By the Microsoft Office Live Small Business team

Microsoft Office Live Small Business makes it easy to create a professional Web site and build your online presence. But if you also have a physical store front or participate in local events, you can focus your online efforts in several ways to help attract customers locally.

This article addresses how to use the tools available in Office Live Small Business to help target your efforts when promoting an individual event and how to develop an online strategy for promoting your ongoing local activities.

In this article

 Determine your business goal
 What is your Web site telling you?
 Who is your customer?
 Promote your events throughout your site
 Connect with your customers
 Determine key performance indicators
 Develop a long-term strategy

Determine your business goal

Whether you want to increase attendance for a single event or continue to draw more customers to your local business, focusing your efforts to attract your target customer requires some strategic planning.

• If your goal is to build attendance for a single event, consider what your best outlets are for promoting the event (such as the most popular pages on your Web site), whom you want to draw to the event (your target customer), and how attending will benefit the customer (why should they attend?).

• If your goal is to improve attendance at ongoing local events, such as periodic in-store promotions, consider the same factors you would when planning for a single event. Also consider how you can track your progress over time to sharpen your strategy and continually improve results.

For example, with the single-event approach, you might start with a goal of generating 20 attendees from your Web promotions, resulting in at least two sales or four business leads (potential customers). For an ongoing effort, your initial goal may be to increase attendance at your monthly in-store events by 20 percent over the next six months. Either of these goals helps you determine whom you want to reach and what you want them to know about your events, and it gives you the specific information you need to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

The sections that follow can help you target and plan your promotional efforts for improving event attendance.

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What is your Web site telling you?

To effectively promote your events online, you must know where to focus your efforts. Use the site reports available in Office Live Small Business to help determine the best places to promote your event on your Web site and elsewhere online. To learn about using reports to help you get started with a new online promotion strategy, see Use your Web site to help achieve your business goals.

 Note:  You must activate the Reports feature before Office Live begins to collect the data to be reported, such as page views and keyword usage. To activate Reports, on the Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, click More, and then click Reports. On the Reports page, click Activate for FREE.

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Who is your customer?

Is the purpose of your event to build awareness of your company, boost sales of a particular product, or perhaps build your database of potential customers? Think about what you want to accomplish, and use that to determine who the target customer is for this event.

When you know where you want to promote your event online and who your audience is, determine what you want to tell them. Consider the following guidelines:

• Never overstate the benefits of attending the event. Remember, increased attendance doesn't necessarily mean increased business. One of the best ways to earn a new customer is to simply deliver on what you promise.

• If your event is targeted to a specific part of your business (such as to showcase a product), focus your promotional efforts where you are most likely to reach customers interested in that type of product (the Keywords report may be particularly useful here).

• Highlight the benefits of attending the event in all promotional content, such as special offers or discounts available exclusively for event attendees.

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Promote your events throughout your site

Remember that you can use any page on your site to draw visitors to content on other parts of your site. So, promoting your event on your Web site doesn't just mean creating an event information page. Try promoting your event on your site in several ways:

• Include a highlighted area on your home page that mentions your events and links to an event page for more details.

• Include an event calendar module on your home page or your event page. You can add detailed event information to calendar listings, as shown here. For help using the event calendar module, see Add, change, or remove an event calendar.



• Promote the event on every page of your site that contains relevant content, such as an information page for a product that will be shown at the event or a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page for events that will offer expert advice.

• Mention your event on your Contact Us page, and include a form on your event page for users to send you event-related questions. To include a Contact Us module on a Web page, see Add, change, or delete a Contact Us module. To learn about using the Form Designer module to create custom forms, see Collect customer information using a Web page.

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Connect with your customers

Although you can use features such as keywords to help draw visitors to your site, you can also reach out and connect with potential customers directly.

• If you have a Windows Live Spaces blog, add a blog module to your Web site that displays recent posts. To learn how to add a blog module to your Web site, see Add, change, or remove a blog.

• If you participate in online communities, such as the industry forums, promote your event within those communities. You can also explore community or industry-related Web sites and ask them to link to your event pages.

• Send e-mail marketing messages, such as e-mail newsletters, that promote the events. For help creating effective e-mail marketing messages, see Getting started with e-mail newsletters.

 Note:  It's important to only send e-mail marketing messages to those who have signed up to receive that type of information from your company. You can add a Contact Us module to any page. This module lets you invite visitors to subscribe when they submit the contact form. For more information about the Contact Us module, see Add, change, or delete a Contact Us module.

However you reach out to potential customers, be sure to include links to the pages on your Web site that promote your events. Then, you can help determine the interest generated by your efforts by designating conversion points on your site.

A conversion point is a location on your site that indicates growth in your customer relationships, such as when a visitor submits a newsletter sign-up form or clicks a link to learn more about an upcoming event. The site reports in Office Live Small Business enable you to track the number of visitors who reach each conversion point and also which referring sources (such as an e-mail newsletter or search engine) and which keywords result in the most conversions. For more information about working with conversion points, see Add, change or delete a conversion point.

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Determine key performance indicators

After you decide which online tools you want to use to improve local event attendance, you can determine how to best track the results of your efforts. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are factors that provide important information about the progress you make, such as the following:

• Which of the referring sources where you promote your events (such as search engines, forums, or community Web sites) provide the most traffic to your site?

• If you designate conversion points, which event-related pages show an increase in conversions?

• Do any pages that link to your event pages show a high exit page count? If so, you might consider revising those pages.

• Do you see an increase in page views for the event pages that you link to from an e-mail marketing message? If not, you may want to explore whether you need to adjust your message content or your subscriber list for future efforts.

The site reports available in Office Live Small Business can tell you most of what you need to know about the KPIs that you identify. For help using reports to track your progress, see Track and Analyze Key Performance Indicators.

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Develop a long-term strategy

One of the most important benefits of tracking specific KPIs to support your goal is that it helps you evaluate the benefits of individual efforts. Additionally, when your goal is to improve event attendance over time, or even to promote the occasional individual event, you may also want to track other statistics against growth in event attendance. For example, look at sales generated at events to ensure that an increase in attendance from your promotional efforts is leading to an increase in business derived from those events.

Track your success rates across different types of efforts and different types of events to determine the best approach for promoting your events. When you use the tools available, you can develop a strategy that helps you continuously improve and grow your business.

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