By: Dennis Schiraldi

In the DOYO Live blog this week we discuss:

• Marketing on Small Business Saturday in Youngstown, Ohio

• DOYO Live Super Early Bird Tickets

• The DOYO Live Marketing Show – Featuring The Shop On Liberty Street

• Event Based Marketing – How to Maximize Your Efforts at Your Next Event

• Shop Small – Small Business Saturday in Youngstown

• Social Media and Email Marketing for Small Businesses

• DOYO Live Call For Speakers

DOYO Live Super Early Bird Tickets – Just in time for Small Business Saturday!

Small Business Saturday is here and there are a number of businesses that are celebrating Shop Small in the Youngstown Area. DOYO Live is one of them. We are not only offering a huge savings on DOYO Live 2017 tickets, we are also living the mission and helping some of the local small business owners get the word out to shop local, which are highlighted in this blog.

We are celebrating shop small by offering a $100 ticket to DOYO Live 2017. This is a significant savings off full ticket prices, for those of you that don’t know. DOYO Live is a digital marketing and interactive design conference that is held in Youngstown, Ohio. However it’s not just a 1-time per year event.

DOYO Live is committed to the professional development of marketing, sales, business and design professionals. We do this through our online content, such as:

• Webinars, blogs
• Email newsletter
• The DOYO Live Marketing Show
• Workshops
• Consulting
• Annual Conference

DOYO Live this past August featured world class talent like Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing World, 16 breakout sessions, workshops, networking and a now legendary after party. DOYO Live (the marketing conference) sold out in year-1 and attracted over 200 marketing, sales, business and design professionals. We are expecting DOYO Live 2017 to be bigger and better!

We are working on year-2, our call for speakers has attracted some of the top talent in Youngstown and surrounding states and we are currently working on finalizing agreements with nationally recognized keynote speakers of the Joe Pulizzi caliber. It’s early but this is an awesome opportunity for savings on tickets.

Buy your tickets for DOYO Live 2017 today! Savings ends December 31, 2016!

The DOYO Live Marketing Show – Featuring The Shop On Liberty Street

The DOYO Live Marketing Show visited The Shop On Liberty Street for our first on location Facebook Live broadcast. We’ve now had a successful 2-month run of The DOYO Live Marketing Show. It’s been gaining a great deal of momentum which started back last May as a way to engage our audience for DOYO Live.

In the meanwhile, in this blog we feature video from our Facebook Live with Marissa Devantier, we discuss event marketing, Small Business Saturday marketing strategy and more. I take some live on-air questions and provide advice about email marketing, social media strategy and some other fun stuff!

 

The DOYO Live Marketing Show – Featuring The Shop On Liberty Street – Part I

 

The DOYO Live Marketing Show – Featuring The Shop On Liberty Street – Part II

The Shop On Liberty Street owner, Marissa Devantier, as you can see from the picture above and in the live video, (that is recorded of course), is just a absolutely lovely individual. A very smart business owner and was such a great sport. We had a lot of fun, being first is never easy.

Marissa and I discussed a number of topics, being a business owner was one of them. We both just spoke at Junior Achievement last week. That program is doing great things and Marcy Angelo program director is doing great work for JA in the Mahoning Valley.

Perseverance, hard-work, all things that have served her well in opening the collaborative space that gives makers, designers and artists a place to sell their goods. It’s an awesome eclectic mix of some very awesome products. Handmade soaps and body salts, handcrafted pens, jewelry and our personal favorite, theatre lighting canisters turned into clocks.

Marissa has been a driving force in rallying area businesses into co-marketing Shop Small Youngstown. We applaud the effort. Here are some things you can do. Be sure to visit local small business, leverage social media by sharing your experience onFacebook Live, snap a picture and post on Instagram and be sure to use the hashtag #shopsmallyo. These are just some ways you can support local businesses!

How to Make Your Next Event a Big Success

Whether you are in the planning stages of your next big trade show event, makers fair or any of the above. The success of the participation of the event is won and loss in the planning stage. Setting goals and expectations for the event. Such measurable outcomes:

• Booth visits
• Demos
• PR interviews
• Total amount of impressions delivered on social media
• Leads
• Transactions

Planning For Your Event – Where the Battle is Won and Lost!

These are just a few, we go much deeper in the video. Once you have your goals in mind it’s always a great best practice to have a pre-promotional plan of attack. Leverage social media, mine data on social to see what the event or trade show trending hashtag is going to be. If the event has any history go back and look to see who was posting last year. Either follow them on their social media or build lists. Especially on Twitter.

Twitter tends to be the event social media platform of choice. Although Instagram has rapidly caught up. Take a look at your LinkedIn data as well. See if there are groups of professionals dedicated to the event. Post information about the event on LinkedIn, contribute to published articles that you can re-purpose on your own blog. And syndicate via social media, email, etc.

Your content strategy that you’ve been engaged with now for 12 to 18 months. Ya, you know the one you’ve been churning out content, going to events, speaking, networking, it’s time to put that thing to good use. Pull together your editorial calendar pre-and-post. Always tickle in that you are going to be at the trade show. Very important, don’t make the entire blog about the show or event. But do make it about the industry or city, figure out ways to incorporate that you will be there and try to bring value to your reader beyond just saying, “we will be at booth 2543, stop by and see us.” Or the other is, “We will be at the fair this weekend be sure to stop by and visit.”

You got to admit both are pretty self-serving, and in a very noisy sea of those same invites, especially over social media. It feels like we are playing the 2008 game on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Why not go on a Facebook Live, talk about your booth, some of your exciting offerings, maybe unveil a sneak preview and stop by the booth to see it in action.

Over your email and social platforms maybe discuss a giveaway for stopping by…I love inventory as a way to incentivize, that’s why we are currently running an Instagram and Facebook contest for DOYO Live 2017 – Super Early Bird Tickets. I have tickets in exchange for mindshare.

Think about your inventory, pick something low end to get the exchange for time and opportunity.

Let’s talk about email

Email is going to be a big driver for you next event. Invite everyone on your email list to engage in the totally awesome content you are rocking on your blog, notifications when you are going to be at the event, what you are giving away  and your purpose on why.

The reason being, is that your list is either attending the event, will have a peer, colleague or friend that will be. They can become a marketing arm for you. Remember word-of-mouth marketing, that still is a thing. Likely in the form of a forwarded email but that’s fine, it’s still a thing.

You may want to consider hosting a webinar prior to the event, especially if you are in a B2B related business. Engage people prior to the event, whether they are attending or not and leverage the fact that the event will have trending information online. If I’m in a B2C business it’s very simple. I likely go to Facebook Live and do a show prior to either a sale, during a sale or prior to attending a local health fair, makers event or whatever it is you are doing.

Reason being is you now get the opportunity to tell people why you are doing it, what’s important about it…You get to go do this now and produce your own press conference. It’s absolutely amazing and it lives on Facebook for people to see.

Be Your Charming Self During the Event

So moving on from the pre-promotion ideas and strategy. During the event you want to be engaging, don’t huddle with other co-workers. You are not playing a football game, you are there to engage. Be sure to smile, have energy. It’s long hours, often times a slog, no doubt about the fact. I’ve headed up trade shows for major corporations like GE Healthcare at RSNA. Which attracts 60,000 radiology professionals from around the globe.

That show is 100+ years old, takes place in Chicago next week and you are typically there about 6 days. It’s a grind, 12 – 14 hour days on your feet. Working the booth, networking at night, staying up late, bus lines, people, and I always looked at it as a celebration of the industry.

Have a mechanism in place that you can capture name, address, phone and email. Simply grab a business card, rent a scanner to scan badges, there are different apps on your phone you can now grab. You can now grab QR codes off badges and scan them. If it’s not that type of event…I would grab as many names, emails and social media profiles as you can. Get creative, maybe have a selfie opportunity and ask the person their Instagram handle so you can tag them.

Once that happens they like, share and comment. And maybe they do that consistently after the event. After that they take the next step visit your website, sign up for you newsletter, read your blog and then make a purchase. Yes, I understand we all want the quick hitter, but that’s what it takes in the modern economy. So my advice, build it that way because if you do you will have a life long customer and not a one nighter.

Don’t Waste the Opportunity Post Event

Always follow up. It never ceases to amaze me…When I talk with small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. How many leads did you get from your event? How many customers visited your space? Great, now what did you do with their contact information. Nothing. Great that’s a HUGE waste of time and money invested into the event. Have a follow up plan. Enter people into your email list if you got their email.

Call them on the phone, remember that dinosaur? Yes, call them on the phone, ask them about the event, what they thought, invest into them and their experience. If it’s right in the context of the conversation and the product you sell see if there’s an opportunity for a demo, a fitting, a visit over coffee and make sure you put it on the calendar. I would not only follow up with adding these individuals to my email list but also via phone and individual emails. For example, go to your MS Outlook or Gmail and fire off a personalized email.

Maybe if it’s really high value put together a nice mailer. A thank you card, it’ll go a very long way. More importantly if you need help with strategy for you next event, be sure to keep me in mind. I can help from a consulting perspective to make it a real winner!

Shop Small – Small Business Saturday In the Youngstown Area

The Shop On Liberty Street – Marissa Devantier, Owner

The real highlight for me was that our The DOYO Live Marketing Show went on location for the first time. We visited The Shop On Liberty Street and sat with store owner Marissa Devantier. We talked marketing, entrepreneurism, Small Business Saturday in Youngstown and some other fun stuff.

This was awesome on so many levels. Marissa and I originally met when I did a presentation for WE – Women Entrepreneur, a program that was started out of the Youngstown Business Incubator last year and is coming back for it’s sophomore season. And then again at the Summer Festival of the Arts at YSU.

The Shop On Liberty Street is a collaborative effort to give local makers and artists the opportunity to rent space from Marissa to procure their products. Everything from one-of-a-kind jewelry, to handcrafted pens, homemade soaps and bath salts and coffee.

As you can see in the pictures this a a great place to shop, it supports the local business environment. Which we talk about at length in our Facebook Live. Hopefully you will get a chance to view it. In the meanwhile, this coming Saturday businesses from all over Youngstown are participating in Shop Small. It makes complete sense to support local business, but just in case you need further proof American Express provides some interesting statistics:

Stats from the Small Business Administration

• There are 23 million small businesses in the country.

• Small businesses have increased by 49% since 1982

• 54% of U.S. sales happen at small businesses.

• Small businesses have created 8 million jobs since 1990.

• Franchised small businesses employ roughly 8 million people, and make up 40 % of all American retail jobs.

Small Business Stats from Other Sources

• Small businesses donate 250% more than larger businesses to non-profits and community causes (Source: Seattle Good Business Network).

• If you spend $100 at a local business, roughly $68 stays in your local economy. If you spend the same are a large business, only $43 stays in the local economy (Source: Civic Economics Study in Grand Rapids, Michigan).

• 66% of the businesses plan to re-invest the money back into digital marketing. (For the record we love that stat).

So what businesses in Youngstown are participating? Here are just a few!

DOYO Live 2017 – Call For Speakers

DOYO Live call for speakers is currently open. Our conference last year was highlighted by Joe Pulizzi, the Founder of Content Marketing World and a Top 50 influencer in the world of marketing. We also had 16 breakout sessions, workshops and a legendary afterparty.

We are looking for marketing, business, design and sales professionals that would want to present on the following:

• B2B or B2C strategy
• Social media
• Responsive design
• Branding
• Sales
• Social Selling
• Digital marketing

Visit our speakers page and complete your submission today. This will be open until December 31, 2016. As a speaker you will generate a great deal of awareness for you and your business. All presenters get included into the ongoing marketing strategy, plus 2-tickets to DOYO Live 2017. Learn more today!

ABOUT DOYO Live

DOYO Live is dedicated to the professional development of marketing, business, sales and design professionals through our online efforts such as our blog, email, The DOYO Live Marketing Show delivered through Facebook and Podcast, in-person workshops, consulting and of course the annual marketing conference in Youngstown, Ohio.

Our mission is not just to educate but to help stimulate the economy of Youngstown and the entire region by helping people with their marketing efforts, provide work to contributors to our event and bring people downtown for the annual conference.

We are very appreciative and thankful that you are a fan of DOYO Live, if your business would like to be featured on one of the upcoming Facebook Live Shows, please send an email to [email protected]. As always please leave a comment and let us know what you think!