5 tips to be a winning MICE business after COVID-19 (Ep 4)

In this episode, I share 5 tips on how a MICE business can be one of the winners once this horrible coronavirus epidemic is over. 

The 5 tips are:

1. Update and organize everything internally in your business.
2. Ask for testimonials
3. Create 1 years' worth of marketing material for your social channels
4. Fix your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
5. Get a new webpage. 

Links to resources mentioned in this podcast:

1. Hootsuite
2. Buffer
3. SocialBee (we use this one inhouse)

NB! The SocialBee link is an affiliate link and should you follow this link and sign up for SocialBee we may earn a commission without any extra cost to you. 

Links to articles mentioned in this podcast:

1. How to ask for a video review
2. Basic SEO for MICE businesses

Now that we (unfortunately) do not have any clients, we should take this opportunity to do some "house cleaning" and sort out all our internal processes and organization of folders, Dropbox or other file systems we are using. 

It is also a great time to update old descriptions and pictures in your catalogs and sales material. 

If you have the language skills, translating your material to other languages can also be beneficial. If you are a DMC, you may like to know that having your brochures in the languages of your customers saves them a lot of time and is very beneficial for your agency. 

Maybe you have lots of pictures of what you do on your phone. Clean up the phone, get the photos into a picture database, publish on social media, or find other uses. 

Guests and customers will connect better with authentic content, than glazed and picture-perfect stock images! Use real pictures of real customers. 

I did not mention it in the podcast, but UGC - User Generated Content is super powerful.

Testimonials are super-duper powerful and vital. It is like an online "word-of-mouth" marketing superpower. 

Social proof, recommendations by others who have experienced your product is the most powerful tool you can have in your sales toolbox! 

Get it, use it! 

If you can manage to get video testimonials from your customers, those are the most powerful social proof you can get! 

Neil Patel is one of the most recognized SEOs and Digital Marketers in the World. He said that "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is priceless." (link here) 

I have made a mini-guide on my blog MICEnotes (micenotes.com/video-reviews), on how you can ask customers to make your video reviews and the practicalities around it.

Why not use the extra time you now have on your hands to prepare a year's worth of social media content? 

Create beautiful images, memes, articles, and useful material that you can drip onto your social channels over the coming year. Why not even for 2021 while you are at it? 

Let's say you publish one image/article on your Instagram per week, you need 52 images, and you have done a year's worth of work.

I am not sure if one post per week is enough (I would do much more); however, for illustration purposes, you can get by with as little as 52 images. 

You will need a scheduling tool for automatic posting all those images (they will cost you money), but imagine if you now took one week and focused on producing enticing content for your social media channels. You would not need to do any more social media work for a full year! 

Ups... that's not entirely true. You NEED to engage with your customers once the posts are live, and you NEED to answer questions potential customers ask. 

But guess what, you can do all of that INSIDE of the tool also, so you can make it part of your daily/weekly work processes (I would do daily). 

I mention three tools that can help you out with scheduling:

1. Hootsuite
2. Buffer
3. SocialBee (we use this one inhouse).

NB! The SocialBee link is an affiliate link and should you follow this link and sign up for SocialBee we may earn a commission without any extra cost to you.   

Being found on search engines like Google, Bing, and Pinterest is extremely important. 

Google is the largest search engine in the world, with about 80% or so of the market. They also own YouTube, which is the second-largest search engine in the world! 

If you are not using Pinterest - which is a picture and discovery search engine (NOT a social media channel), you are missing out on a lot of traffic to your brand, destination, or services.

You should not rely exclusively on paid advertising (PPC - Pay Per Click) from the likes of Google Ads or Facebook Ads. 

Sure, PPC is super and very useful, if done right. However, if done wrong, it will suck your bank account dry before the end of the month (really, be aware, especially with Facebook ads).

SEO is a free traffic source. 

SEO is complicated and takes lots of time and resources, and most companies will typically buy these services from reputable companies or try themselves (everyone is an SEO genius these days...).

I, Thomas, your host, coincidentally happens to be an SEO as well and know a thing or two about proper SEO. 

There are so many MICE companies which have poor SEO, or none at all. 

Not being found in Google will hurt your business, 100%!

I have written a basic SEO guide on what you can (probably) do yourself to have the absolute minimum for your website. 

You can find the guide on Micenotes.com here. 

In the current climate, SEO's and online marketers are also affected by the coronavirus. Therefore, you may be able to get some good deals on SEO work right now.

I see so many MICE companies that have, in the lack of a better word, crappy websites.

If you are one of my competitors, I love that! 

But if you are not, I would advise you strongly to make sure you have a great website which is built for 2020, and not 2005! 

Your website must be responsive; it must load fast; it must look modern and, most importantly, give the customer what she or he is looking for. 

If there is one thing we all know for sure, it is that due to this coronavirus, "the whole world" is moving online (finally), and the competition online will only be harder and harder. 

If you are not meeting tomorrow head-on and have a proper website, you will lose! 

Having a proper web presence and a webpage that ranks in google, that works on mobile, that has useful content, and loads fast, are all critical ingredients for being one of the winning companies after COVID-19!

I "shamelessly" plug that in the last two weeks, I have offered my SEO and web development services at a 50% reduced price to customers who hire me during the downtime of my DMC agency. Two clients just saved $2000 each for jumping on the opportunities which exist right now. 

If you want to talk about your web presence, feel free to email me: micenotes@gmail.com, and we can have a chat.

Thomas Danielsen

I am the host of the MICE FM podcast. It's awesome that you dropped by, and nice to meet you!

I am a MICE professional with over 15 years of experience in the industry. I am the founder, and co-owner of a DMC in The Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) called DMC Baltic. 

I also blog about the MICE industry over at my blog MICEnotes.com