How to Plan a Successful Small Business Conference

What’s one of the best ways to bring a small business to the forefront of the industry?

The answer is simple: networking in a conference.

There’s no doubt that small business conferences are one of the most powerful tools in the hands of business owners to get their business some time in the limelight. If you’re looking to take advantage of this trend and make a profit with a small business conference, you’re in the right place.

In this article, we’ll go over a few basic principles of what you need to do when you’re planning a small business conference.

Determine Objective

The first thing that you need to do is figure out a central idea of what you want to achieve with your small business conference. What is the underlying purpose and mission of the conference? 

Is it to educate attendees on sales in a specific industry? Is it simply to connect vendors with purchasers? Or is there a wider purpose, a movement that you want to start across the industry?

Whatever the end goal may be, your small business needs the focus of a singular objective in order to impart a feeling of real value to attendees.

Plan a Budget

Once you have a general idea of what you want your conference to achieve, it’s important for you to then start planning your budget. This is going to allow you to figure out what conference activities you can then fit in with your budget.

Remember to take into account the earnings that you will receive from the conference as well. By selling advertising as well as registrations, you could potentially hope to earn a very significant profit, even after paying for speakers and conference activities.

Find Speakers

That segues us nicely into one of the most important things that you need to do for your small business conference: identify excellent speakers that will help your conference drive its mission home.

The higher profile the speakers you are able to secure, the better you’ll be able to promote your event. 

Promote Your Event

Once you have everything lined up, it’s time for you to start marketing efforts so that you actually get attendees to your event. 

So how exactly do you market a small business conference? Well, there are a few strategies you can employ.

The first such strategy is advertising. Well-crafted copy on some social media platforms could definitely entice many a registration.

Another avenue for promotion is through the speakers you have hired. If they have significant audiences, make sure that they are doing their part to promote the event to their following.

Leverage Conference Calling

Lastly, you also want to leverage conference calling for those attendees who want to absorb the information from the conference virtually. Thankfully, there are a plethora of free conference call software options available these days, so setting this up shouldn’t be technically difficult.

Plan a Great Small Business Conference

With these ideas under your belt, you should be well equipped to plan a great small business conference.

For more business advice, be sure to check out the rest of the website!