How to Grow an Event Planning Business

Collaboration makes a small event planning business successful
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The event planning industry has been growing steadily for the past five years, and it is expected to grow even further. With new business opportunities, you can also expect an increase in competition. It is always important to stay on top of your game and adapt to the changing environment to make the most of new opportunities and remain relevant in the marketplace.

Diversification is Key

When businesses want to expand, diversification of the services offered plays a key role in making it successful. When you decided to be an event planner, you might have just wanted to focus on weddings and anniversaries. Although this might have been successful over the years, the event planning business doesn’t have to stop there.

Take a good look at the business environment in your area and see what opportunities exist. There might be prospects of partnering with a marketing firm to engage in brand launch parties or even corporate meetings. Further, if there is a high concentration of corporations in the area, it will be a good idea to target these companies to add corporate events to your portfolio. Your knowledge and experience will give you the necessary confidence to plan an event regardless of the nature of the event.

If you have been doing corporate events, it would be a great idea to also cater to weddings and other personalized events. There are so many opportunities out there like graduation parties, educational seminars, workshops, conferences, and brand promotion, to name a few. Building clientele in various industries will not only make your business more profitable, but it will also give you a chance to do a lot of cross-promotion.

Engage your Target Audience

If you haven’t already, join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend their meetings and events. It will be a great way to network with people from different industries. Engaging with your audience regularly can only help to open up new event planning opportunities.

Get online, check your website, is it engaging? If it isn’t, there is no time like the present to revamp the website to make it more inviting and easy for people to make inquiries. If you are not actively blogging, it’s time to catch up! By using the right keywords, blogs, and social media can help you be at the forefront of the industry.

Twitter hashtags created for the events you’re working on are a great way to not only promote your business but also to get a feel for the crowd’s reaction. Along with intelligent social media management, you can engage your audience without spending any money.

Never Stop Promoting

In a crowded business environment, everyone is fighting to be heard. So, promote your business as much as possible to stay competitive. Engaging elements of social media like hashtags and blogs will also help promote your business at no extra cost.

If you haven’t checked your digital footprint lately, it is time to see exactly where you stand. Digital marketing is a great tool to help you become an industry leader. It’s a good idea to hire a digital marketing agency to handle components like social media marketing, organic search, content marketing, and clientele lead development. But if you can’t afford it right now, you can always start learning how to do these marketing methods one by one. 

If you are already blogging, you almost have content marketing covered. With a little bit of search engine optimization, you can start directing traffic (potential clients) to your website. Each experience has to be fresh and relevant to the readers, so keep updating your blog often and regularly. Further, it wouldn’t hurt to add a promotional video on YouTube to promote your business.

Invest in email campaigns to target corporate clients; it will be money well spent if you get access to the right database. You never know who will be checking their email after a morning meeting about planning a large conference. Being at the right place at the right time, even if it’s through email, can only turn into an opportunity.

The Bottom Line

All this may seem overwhelming if you are a small business without much full-time staff to manage everything. However, once you get a little experience adapting and diversifying, you will realize that it is easier than you originally thought and can be easily added to your daily routine.