Research Note: How To Generate Attendance At Events While Establishing Brand With Top Buyers

According to the nearly 200 buyers of professional services who we surveyed in RainToday's research study, How Clients Buy, direct mail, email, and telephone calls are among the least likely ways that service buyers use to find out about service providers.

The top methods (after referrals) buyers look for service providers are through:

• Attending presentations at conferences (69% of buyers somewhat or very likely to use)
  
  
• Personal awareness of the provider (69% of buyers somewhat or very likely to use)
  
  
• Attending in-person seminars delivered by the provider (67% of buyers somewhat or very likely to use)

But how do you fill the seats? We asked those survey participants who attended seminars, presentations, and webinars how they are most likely to find out about such events. Here are the top tactics they mentioned, in order:

Marketing Tactic	% Somewhat Or Very Likely To Use To Find Seminars
Invitation or brochures sent to you by mail	74%
Referral by colleague	61%
Email sent by provider	57%
Email sent by 3rd party to which you subscribe	39%
Invitation by telephone	33%

While the surface evidence from How Clients Buy shows that direct techniques such as mail, email, and telephone may not be the most attractive tactics for services marketing, they are a key part of the marketing mix, if you understand how they fit in buyers' purchasing processes.

Mail, email, and telephone calls are currently among the top tactics service firms can use to get potential buyers to seminars and events. And, in general, seminars and events are the top tactics buyers use (after referrals) to find service providers.

The Connection To Brand Recognition

Also noteworthy from the research is that “personal awareness of the provider” is wedged between conference presentations and seminars as a top way buyers identify service providers. Let's assume seminars and events are a core part of a service firm's marketing strategy, and the firm employs mail, email, and telephone calls to generate attendance for those events.

Over the course of two years, if the firm does a good job inviting their top prospects to ongoing seminars and events using mail, email, and telephone calls, the firm can generate a high percentage of personal awareness of the provider (also known as brand recognition) as an additional effect of their event attendance generation strategy. If the list of potential attendees contains the top likely buyers of the firms' services, then firms will be generating this brand recognition in a highly-targeted and efficient manner.

Takeaways:

• Conference presentations, personal awareness of the provider, and in-person seminars are the top methods (after referrals) that buyers reported using to source professional service providers.
  
  
• How service firms use the various marketing tactics available to them can help them be most successful in growing their firms. Mail, email, and telephone calls as standalone marketing tactics are not by themselves top ways buyers reported they are likely to use to source service providers. Mail, email, and telephone calls are, however, the top tactics they use to find out about events.
  
  
• We suspect “invitation by telephone” to be lower on the likely-to-use scale from the buyers' perspective because fewer professional services firms employ the tactic. In our experience, the tactic works very well, though it tends to be more time consuming (and thus expensive) than mail and email.
  
  
• If service firms employ seminars and conference presentations as a part of their marketing mix, they can use the event attendance strategies of mail, email, and telephone calls to improve their brand recognition. This has implications for how firms go about spending to build their brand name. For example, instead of employing straightforward advertising to establish brand recognition, firms might consider running events, and establishing brand recognition through the very tactics they use to generate attendance.

Want To Learn More? Check Out These Resources:

• To learn more about what buyers said you can do to improve your selling skills, check out How Clients Buy, available in the RainToday Store.
  
  
• To read more about tactics for generating attendance for seminars, read Seminar Marketing - Seven Tips to Increase Attendance.
  
  
• To learn more about cold calling as a part of selling professional services, read How To Set Appointments Through Cold Calling.