When it comes to event marketing you find that many markets are so saturated with all sorts of people who consider themselves promoters.

The reason for this is that the barrier to entering the market is so few and set so low that anyone can afford to become an event marketer. After all, many think you just need a logo, get a MySpace page and print a couple flyers to have the honor of calling themselves event marketers.

Hence the market becomes saturated with a lot of competition for the same audience, which adds a lot of clutter and confusion.

So here are some ways you can break through that clutter and eliminate your competition.

You Are Your Biggest Competition
1st thing you should know about competing is that you are your biggest competition. You and you alone decide your strategies, how hard you are going to work, and if you are going to sleep in while your competition is out promoting.

The majority of times winning or losing has more to do with you and less to do with your competition. It has more to do with you being willing to do what it takes to create and market an experience that will outclass whatever is promoted on the same night or day of your event.

You can make all the excuses as to why an event didn’t do well if your competition had a better turnout and event than you, but you know deep down that it was you why YOU failed. You could have invited more friends, sent out more emails, put out more flyers and create an experience that inspired people, but you didn’t.

To win over your competition, create habits that will support your success. Create the best you.

Play By Your Own Rules / Be Different / Be Creative
One thing you may notice about many events and marketers is that they are rather formulaic. The radio ads sound the same, the flyers look the same (Sexy girl and text), and the message is the same, “We’re the best! The best place to be!”

So imagine the audience when they are clobbered with the same and mundane, very little to differentiate the events and they end up just flipping a coin to decide which event they are going to attend.

This is your opportunity to seize your audience. Provide something different, talk to them and with them through your story. Don’t just market at them and force your message down their throats. Because everyone is doing the same thing it won’t take much for you to stand out and you don’t have to spend a whole lot of money to be different.

Don’t just go to the extreme just because, but let it make sense to what you’re trying to create for your members. Give your audience something refreshing to believe in.

Nobody became great being safe and ordinary. Take the risks, then improve, tweak and deliver accordingly.

Build An Army and Cater To Them
Your best weapon against any competition is an inspired group of people sharing your message and inspiring others to act, to attend your event experience and become a part of a movement.

No matter how well you promote, how many celebrities you have, and how pretty your promotional material is, the only person’s decision that counts is the member of your audience. At the end of the day they decide where to go and who they are going to tell. It is this sharing of information with friends in which the true power lies. This sharing aka Word of Mouth is something you need to aspire towards.

You have to inform, cater to, deliver and then motivate a strong enough body of believers to tell their friends/bring their friends to your experience.

If you focus on building a community of members rather than a body of faceless, nameless people to pitch to, then you will have set up yourself for a sure win against your competition.

No matter what your competition does and message they are trying to sell to your members, they will ignore it. They will ignore it because they are tired of being marketed to, they are tired of the pitches and claims. They raise their “Yeh Right!” flag and keep it moving.

Instead they say I belong to this community of people who are getting together for an experience that’s our own. Then when they share it with their friends and tell them it’s the best place to be, their friends believe them. They believe them because it’s not a marketing pitch from some random guy they don’t know.

This is their friend and their friend has their best interest at heart. Their friend wants them to have a great experience. Their friend endorses this event experience, and their friend is much more trusted.

Have a big enough army of friends and you can’t go wrong.

Create Your Biggest Nemesis
This is something that I read recently in Inc. Magazine courtesy Josh Linkner of ePrize that I think you should apply to your event marketing model. If you don’t have a huge player in your market to compete with, create one.

Build up an image of the most talented, supported, celebrated and successful event marketer and use them as your measuring stick. This will keep you in check and make you realize you have a far way to go. You have to figure out how to out-maneuver this nemesis, how to create a better experience, and how to build a stronger loyal army of members who believe in your story and mission.

Too often I hear promoters talking or badmouthing smaller competitors in their market. Saying who has the nicer flyer, who had more groupies and who got 400 when they got 450 members to show up for their event. This is a warped way of thinking, of course you are going to look better if you’re comparing yourself to the losers in your market.

This is why I love to travel and see how other event marketing gurus produce an event, because it makes me realize I haven’t even scratched the surface yet. That guru is promoting events with turnout of many thousands, everywhere I go I can’t help but notice their branding all over the event and every single member is enjoying the experience.

Measure yourself against the best or create the best to compete with. Leave everyone else to fight over the crumbs.

These few strategies will have you running circles around your competition. Be your biggest competition, create a big nemesis, play by your own rules, build an army of loyal friends and enjoy your success.

I hope this was beneficial to you and I wish you much success. Set out to win and win big!

TRENDS, Out!

P.S. You can learn more about Driving Your Competition Crazy by checking out this site by Guy Kawasaki: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/index.html

Written by TRENDS for - EventMarketingTips.com. EMT is an outlet for all my latest lessons, adventures, interviews, resources, rants and more about Nightlife, nightclubs and more.

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