Your overall and long-term success as a New York event planner lies within your ability to create incredible event experiences. But it also heavily depends on the effectiveness of your lead generation strategies. How you attract, engage, and land new event-planning clients matters. And without a lead generation plan to target your core audience of decision-makers, you’ll be flying blind with crossed fingers. Stop hoping for more event clients and create funnels and initiatives that attract them to your brand. These are the most effective lead-gen strategies to consider implementing into your roadmap. And aligning your efforts with these best practices will help you surge the number of event clients you get every week, month, and year!
Lead Generation Basics
Business-to-business marketers today say that 65% of their leads are coming from referrals. Another 38% say their leads are coming from email marketing. And 33% say leads come from search engine optimization. Knowing these stats, event planners can look to emphasize the effectiveness of how they cultivate referrals, implement email marketing strategies, and boost SEO. But first, make sure you recognize the lead generation basics:
What is a lead?
A lead is any event planning decision-maker who expresses some kind of interest in working with your company.
Why is lead-gen so important to event planners?
Lead generation is the method for keeping your pipeline full of potential event clients, helping you avoid those dry spells throughout the year when you don’t have events to curate. Lead-gen is the strategy that keeps your brand in front of your target audience ongoing.
What is a marketing qualified lead?
An MQL is a prospect that may have reached out or engaged with you in some way but isn’t quite ready to start planning an event with you yet.
What is a sales qualified lead?
An SQL is an event decision maker who is interested and ready for you to engage and sell them on your event planning services.
Lead Generation Processes
When you start developing your lead generation process, categorize your efforts and the prospect’s journey into four primary stages.
Introduction – these marketing efforts will introduce your event planning brand and business to your audience.
CTA Nurturing – these marketing efforts provide CTAs that inspire leads to click through to the next step, whether it’s to learn more or gather information.
Information – these marketing efforts are those that provide those recently clicked visitors with the information about your event services and unique offerings.
Conversions – these marketing efforts take the recently informed prospects to the next step, which usually is a conversion when they reach out to you about discussing their event.
Marketing for More Event Client Leads
With the four stages of marketing and lead-gen in mind, you can then map out your marketing channels and strategies to facilitate each. For the introduction phase, you might create email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, and blog strategies that properly “introduce” your event planning services. In the nurturing phase, you’ll create a dedicated landing page with a contact form. Furthermore, you might create a blog, social, or paid ad campaign for the informational stages, sharing relevant content about how you’re uniquely positioned to solve their event planning pain points. And past event client testimonials are pivotal tools across all lead-generation efforts since they’re proven statements that inspire testimonials and referrals.
Lead Generation Strategies
For event planning professionals, these lead-generation strategies prove to be the most effective. Once you’ve developed your goals and identified your target audience, consider these channels and strategies for facilitating your lead generation plans.
- Facebook Lead Generation
- Twitter Lead Generation
- LinkedIn Lead Generation
- Pay-Per-Click or Paid Ad Lead Generation
- B2B Lead Generation
Additional Tips for Lead Generation Strategy Execution
Because your event planning lead gen needs to be an ongoing initiative, keep these tips in mind to fine-tune and polish your efforts. If it’s not working, change things up and A/B test where you need to find improved results.
- Use the right lead-generation tools, including software, ad designs, and content partners.
- Follow the metrics ongoing so you can spot an ineffective effort immediately and make changes.
- Make your marketing just as fun and engaging as your personality and event planning services.
- Verify your message consistency so as not to dilute your brand or message.
- Create great offers and exciting options to always inspire potential leads to take the next step toward engaging with you.
Start growing your event planning leads with these insights and strategies in mind. And learn more effective ways to boost your business when you get tickets to The Event Planner Expo 2023! Get in the room with top events industry professionals and learn from the best about emerging marketing trends, incredible growth tools, and unparalleled business advice! How you market your business and generate leads will gauge your success as an event planner. And event planners know that the best place to be to learn the most is at The Expo.
