7 Effective Strategies for Seminar Marketing BY Susanna Strandberg

Running a seminar business is exciting, enjoyable, exhausting and challenging, all at the same time. With the low start-up costs involved, you are pretty much dependent on your own skills to make the business a success. You need to be a subject matter expert in the area you are speaking about, and also deploy the right marketing strategies to draw adequate participant enrolment into your sessions. For instance, if you are running a Kids and Business seminar you need to find ways to market your program to schools and parents. As with any other business, effective marketing strategies are the key to the success of your seminar business. Here are some marketing ideas you can use for your seminars right away:

1.Comb through your contacts

Relationship selling is always better than starting out with cold calls. People are more willing to listen if they know the person talking to them personally. In addition, some of your acquaintances may be willing to help you out especially when they know you are just starting out on a new venture. Indeed, in the business world, deals have been closed through the virtue of connections, so this is where you can start as well.

2.Newspaper advertising

There are two ways you can do this. One, you buy advertisement space, create awareness of your seminar program and provide a phone number and email for registration. Another more effective way to do this is to get interviewed by a reporter, and get an article written about you and your seminar program. This way, you'll get greater value and publicity through a larger newspaper column and also get to save on advertisement costs.

3.Cold calling

It is inevitable that there will be a time when your personal contact list becomes exhausted. Thus, you will have to do what many people in start-ups do; cold call. Go through business directories and get the contact details for your target market. Then, get the right person in charge and fax or email seminar information to him or her. Finally, follow-up with phone calls to set up meetings with your potential customers.

4.Collaborate with other businesses

This is where you form strategic alliances with other complimentary businesses so that you can tap into their pool of customers. However, these business owners would need to see a benefit that you can bring to their businesses before they are willing to collaborate with you. Here, you need to put your thinking cap to work and think of creative ways to bring value to your strategic partners.

5.Organize free seminars

Free seminars will probably attract a larger audience who may be curious to find out what you have to offer, without risking any of their money. You can combine this strategy with any of the strategies above to promote your free seminar, or get invited to speak for free in events in which the audience is also your target market. Of course, these free seminars will only provide your audience with 5% of what you have to offer. They will have to pay full price for the entire package.

6.Create a website

One of the most powerful tools available now would be the power of the Internet. Nothing works better than a website that runs for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Create a website where anyone from anywhere can gain access to read about your seminar programs. Of course, appropriate Internet marketing strategies must be adopted here to pull traffic to your site.

7.Work with sales agents

If selling is not quite your forte, you can engage the expertise of sales agents who can help you promote your program to the right target market. Of course, you'd probably have to share a substantial portion of your profits with them as well. The good thing is that they may have a pool of ready customers whom they can approach to get the numbers in for your seminar program.