The right channels. The right time. The marketing that works for YOU.
June 4th, 6th, 25th, and 27th 2019 at the JMU Ice House Room 117
8:30am-10:00am (with networking time until 10:30am)
Four-class series: $75 ($60 special pricing for Friends of Downtown)
Bring a friend with you and get a discount on the full series! Two-student packs: $110 ($90 for Friends of Downtown)
Individual class pass: $25 each ($20 special pricing for Friends of Downtown)
Not a Friend of Downtown yet? Learn more here.
Leave this four-part marketing series feeling empowered, not overwhelmed. Find out how you can turn everyday business activities into marketing so you can keep in front of your customers and attract new ones in order to boost sales. We’ll show you how to decide what marketing may be most appropriate for you, set priorities, and manage your time while sorting through the noise and only taking on what will actually benefit your business. Plus, you’ll get added to an exclusive closed Facebook group where your workshop cohort and our team of marketing experts will be available for networking and chatting between classes!
Brought to you by the Shenandoah Valley Small Business Development Center and Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance.
Featuring presentations from Andrea Dono (Executive Director of HDR), Allison Dugan (Assistant Director and Business Advisor for Valley SBDC), Karen Lawrence (owner of KLCreative Media), Christine Schmidt (owner of Social Bug Digital Media), and Jeslyn Stiles (Director of Marketing for HDR).
Day 1: All About Customers
Day 1 will introduce the workshop series and cover marketing basics, setting your personal marketing benchmarks, how to assess marketing needs for your business, how to access and use market information, how to identify who exactly your customers are, how to use those customer profiles to make your marketing even better, and more.
Day 2: Your Message & How to Reach Them
Day 2 will build on what you learned about your buisness and your customers from day 1 and take a deeper dive into marketing storytelling, what content is, how to create authentic (and easy!) content, finding your business identity, tips for creating great photo and video content using equipment you already have, planning ahead with a content calendar, marketing automation, and more.
Day 3: Right Channels at the Right Time
Now that you know who your customer is and what you’d like to show them, day 3 will cover marketing channels and how to build a channel mix that works for you. We’ll cover the media options available to you, their role, which ones you need to be worried about right now, the basics of hot-button marketing topics like SEO and ecommerce, how to be a savvy consumer of marketing services, when you should outsource and when you should DIY, and more.
Day 4: Nontraditional Marketing and Social Media Deep Dive Breakouts
By now, you’re well on your way to being a marketing master — so lets dig a little deeper. During our last session, we’ll have breakout sessions digging into nontraditional marketing and networking (having a presence at fairs/markets/shows, planning events, community collaboration, outreach, and avoiding the “year 2 fade out”) and social media marketing (the basics of running social ads, navigating the Facebook backend, how to translate your social analytics, best practices and trends, and more). We’ll finish the session with an exercise that will help you put your new marketing knowledge into action!
Pricing for the four-class series is $75 ($60 special pricing for Friends of Downtown). We strongly recommend registering for the entire series, as each day will build on and add to the information learned from the others. However, if you can only join us for a single class, a one-day pass is $25 each ($20 special pricing for Friends of Downtown).
All registrants will also receive an invitation to an exclusive closed Facebook group where the workshop cohort and our team of marketing experts will be available for networking, chatting, and questions between classes and after the workshop. We also have a happy hour and other additional surprises in the works for our Marketing Made Easy graduates!