You’re hustling to make your NYC event planning business successful. And you don’t have time to throw marketing strategies at the wall and hope something sticks. Your marketing has to be targeted, strategized, and effective so that you can spend more time planning jaw-dropping events. In this article, we’ll tell how a sales funnel can make marketing more efficient and how you can optimize the sales funnel for maximum conversions.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
The sales funnel is an image-based, pictorial representation of the customer journey in the shape of (you guessed it) a funnel. The idea is that prospects (the more, the better) enter the wide end of the funnel at the top.
As they journey through the stages of the sale, the numbers become smaller until they arrive at the narrower end of the sales funnel in which the sale happens—or it doesn’t happen. Either way, the consumer has reached the end of the customer journey.
Sales funnels have been used by sales professionals since time immemorial. Cavemen probably used them to hawk their spear tips. If so, they used the traditional AIDA structure.
- Awareness
- Interest
- Decision
- Action
Why Do I Need a Sales Funnel for Event Planning?
A sales funnel is useful for every business, including event planning. It will help you increase your revenue in the following ways.
Define Your Customers and Their Needs at Every Stage of the Journey
Creating a customer profile is essential for business success and goes hand-in-hand with creating your sales funnel. Essentially, consumers’ needs change as they travel through the sales funnel. The content and marketing that engages them at the awareness stage will change as they enter the decision stage. Defining these changes will help you create a more targeted sales strategy.
Create the Basis for Analyzing Your Marketing Effectiveness
You earn your money from the events you book. That means your marketing doesn’t pay unless it works. Your sales funnel will help you zero in on the amount and type of marketing legwork you need to do to make bank.
As you develop and work with your sales funnel, you’ll uncover invaluable data, such as:
- Percentage of event leads that turn into paying clients.
- The portion of the customer journey where leads are most likely to drop off.
- The average amount of time each prospect spends in each stage.
- Demographic snapshot of the type of prospect most likely to convert.
- And so much more…
Increase Your Revenue Efficiently
The benefits of a sales funnel coalesce into one all-important perk: closing sales as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The kinds of marketing that are available are mind-boggling: hobnobbing, social media, networking events, and content.
You don’t have time to do it all. And you don’t have time to go about it willy-nilly hoping you hit upon something that works. Fitting your marketing strategy within the framework of a sales funnel will help you book events more effortlessly.
Updating the Sales Funnel
The concept of the sales funnel hasn’t changed much since it was developed over a hundred years ago. And while the sales funnel is as relevant as ever, we do have to update our concept of it.
Your prospects have more resources and choices than ever. You can imagine that they’ve researched your firm and you. They’ve also assembled a Pinterest catalog of event ideas, and so on and so on.
So, imagine the sales funnel is a waterspout over the ocean, and the ocean is the internet. In this analogy, your sales funnel is dynamic, and you have to incorporate the material that prospects find online into your marketing strategy.
Start with Your Target Audience
Like everything in marketing, optimizing your sales funnel for your events planning business begins with identifying your ideal client. An NYC event planner’s ideal client may be an individual or a corporation. You likely have more than one ideal client. If so, create a profile for each target customer and include the following information:
- Income Level: This would indicate the client’s budget for events.
- Pain Points: Identify the common problems your ideal clients have when it comes to planning events. Then, identify the ways you uniquely solve those problems.
- Obstacles: List the reasons clients resist booking your services. These include price, uncertainty about your brand, and preferring a competitor.
- Hangouts: Identify the places your ideal customers hang out, both online and in person.
Create a Marketing Strategy for Each Unique Stage of the Sales Funnel
With your customer profiles in hand, you’re ready to create a marketing strategy that optimizes every stage of the sales funnel.
Awareness
At this sales funnel stage, the customer becomes aware of your brand. Studies show that consumers need to encounter your brand at least seven times before making a purchase. So, ideally, this awareness happens before they have a specific need for event planning services. You can tailor your marketing strategy in several ways for this stage:
- Create a blog and social media campaign designed to help your audience put on smaller, DIY events, like dinner parties and children’s birthday parties.
- Create an email list. An email marketing campaign is still one of the most effective marketing strategies out there.
- Attend professional networking events, such as The Event Planner Expo. Corporations, especially, attend event planning events while on the lookout for vendors that can help them in the future.
- Volunteer your services for nonprofits. Putting on a gala or similar event for a charity is a great way to raise your brand’s profile.
Interest
At this stage, potential clients have a specific event in mind and are “shopping” for an NYC event planner. Ideally, they’ve heard of your services through your efforts in the “Awareness” stage. You can further cement yourself as the event planner for the job through these strategies:
- Content that aligns with other consumer concerns at this stage, such as setting a budget or a rundown of the best NYC event venues.
- Build relationships with professionals with complementary services, such as photographers, caterers, and entertainers. Clients often ask these experienced providers for recommendations.
- Create social media posts with photos from your recent events. Clients will often “stalk” your online presence to determine if you might be the right fit before they reach out to you.
Decision
Clients are ready to reach out and start talking. Make it easy for them to connect with you with these marketing strategies.
- Make sure they can easily find your contact information on every online profile you have. Don’t make them click through to your contact page on your website.
- Respond quickly, ideally within minutes. Assume they are contacting more than one event planner. The one they connect with first has the best chance of closing the deal.
- Make it about them. Instead of telling them how great you are, tell them about how you can help them make their event successful.
Action
At this point, the client makes a decision. Hopefully, they’ll decide to hire you to plan their NYC event. Here are some things you can do, regardless of their decision.
- Send a thank you, even if they hired a different event planner.
- Send a short survey asking them quick questions about how they made their decision.
- Continue communicating. Keep in touch so that you stay top of mind for the next event.
An Optimized Sales Funnel Leads to NYC Event Planning Success
You don’t have time to haphazardly go about marketing your NYC event planning business. A well-crafted and optimized sales funnel will help you target your marketing message and close more deals.
The Event Planner Expo is the biggest opportunity to optimize every stage of your sales funnel. Raise your brand awareness, pique client interest through one-on-one interactions, and connect with potential clients who are actively planning events. Reserve your booth today at The Event Planner Expo 2024.
