Use Meet Up and OfficeExec to promote your business.
How?
Most small businesses have a website that gets lackluster traffic. Just to bring good traffic – traffic that is interested in your products or services up to a 1000s visitors a month takes time and dedication, which most don’t have if they are trying to run their own business. But, even if you get those 1000, or more, visitors, they don’t translate into contacts.
Maybe you’ve heard off MeetUp.com? Maybe you’ve even used it – and if so, we would love to hear about it. MeetUp.com is a social media site that gets millions of viewers a month. More importantly they have an active community where new groups, and new meet ups are emailed to existing users looking for that type of thing.
For example, if I have set up “Email Marketing” as an interest and a new group, or a new meet up happens in my area about “Email Marketing” i get a notification. Imagine you are an email marketing looking to build trust and exposure to your brand – just by created a meet up you would have reached out to potentially 1000s of interested people.
Now comes the tricky part – where will you have a meet up? Coffee shop works for small (3-4 people) informal gatherings to hash out ideas. But you need a quiet, dedicated space to really get people involved. This is where your free hours with OfficeExec come in handy.
When we decided to offer free boardroom hours we broke an industry norm. Even now, 4 years later, not a single one of our competitors offers free boardroom hours. Most of their profit models rely on charging a hefty sum for the use of the boardroom. We thought, a new company, that is still trying to find itself, shouldn’t have to spend tons of money for the potential of a client. The free hours was our idea of extending your marketing budget.
As years went by, people didn’t see it that way – instead they utilized the hours practically. They would have schedule important meetings with their clients during the free hours and end up saving a hefty sum. According to our numbers, we saved each one of our clients an average of $1724 over 2013. That’s good – but that was never the actual intention.
The intended use of the space was to create ways to gain new clients. If you are inviting a paying client – then the smart way is to pass the cost onto the client. Use the free hours to get new clients, instead. MeetUp.com just makes the whole thing much easier.
1) Simply start a MeetUp Group that speaks to your audience. Just by starting the group you establish yourself as an industry leader and an expert.
2) Have the meet up itself at OfficeExec, using your free hours.
That’s it. Our standard plan comes with 12 hours free – that is enough for 3 -4 such meet ups a month. This will allow you to build tight networks and channel your expertise through word-of-mouth marketing.
If you need help to get started or unsure of what MeetUp.com is or how to use it, let me know – gratuz@officeexec.com – I’ll gladly share any other tips I have with you.