The third and final Market Awareness Session to be held at Creative Spark in Dundalk will take place on 28 January 2015 with Karan Thompson Consulting. Karan has been at the forefront of developments in the field of creativity and innovation as Innovation Coach for the development of the creative industries in Dublin through CreativeD, a network designed to support and develop SMEs in the creative industry sector in Dublin City and County.

This Market Awareness session will look at the following:

Using Social media

• Choose channels that suit your audiences • Create and curate • Tell your story • Make your business easy to find and easy to share • Use the talent in your team • Keep abreast of new trends and what is relevant to your business • Develop online networks and connect through them • Measure your success • Blogging – first tool for B2B social media success, LinkedIn 2nd tool, Twitter – 3rd tool • Testimonials • Finding your Heroes - Celebrities – Spokespeople for your brand

Channel marketing and PR

• Public relations • What media channels are right for your audiences? • Are you trying to reach current stakeholders or potential stakeholders? • Personal, unique, fun, STICKY – memorable • Use ‘Friendly persistence’ to expand your circle of influence • Use comments online and letters to editors etc • Consider - are words enough? (FundIt Campaign - early adopters / Evernote, Dropbox – strategies for market awareness)

Marketing and Sales – Converting your awareness to sales

• Understand the difference between awareness building, marketing and sales • All about sales in the end – but it starts with awareness • Build relationships with your audiences • Businesses more likely to buy from companies familiar to them • Prospects who are aware of you are likely to buy more quickly and with less price sensitivity

Measuring the value of your Marketing Awareness Strategy

• Measuring your social media success • Align engagement strategy and funnel marketing with your PR metrics • Use Google analytics • Add goal tracking to show your funnel and where you are losing customers.

Honing Your Message

• Refining the message • Test your message - (Will they remember it? - Can they revert back to others what you were trying to say?) Approach – Workshop where individual candidates refine their original message (from day 1) using the CO*Star model and test them with their peers (paired)

Success stories – Getting to market

Potential guest speakers will share their stories of getting to market.