Networking is a very important skill for business owners to develop. It’s the best way to find new opportunities for partnerships and find potential new customers as well. If you do a quick search online, you should be able to find plenty of great networking events in your industry that you can attend. But what if you can’t really find anything? If there are not any networking events that bring together people in your specific sector, why not set one up? Setting up your own networking event benefits you in two ways; firstly, it gives you that networking opportunity that you’re looking for, and secondly, it shows people that you are a leader in your industry. If you want to set up your own networking event, here are some basics that you need to know.
Call In Professional Help
You might think that you can handle putting on an event yourself, but if you haven’t done it before, you’re really going to struggle. There are so many details to sort out and it’s likely that you will take on more than you can handle if you decide to do everything on your own. It’s best to hire a corporate event planner to help you handle all of the finer details. They will have a lot more experience than you and they will help you to avoid the common mistakes that people tend to make when they set up networking events. It makes life a lot easier if you have somebody else handle the event planning aspect, so you can focus on promoting the event and making sure that you fill the room on the day.
Understand Your Reasons
It’s important that you have a reason for hosting this event, and that reason cannot just be to network with people, you need to be more specific. Are you looking to meet with potential new partners for a marketing collaboration? Do you want to promote your business to potential customers? Are you trying to find a new manufacturing company to work with? The reasons for the event will dictate how you promote it and what the format of the event is, so you need to understand your reasons before you get started.
Network Before The Event
Even though the whole point of the event is to network, you should still be networking in the lead up to the event. This will help you to start building relationships with people beforehand, which means that they are more likely to attend. Establishing that relationship before the event and making clear what your intentions are will make it easier to get good results when networking. You can network online with people or try to attend other similar events and see if you can meet people there.
Get Things Moving
As the host of the event, it’s important that you are there to get things moving and help others network, as well as meeting people yourself. The best way to do that is to meet and greet everybody that comes in and ask a little about their business interests. Then you can point them in the direction of people that they might like to speak with.
Your networking event will be a big hit and your business will benefit as long as you follow these basic rules when planning and hosting it.
