Author: Alexis Rose

Providing marketing strategies backed by relationships + community connections, to allow your business to stay cutting edge at AlexisRose.co

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PiVOT Friday Series Recap – 4/17!

Last Friday, we featured THREE local businesses. First we spoke with Danielle Bayard Jackson who owns Tell Public Relations, an all-women PR agency supporting other female entrepreneurs. Danielle shared that prior to starting her PR agency, she was out in the community and noticed how many women were running amazing businesses but getting very little recognition, which forced them to struggle financially or even shut down! She launched Tell Public Relations to increase visibility of local female entrepreneurs to make sure other people are aware of their business and help them to flourish.

Danielle Jackson, TELL PR

While everyone else has been pivoting to virtual, Danielle and her agency are still working just as hard, being available the same hours as normal, but just happen to be working in pajama bottoms. Her focus recently has been to support her clients as they are struggling with canceling or rescheduling in-person events or speaking arrangements. Tell PR has pivoted to provide their clients creative ways to gain exposure, outside of the traditional media route, such as run social media campaigns, Instagram Live series, and their goal is to educate and empower each client to eventually back the reins on their own PR.  One main difference for Danielle and Tell PR during COVID-19 is that they were scheduled to host in-person educational trainings and events with their clients this month, which have now shifted to virtual. 

We were even lucky enough that Danielle spilled to us some of her secret sauce!

Tip #1: For businesses that thrived on demonstrations or tours, you CAN still give a virtual tour of a new property, demonstrate a recipe in a new kitchen, and launch a grand opening event! You just need to pivot your mindset. 

Tip #2: Did you know you can hire a celebrity on Cameo.com to share your virtual events to the public, and back up your product/service. Um, neither did we, but we may go check that our immediately!

Our second speaker was Brandon Bruce from Food Not Flowers, who interviewed with us directly from his garden!. This business is not exactly what you may think (move over, Edible Arrangements). Food Not Flowers provides consumers the opportunity to purchase a thoughtful, practical, and well presented care package and send it to someone in need. 

Brandon Bruce, Food Not Flowers

 

This is especially important now where you cannot be physically together. If someone has sick family members, or just lost a job, you can send them a care package by ordering through Food Not Flowers online. While they were already an ecommerce focused business and had made some recent pivots before COVID-19, they are finding that people are starting to engage with the brand more than ever! Purchasers have enjoyed the well thought out, nicely wrapped gift with a personal note to send to their loved ones. Better yet, they even offer free “Send Love” packages to people on the frontlines, such as Health Care Workers. You can nominate one online!! Go now!! 

#SpreadLoveNotFear 

Last but not least, we spoke with Lynn Kroesen from the Hillsborough County Entrepreneur Collaborative Center. The ECC is an amazing

 facility in Ybor that has for many years held training classes for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Each year they hosted 100 or more in-person events, totaling 1,000 or more attendees, and bringing in various partners to provide the best resources. The best part is, almost all 

of the workshops and events are free, or $10-15 max! 

Lynn Kroesen

When the pandemic first hit, this business was in emergency operation mode. They helped with handling small business loan applications and focused on providing resources to those in need. Now, they are pivoting back to the events world, and hosting educational and networking opportunities in a virtual space at no cost. They have increased the total number of events per month, and have seen a huge uptick in not only attendance, but the demographic of their attendees, due to the fact they are able to now serve and connect with even more people! Their weekly program, 1 Million Cups, has now moved virtual and has 50+ attendees each week and attendees are participating from all over the region. In the future, they hope to go back to in-person pitch practice and educational workshops, but plan to keep virtual events as well, such as offering resources on how to market your business online!

 


Tampa Bay Goes Live has launched a weekly Instagram LIVE series called: PiVOT. This series, hosted every Friday at noon, features local businesses and professionals, providing them a platform to share their story of how they have pivoted to virtual. In the first two weeks, we featured a diverse set of speakers, such as local organizations and networking groups, non profits, restaurant and food industry owners, and plan to continue bringing in more each week! 

 

Do you know someone who has a great PiVOT story? Send nominations to TampaBayGoesLive@Gmail.com! 

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How to Successfully Market a Virtual Event

Once you’ve selected your platform and your content for your virtual event, you may think you’re done with the logistics, but you’ve only just started! There’s a lot of content, virtual events and educational information flying around social media and into people’s inboxes right now, so it’s important that you set up a strategy for promoting and marketing your event to make it stand out amongst the busy-ness. 

How will you measure success? You will probably want to set a goal number of guests to yourself right away, so you can gage the engagement and RSVP count and make sure you’re meeting that goal amount.

To walk you through how to market your event, I will use a virtual event I planned for AAF Tampa Bay to provide examples! 

Step 1: Branding Guidelines

Select a variety of colors, fonts, and images that inspire you and match the messaging of your event. Organize them into a Google Doc or Folder so you have the ability to share with others who may be helping you build your event creative. It does not need to be overly complicated or time consuming, but it’s important that you use these as guidelines for all future promotions!

Example: 

Inspiration image with font overlay for AAF #TBonTap event.

All future posts included the #TBonTap overlay text so guests could recognize the event promotion!

 

Step 2: Social Media & Email Promotion

Now that you have the overall branding set up, start playing around with optional social media postings for both Facebook and Instagram. It’s great to have a mixture of photos and images with graphic designs to add variety. Make sure that all social posts include a call to action and a consistent message, and ONLY link your event in an Instagram bio (not in the post directly. It won’t click through to the URL!). Tag your speakers and sponsors, and encourage them to share! If you have multiple people helping plan and organize the event, recommend they share on their personal pages as well! The more cross-promotion you can get on social media, the more people who will have eyes on your event. 

For email, it’s recommended you send one email to your full email distro a few days prior to the event. Include as many details as possible. Where on social media you may be slowly unveiling who your speakers are, in the email you should include all of these details at once. Your email should lead to an uptick in RSVPs, a bit higher conversion rates than via social media, because your audience is in work and plan-your-week mode while in their inbox! 

Example:

Social: We used the #TBonTap message in every post so our audience could recognize the consistency. We also slowly unveiled who our speakers were to increase excitement and provide more content. 

Email: 

Step 3: Registration Micro-site

There are multiple reasons why you would want to include a micro-site for your event registration, rather than just using a Facebook event page or emails as confirmation. Building a microsite allows you to utilize your branding and messaging while driving all traffic to one place. By requiring people to register, you can charge attendees to attend and accept payment directly, or if you are offering the event for free, you can at least obtain all of the contact information from your guests who sign up. Not only is this a great way to generate leads, but you can now start building a relationship with these people!

What information do you need to include on your registration page?

Details such as the time, date, location/platform, and cost.

An overview of the agenda, the speakers, and the topic during your event.

What contact information should you obtain when people register?

Name, email, phone number, company

Example:

AAF Tampa Bay virtual happy hour event registration page built through WildApricot. Very simple, but includes all the necessary details!

Step 4: Include Giveaways

It’s highly recommended that you offer a giveaway of some sort to your guests! Whether it’s a gift card or a free membership, some small incentive can help you increase your RSVP’s and your show-up rate! One tip to obtain giveaways is to reach out to local businesses who can benefit from the audience you will be connecting with. They may be willing to sponsor with either a dollar amount or a product that would be worth offering to your guests. It’s a win-win for you and your sponsor(s) by providing value to both – you get your sponsor in front of a large audience and you provide your guests an incentive to attend your event! 

Example:

AAF used its programming budget to purchase $10 gift cards for three local businesses. This encouraged the overall #supportlocal message that was behind our event, while also offering a fun opportunity to raffle off gift cards live! We also set the raffle timing for after our panel, so our guests had to stay the whole time in order to win.

We then promoted the gift card giveaway on social media and in our email marketing.

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How to Select the Right Virtual Platform

With the world being forced to go completely virtual, our daily schedules, planners, and overall structure has been completely unhinged. The good news is, we can sleep later, spend less time getting ready, and avoid traffic altogether. What has become more complicated, is how we can continue to stay connected to not only our colleagues but our friends and family from the safety of our homes.

We quickly have had to pivot. The work meetings you had set up for this week, both internally and externally, had to be moved to a phone call or a Zoom meeting. The happy hour you had set up with your friends for Friday night will now be over Facetime. The new product you were planning to activate during a big launch event will have to be, as you’d assume, canceled. All big plans you’ve had set up for the next couple of months must either be canceled or recreated with a completely new vision.

You don’t need to necessarily cancel EVERYTHING you’ve got planned. Luckily, it’s 2020 so there is plenty of software and apps out there for you to conduct successful meetings, host a big launch event to promote a new product or service, or even have a happy hour with a group of people (colleagues or friends). What can be overwhelming is the number of options to choose from. How do you pick the right platform?

I have broken down the list of recommended software based on the type of event or meeting you will be hosting and provided a few options for you to consider!

Internal Company Meeting
Option 1: ZOOM
ZOOM has been everyone’s go-to video chatting technology. The good news is, most people will have downloaded it and used it before, so you’re not trying to teach a dog new tricks. The downside is with internal meetings, you may have to schedule back to back to back ZOOM calls and your entire team may be really sick of the platform by 2:00 pm. What I’d recommend is if it’s a 1:1 call with your employee, stick to a traditional phone call. If it’s a company-wide meeting with 50 executives, include a presentation in the background to keep everyone on track and focused.

 

Option 2: Microsoft Teams
Teams is another great platform for internal communications. What is unique about teams is that outside of video chatting capabilities, it’s also a collaboration tool. It has the capability to also host folders of work that your internal teams may need to collaborate on, outside of the company network, but still, security protected. For meetings, the video calling feature is easy to use and has little technical difficulties, keeping your teams on track!

 

External Client Meeting
Option 1: ZOOM
Similarly to your internal company meetings, your external clients will probably be most comfortable with ZOOM as well. This means less time trying to work through technical difficulties and more time getting to work! What is great about ZOOM is the ability to share your screen and/or share a presentation, so it’s very collaborative. It can host up to 100 people, so you can even still have your monthly sales update.

 

Option 2: Google Hangouts/ Hangouts Meet
Similarly to ZOOM, Google Hangouts is simple, easy to use, and set up through Gmail which most people have an account with already! You can easily jump on a video call, share your screen, and have chat capabilities. However, Google Hangouts can only host up to 10 people. For those that have G Suite, Hangouts Meet is the upgraded version with real-time captions, support for up to 250 participants, and 10,000 live stream viewers.

 

Launch Event
Option 1: Instagram LIVE
For a virtual launch event, you will want to consider multiple factors.

  1. Where is your audience? Do you gain more engagement on Instagram or Facebook, or somewhere else? What is the age group of your audience? If the answer is mostly Millennials and Gen Z, then Instagram LIVE will be the way to go!
  2. Don’t forget to bring in other partners and speakers. This will widen your IG LIVE audience because you will tap into both your followers AND your speaker/partners’ followers. Be sure to promote your event for at least a week beforehand and post a follow up thank you for attending after as well!

Option 2: Facebook LIVE
After considering your options, you may have decided your age group and audience is more likely to be on Facebook. OR, you decided to try both! We’d recommend you try both, but not at the same time. Host an Instagram LIVE first, then a Facebook LIVE the week after. You’re going after a completely different audience so it won’t overdo it. Again, make sure you do promotion before and after an event. This is a great way to build engaging content without being too sales-y.

 

Option 3: ZOOM
You may want to host an actual event where your listeners can feel like attendees, meet each other, participate in the discussion, and more! This is where ZOOM will come in for a great option for an event that feels almost like a real event! There are tips and tricks on how to host a great virtual event, including strategies leading up to, during, and after to continue the relationship you’ve now started with your audience and the education you’ve now given them about your product or service. This information will come soon in a future blog post, or you can contact Alexis Rose LLC at connect@alexisrose.co to get started immediately!

 

Networking Event or Conference
Option 1: ZOOM
Similar to the launch event, you can create a virtual networking event using ZOOM that allows your audience to engage with each other, have a speaker who is leading the conversation, utilize a presentation in the background, and even break your guests into mini break out groups (using the paid version of ZOOM). Make sure there is an overall topic or purpose behind your networking event, so that way you can tailor your content and discussion around this topic rather than having an open free-for-all. It will give your event more depth and meaning during a time when people could instead be, I don’t know, watching Netflix.

 

Option 2: Lunchpool
This one you’ve probably never heard of before. But, Lunchpool was launched just in time for a 100% virtual lifestyle and provides unique capabilities to its users! This software can host up to 100 people and allows for presenters, engaging speakers panels, live Q&A from your guests, and can break out your guests into groups of 8 at tables where they can interact in a smaller group. This software is also great for more casual meetings or events with colleagues or friends.

 

Happy Hour with Friends or Colleagues
Option 1: FaceTime
The traditional FaceTime never gets old – especially when it’s impossible to see your friends’ faces in person! FaceTime allows multiple users at once. Just start a group chat (with iPhone only friends, of course) and start a FaceTime call with all parties on the group chat. But first, pour yourself a glass of wine or a beer!

 

Option 2: House Party
Ready to party like it’s 1999? House Party is an app that allows larger groups to attend the same “party” but breaks people up into smaller groups of eight into separate “rooms”. The app allows you to send private messages while on the call, play a game such as trivia or heads up with the 8 people in your private room, and even send a facemail (a voicemail, but with your face). This app would be fun to try out with your friends or “cool” colleagues.

Option 3: Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger just launched a standalone messenger app for Desktop that allows unlimited and FREE group video calls! In an effort to compete with other platforms such as Zoom and Google, Facebook now allows free video desktop calling with an unlimited time limit using the account you most likely already have set up! Nothing new to download or logins to create. This one is great for video chats with friends that you already have on Facebook. However, it may not be best for a work environment, as this platform may mix business and pleasure by using your personal Facebook profile with your boss or client.

 

Just because we are stuck indoors, for the time being, does not mean you cannot make new connections, build business partnerships, or even make friends!

 

Take a look at the Tampa Bay Goes Live calendar to see what virtual events are coming up. Or, plan your own! Reach out to the team for help setting up and hosting a successful virtual event.

Visit the author’s website at: www.alexisrose.co