Back to: Grow Sales By Making Your Location a Can’t-Miss Destination

We want you to be successful in how you approach building and hosting events. Before you start planning an event, make sure you’ve got the right reasons, skills, resources, and capacity to host events.

Here’s a checklist, from a strategic perspective, what you need to host successful events.
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  • What’s the Event Value?
  • What Type of Event will you host?
  • Determine the Logistics, Resources for Hosting.
  • What will you use as Promotional Tools?
  • How will you Transform the Traffic?
  • How will you build your Programming/Events Calendar?

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A. Event Value

Do you have a meaningful and appealing reason to host an event? One that will draw in the Participants (or Customers) you hope to attract?

In what way will your event enhance your customer’s experience? Provide more for their money? Provide insider or specialized knowledge? Make them better consumers or experts?

To benefit you, your event needs first to be about them!

B. Type of Event

What types of activities would your customers enjoy? Do you cater to families? College kids? Young singles? Wine snobs? Foodies? Fashionistas? Philanthropists? Artists?

This is a great place to start.

Does your restaurant, bar, retail shop or cafe have space for 10 people or 100 people? Do you have room to host a class or seminar, or just an informal tasting or demonstration? Are you allowed (by your property management or neighborhood) to host live music events?

What type of events can you realistically host in your space?

C. Logistics, Resources for Hosting

Do you have (or can you find) the time, money, staffing, space/location, etc… to host the event.

The best-intended event will fail if you don’t have enough of these resources.

D. Promotional Tools

Do you have the budget and time to spend to promote the event properly, via in-store signage, social media, direct mail, flyers, etc…?

E. Transform the Traffic

Will you have the process/tools in place to convert traffic to sales, or trial, or capturing names and email addresses?

F. Programming/Events Calendar

Are you considering future events, developing a schedule, so this isn’t just a single one-time thing, but ongoing, so you become known as a place to go. This will indeed make you a destination.

So there’s an approach to think about the overall process of hosting events, now we’ll get a bit more tactical and share what makes individual events successful.