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How to Use Your CRM to Host a Successful Networking Event

Dec 20, 2023

Event marketing campaigns help your company promote its products and services.  

Networking events have long been used by many professionals to establish and enhance relationships with others that can be mutually beneficial to each other’s business. Examples include open house showings for real estate agents; homebuyer workshops put on by mortgage bankers and attorneys; speakers’ workshops; and simple meet and greets with the local chamber of commerce. These are all opportunities where professionals can meet, interact and learn from one another. Most are in person but many are held online.  

Using a CRM to manage networking event invitations 

A good CRM is essential to many business practices, including database organization; customer segmentation; auto-response lead generation and business building campaigns; general marketing; social post generation and distribution; milestone triggered progress reporting; and much more.  

It’s logical then that your CRM can be useful for segmenting and managing the distribution of invitations for a networking event. Event marketing, by way of the creation of targeting prospect lists, the utilization of social posts, SMS texting and landing pages with response forms are all of great utility, and they can be supported by your CRM. You simply create your lists and start sending and posting to your prospects or groups.  

Using a CRM to handle event marketing registration 

A great purpose-built CRM like Surefire℠ CRM and Mortgage Marketing Engine is a great example of a CRM system built to handle all manner of custom or creative uses. For instance, a built-in interface that can be used to create a landing page on the fly with included form response mechanisms is the perfect medium to handle both the invitation and registration of attendees for your event. Forget manual list making, individual emails, SMS texting or any other means that prospect invitations have been handled in the past. Surefire CRM is the perfect tool to enable an efficient and orderly way of filling your event with all the candidates of your choice.  

Can you use your CRM to handle automated SMS texting responses? 

Yes, you can. Built-in form-creating tools in Surefire allow you to easily create forms that utilize rules engines to automatically respond to inquiries with an SMS text confirming the intent of the respondent. That frees you from having to manually respond to each and every attendee and frees your time and lets you focus on all the other things that can contribute toward the success of your networking event, seminar or real estate open house.  

Setting the stage by setting your standards 

As the organizer of any networking event, your professionalism in the conduct of soliciting and responding to attendees will speak highly of your standards. Any professional who appears unorganized will face an uphill battle in promoting their actual services. It’s not to say that anyone would expect a mortgage banker, mortgage broker, real estate agent, attorney, title company representative or other professional to be a pro at event marketing. Nonetheless, if you do appear to be a professional in promoting an event, that certainly makes for a great first impression and a far easier segue to selling your actual services.  

Event marketing is about more than offering attendees a special giveaway or free lunch. It’s a great (and enjoyable) way to get the word out about your products and services and increase engagement with prospects and existing customers and business partners. With the right event marketing strategy and CRM, you’ll be set to plan your networking event execution, manage your invites and follow up with attendees post-event. 

If you’ve never seen a first-class and award-winning system like Surefire CRM in action, click here for a demo today. The time you spend can be saved many times over in making your business efficient and professional.

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