Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Case Study on budget lead generation event - 2000% ROI

Events are a great way to get in front of many people (prospects!) at once. Even if you're a small business, hosting an event can be an extremely cost-effective way of generating business leads- and demonstrating your business expertise. It's also a great way to share expertise so that all attendees benefit and think well of you.

I was speaking with a web development company the other day. They run events every month, on various topics relative to the digital space.

They promote the events to their own database and to people they're currently trying to do business with. They get around 15-20 people to every event. They get great feedback and interaction. They get at least one lead from every seminar. And it costs them the huge sum of....$150!

Yes, $150.

They've done a deal with a pub close to their office to get the space, tea and coffee for $150.

Now they tell me they get a sale EVERY time. And a sale for them isn't just a one-off. There's upsell opportunities and ongoing maintenance and development work.

Let's be conservative and say a website with them is $3000.

That's TWENTY TIMES the investment cost to make the sale. Even if they only got a sale every 2-3 times this is still a great zero budget marketing activity.

Of course there is there time in promoting and running the event. But as zero budget marketers know, sometimes time is easier to supply than cash.

Can you apply this to your business? Do you have knowledge to share that people want or need to know more about? Then taking the plunge and running some free educational events could be a big win for all involved.

PS. Free tools you can use to manage registrations:

-Eventbrite - Free for free events (which I'm using for a free event on social media marketing and the law right now -and I can report it's great. Come along if it's relevant.)
-Wufoo - Great form tool that's free to use in most cases

No comments: