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PICK YOUR FLAVOUR OF CRAZY – Still feeling inspired to run my own company, I decided I wanted to create a product or service that was relevant, fixed a real business problem, was specific to a business vertical so I could drill down and was accessible globally. My goal was to make it so affordable that 90% of the target user case would want it…and so began my journey into Software as a Service (Saas) in the Events Marketing Industry.
I’d always been intrigued by Saas after introducing Marketworks to eBay in 2002. Software as a Service seems so obvious – affordable technology delivered over the internet, creating efficiencies and available to the masses. How hard could it be?
EXPERT TIP – MY BEST SOURCE OF INSIGHTS
I stumbled upon a blog, run by David Skok – http://www.forentrepreneurs.com, it became my bible, a powerhouse of expertise and experience, delivered in such detail that it made all other resources redundant. I honestly could not give you a better resource of reading. My advice here is read a post every other day and sign up to his newsletter – it’s FREE.
EUREKA, SLEEP, EUREKA, SLEEP – This is a common problem for would-be entrepreneurs. You wake up in the night, have that eureka moment when your brain connects ideas and you have your start up concept, get out of bed, laptop on and Google the idea… Drat. There is always someone somewhere doing it already, there’s always someone ahead of the game… laptop closed, back to sleep.
I eventually began keeping a pad of paper under my pillow with a pencil. I’d make a quick note or sketch out my thoughts and look at them in the morning. Coming up with your big idea for a technology business has to be one of the hardest most challenging task any entrepreneur faces. Once you have it, you are set on a course like no other where everyone will test your commitment and validation is required at every corner, if not for commercial reasons, simply to maintain sanity.
GETTING MY BIG BUSINESS IDEA
It was while at Qype, the Business listing review site that hired me as a consultant to develop products and revenue initiatives when my big idea hit me. There I discovered the power of organic search, it was simple – when you add new content such as text, reviews, keywords, information, images etc and associate them on a page with a physical address. I called it ‘New data attached to old data’ and it’s simply rocket fuel in search. So much so, that Yelp purchased Qype back in 2013 for $50m and continues to own the local business listing ad space via organic indexing of content.
Qype and Yelp had an event listing service which also indexed to the first page of Google with ease. This was ideal as a new product for sales but you could not even give it away, let alone sell it! Why were business listings pages working commercially whilst event listing pages were failing? It was simple, an event is date stamped and destined to expire, making it less attractive to spend money on promoting.
So I had my problem, which was also my opportunity. But what were professional event organisers doing to promote an event? We created a blog on the top 100 Event Marketing Tips to demonstrate the size of the task at hand – 100 unique marketing activities to promote just one event. We then released a service in 2016 that stepped up the game to meet this bigger problem.
Top 10 Main Ways to Marketing An Event
- Submitted an event to listing sites manually, on average 8 to 15 sites per event
- Sent out a email / newsletter / eflyer
- Republished content via social media (Facebook / Twitter / Instagram)
- Created ticketing
- Used messengers, SMS, What’s App
- Spent money on ads on listing sites
- Spent money on offline material such as flyers
- Paid for ad inclusions in third party emails
- Local print
- Used direct telesales
And so evvnt was born as a tech start up. I wanted to create a service to replicate best in class methodologies of marketing an event, focused on event success which for the event organiser, meant a full room or a clear ROI. It had to understand the importance of the event timeline with regards delivering a customer facing campaign between the day of the submission and the date of the event. It had to be fully loaded with expertise and the genius bit… it would be delivered from a single event submission!
Now if we could do that, then I’d turn anyone in to an Event Marketing professional – the question was could I do it at a price point that was so affordable that ‘anyone‘ would be willing to sign up and pay. What I needed was an MVP, a minimal viable product… All I had were three pretty slides…. so what now?
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Richard Green – CEO & Founder of Evvnt.com
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Start Up CEO Journal | The Definitive Guide To Event Marketing | 100 Event Marketing Tips