a date!

Writing Marketing Copy? Know your customer first!

Had a great business mentoring session with a client yesterday who wanted to focus on getting an action plan together to help her write her website copy.  The design and template was done, but it couldn’t go live until the copy had been written.

However, one hour later we had not only time planned the copy writing but also spent the best part of the session focusing on who exactly she wanted to attract to her website.

Her target audience of “women” was just too broad and she soon realised that to enable her to write powerful and engaging copy that stopped surfers in their tracks and got them to leave their name and email address, she needed to be absolutely clear on who it was she wanted to engage with.

Whether it is the home page of your website, a flyer for your next event or a postcard to handout at networking events, spend some time writing out the profile of the person you want to be attracting before you write the copy.

It will save you months of wasted marketing! 

If you want to learn more about customer profiling and how you go about it, then grab your copy of The CanDoCanBe Marketing Manual. Click here for more info.

Buy a dedicated domain for your individual products

For those of you who have just the one website promoting your business online and yet have several programmes, products or specific workshops on offer, having a dedicated domain for each programme, product or workshop can make your marketing messages work more effectively (as well as helping your search engine optimisation).

It is a great short cut to having lots of mini-sites created, as well as keeping your online visitor within your one site.

Let me give you an example.  You may be promoting a particular workshop called Creative Minds.  You have the page on your website listing the dates, times, agenda, testimonials, etc but that page url may be something like this:  www.YourBizName.co.uk/workshops/creativeminds.html

Quite a link if you are using this page to send people to in your marketing.  Too long a link in an email as it could easily be broken in the received version.  Too long a link to look good on a printed leaflet.  And far too long for people to remember if you are telling them.

Register www.CreativeMinds.co.uk – something short and snappy which people can type easily – and set up your web host to re-direct the traffic to the dedicated page on your website (it’s called domain mapping).

Hey presto, you have an effective marketing message.

How a nail technician training room got me started marketing workshops

When marketing events and workshops, the biggest cost and hit to your profit line is often the venue.

It can be tough when you have made the decision to start offering group sessions, only to fall at the first hurdle – the conference day delegate rate!

The traditional conference hotel or business centre can easily charge £10 a head just for coffee and a few danishes, never mind the £70 for a finger buffet lunch and afternoon tea!

What to do?  Think outside the box and consider where all the free (or lower cost) venues could be.

• Who do you know who could offer a meeting room at local offices?  You could offer to publicise the event with a “thanks for our sponsors” link.
• What about finding places that have rooms available at their non-busy times?  Weekdays for wedding venues, Saturday mornings for conference hotels, mid-mornings at the local sports centre
• Private rooms at restaurants and function rooms at pubs outside of eating times

My first “Work/Life Balance” workshops were run in a hairdressing salon where they offered me their nail technician training room in exchange for me showing my workshop delegates round the salon at the end of the session.  I got a free venue, they had me bring a handful of women in to their salon on their quieter days.

OK, not the glam or the glitz of a usual training room, but it gave me the opportunity to deliver my first open workshops with a very low financial risk.  So if venue costs are stopping you, where can you start? 

Email Signatures Work!

Having dedicated email signatures to promote specific products and workshops has been mentioned several times on this blog, but is worth mentioning again and again as such simple ideas are often over looked.

If you consider how many individual emails you send out day after day, you soon realise how many messages about your business you could be telling people.

And the most powerful parts of any communication is the headline (or subject heading when you think of an email) and then the P.S.

Your eye naturally scans the top quickly, down to the bottom and then you read the content if it captures your attention.

Your email signature is your P.S. so make the most of it, especially if you are marketing a workshop or particular event.  Ask your reader to click through to a dedicated web page for more information and you will be amazed how many curious people do just that.

Taster Sessions work - even for equine therapists!

Julie Todd sent in a great story in response to the last newsletter article “6 Common Mistakes Made when Marketing Events & Workshops” and has kindly given permission for me to share with you.

“In your article you talk about giving tasters - well I have an excellent example which I came across just yesterday and thought you might be interested. 

“I was grooming for a friend at a dressage competition.  We'd just unloaded Victor (the horse that is - and he did come 3rd in his large class so he was victorious!) and this man came up and introduced himself. 

“He was an equine therapist/masseur and offered us a pre or post competition free 15 minute massage.  Well we took him up on his offer and Victor loved it.  Whilst massaging he talked about his service, clients he worked for, etc. 

“I remarked that I thought this was an excellent marketing initiative and he said he goes to shows about once a month and his hit rate is 1 in10 which I think is great.   So another example of samples leading to business.”

6 Common Mistakes Made When Marketing Events & Workshops

Adding workshops and training events to your business mix can be an excellent way of increasing your revenue as well as raising your profile in your local market place.

Workshops can be run at plush hotels, coffee bars, online, through conference calls - in fact when you let your imagination run wild, events can be as big or small as you want them to be.

But there is nothing worse than spending your precious time designing an event, booking a venue and marketing it only to have more trainers than delegates!  And I am sure this is why so many people are put off by running events.

It's the thought "but what happens if no one comes?"

There are several common mistakes that many people make running live events.  Read on to find out how you can avoid them and make sure your events are filled successfully.

Mistake No 1: Offer events that people need - not what they want.  It is too easy to spot a gap in the market and decide to share your expertise on a subject that you just know is needed.  But if there is no desire for what you are offering, it makes selling your event incredibly hard work. After all, it is not just money someone is investing in a live event - it is their time as well.

Find out what your market place really wants before deciding on your agenda.  If you don't believe me, try offering a time management workshop and just see how many people pay you money to attend :)

Mistake No 2: Think advertising not marketing.  "How do I advertise my events?" is often one of the first questions people ask.  Advertising costs can eat in to your profit incredibly quickly and to be frank, will not work if you are offering an event "cold".  Unless you have a strong brand presence in your market, you need to build people's trust in you.  You need to design a marketing plan that builds a conversation with potential delegates.

Mistake No 3: Start marketing with no database.  The larger the database of interested customers you have, the more likely you are to fill your event.  If you have a database of 100 people and you are trying to market an event that you need 7 to break even and 20 to make your target profit, the maths just don't add up.  Your conversion rate needs to be 20% which will only work if you have a very desirable topic and those people all happen to be free on the same day. 

Mistake No 4: Offer the whole cake rather than a taster.  The reason that stall holders at Farmers' Markets offer a morsel to taste is that they want to tempt you to buy the whole cake.  If you want to offer taster sessions to test the market place, consider breaking down your offerings to morsels. It makes it much easier to charge the true value of the event once you start marketing it commercially.

Mistake No 5: Discount heavily as desperation sets in.  Your workshop is in 5 days and you need another 4 or 5 people to really make it work.  You start discounting and offering BOGOFFs (buy one, get one free!).  But how do you think this makes the people, who have already committed to you, feel?  It's like going on holiday, only to find that the person in the room next door got the exact same holiday for half the price because they booked on teletext the week before.

Offer early bird discounts and reward the people who book in advance. If you really need to increase the numbers at short notice, it is far better PR by offering a few free places to your favourite customers as a thank you for their loyalty to you.

Mistake No 6:  Have no follow on events.  One event does not make a business.  Always have something else to offer to people who genuinely can't attend the day of the workshop, but are interested in what you are offering.  (at the very least offer an email newsletter to keep in touch with them!) 

You may find that it takes 4 or 5 months to build up awareness for your events.  It seems a long time, but believe me it will then make filling workshop 3 and 4 far easier (and a lot more fun for you!)

What's my biggest mistake?  Not to double check the day that I had booked a training room.  I found out the day before 15 ladies where expecting to drive to Guildford from across the South East that I wasn't due until the day after!  We had a fun workshop in the staff training room, complete with mops and buckets, which actually added to the day :)

What's yours?  I am sure there are other mistakes that people make and I would love to them.  Drop me an email and tell me your story – or be brave and leave a comment

How do you get people to your workshops and seminars?

You have started up in business.  You have had a steady flow of clients who have enjoyed and benefited from working with you and now you have decided to get in to workshops.

After all, if you want to build successful and consistent revenue flow, group work is the way forward, isn't it?

Finding new clients week in and week out is hard work and by offering group sessions you can reach out to more people, at more affordable rates.  And some of those people will be tempted to work with you one-to-one, perhaps?

So you decide to launch your first workshop.

You set a date and then start telling people about your wonderful seminar.  But the ticket sales don't go as well as you expected. 

You start to panic a little as the date of the workshop looms.  Are 3 people really enough to run this workshop, you start asking yourself?

Then you panic and cancel.