Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Facebook Marketing?

Posted by Anonymous on 6/6/2008 at 12:07 PM ET 25 Points
Hi Everyone,

Thanks for reading. Go Big Event (www.gobigevent.com)is the company I work for. We are a company that provides online registration service for event planners. What we do is we set up a website with the organization's corporate image that accepts registrations and payments online. It saves event planners the hassle from manual registration. Many of our clients right now are professional event planners while others might just be associations or companies who plan a few big events in a year. The product knowledge among event planners is there and the competition is also big. However, the product knowledge for the general public is very low. Many people who plan only a few big events for their organization don't even know there is such thing called online registration. We think the market for this group is massive and would like to focus our time and resources on this group.

We are a small company and don't have the marketing dollar to do massive billboard and print advertising everywhere. We have google advertising right now which is working all right for us. We want to do something with facebook to create awareness. Please see below for the different options:

1. Create a facebook event that ask comments on our new website's usability and design (we are working on that right now) - besides the valuable comments we get, I am not sure if it generate any awareness to the right people.
2. Create a facebook event that ask comments on features that a event planner would like to have, which is helpful to our software rewrite sometime in the future. But once again, I am not sure if this would generate any awareness to the right people
3. Create a facebook page for Go Big Event and invites our clients to be fans of our page. They can pass on this page to others and exchange event planning tips on the wall if they want. I am also not sure if this is a clear objective for creating a facebook page.

I am not sure how to target to event planners on facebook since they don't share a common interest. I would say that most event planners are females from age of 25-50, but that's very general. Any comments?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by jcasalou on 6/6/2008 at 12:55 PM Member
    Facebook and MySpace are great for an inexpensive solution to marketing at a grassroots type level. Have you tried cold calling from lead sources like Sales Genie? You can do SIC searches to help target your customers.

    Jonathon Casalou
    Business Development & Marketing
  • Posted on 6/6/2008 at 4:06 PM Author
    We started our first email campaign last month to the health care industry people in Canada. 2000 emails were sent and we called the 500 people who appeared in our system who have opened the email. 99.9% of the people we called did not remember seeing our email nor were they the right person to talk to. They also don't know who plans events in their department since Health Canada is huge...
  • Posted by Chris Blackman on 6/8/2008 at 8:02 PM Accepted
    Hi

    Welcome to KHE!

    I can't see why you've pitched 1, 2 and 3 as options - when they are not mutually exclusive, they are all going to cost so little and take so little time to set up, you could easily do all three.

    I'd like to suggest a few other options too that will help your search engine ranking (I Googled on Online Registration Service AND Event Planners and you weren't in it; the only reference to gobigevent.com was this post on MarketingProfs!):

    1. Start a blog independent of Facebook that links back to your web page.

    2. Join LinkedIn (if you haven't already) and link to your company web page.

    3. Create a MySpace page that links to your corporate web page.

    4. Visit any blogs relevant to the Event Planning industry and leave comments about with tips for event planners and a link back to your website.

    5. Create digital sitemaps for your website in the various required formats, upload to your website, and submit to Google and Yahoo for site ranking.

    6. Optimise the language in your website to trigger the search terms you think are most important to your market (you could conduct a survey via Facebook to see what your market thinks are relevant search terms).

    7. Attend Trade shows aimed at Event Planners - even if you can't afford to exhibit, you could attend and mix with the delegates and hand out business cards with a 20 second audio pitch.

    That should keep you busy for a few days - hope it helps.

    ChrisB

  • Posted on 6/11/2008 at 6:01 PM Author
    I have talked to my boss about the facebook marketing and he is afraid that we are going to have complains from some customers and everyone will see them... The thing with facebook is that anyone can post their opinion on the wall and there is nothing we can do about it. We have our issues of billing statements and my boss thinks it is going to take at least 6 months to a year to clean up the issue completely. I believe that we have some advocates, the one who gave us testimonials. However, I think there are still some unhappy customers, not with the product, but just with the billing statement. Does that mean we shouldn't go on facebook for now?
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