Welcome to the Event Planning portion of our blog series on Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show. In our first post, we gave an overview and provided the benefits of hosting your own fashion show for your retail clothing store. If you’re interested in hosting a local fashion show for your small retail clothing boutique, definitely check out this blog series.

No matter what you’re doing when it comes to marketing, planning, IMO, is the MOST critical piece. As always, it’s recommended that you spend two-thirds of your time & energy planning the event, with one-third being left for everything else. Having a solid plan will allow you the greatest opportunity to be successful in each step that follows. During the planning process, determine how you want to handle each step of the Fashion Show process:

• Pre-Event Promotion
• Event Execution
• Post-Event Promotion
• Determining Return-On-Investment

Start out by determining what your goals for the Fashion Show are. Perhaps you want to build awareness & publicity for your retail clothing boutique and/or sell $2,000 worth of clothes during the fashion show. Setting your goals during the Planning process will help you calculate the Return-On-Investment from the Fashion Show. Once you have your goals in place, now determine how you will go about achieving them.

Figure out how you will build buzz within your local community. You can build publicity and awareness by promoting the event through online social tools, as well as, through in-store ads/fliers. You can host a live event and invite select customers, friends, family, media, and other local business owners. Video recording the event will be imperative, so that you can distribute it online – perhaps through YouTube or Viddler, in order to capture a larger audience. You can use the same online social tools to promote the fashion show post-event, that used to promote it pre-event.

Finally, pull in a great team to help you pull this off and determine how you’ll handle any of those scary situations that you’ve undoubtedly conjured up in your mind since you decided to go for it. Everyone has a few fears when doing something out of their comfort zone. In order to ease those fears a bit, determine what scares you the most, and figure out a plan for how you’ll handle the situation if it comes up. 90% of the time, those fears never come to fruition, BUT in the rare case that something does occur, you’ll have a plan on how to handle it.

Having a solid plan is the foundation for a successful event. Now that you have a solid plan in place for your local fashion show, you can move on to the next step in the process.

Stay tuned for the next part of the Host Your Own Local Fashion Show Series. We will discuss Pre-Event Promotion for Fashion Shows. With free online social tools at your disposal, marketing an event like this around your local community will be a breeze.

Technorati Tags: creative marketing, retail marketing, Small Business Marketing, Video Marketing

Tags: creative marketing, retail marketing, Small Business Marketing, Video Marketing

Check out some Related Posts

• March 24, 2010 -- Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Event Hosting (3)
• March 10, 2010 -- Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Pre-Event Promotion (2)
• February 16, 2010 -- Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows by Using Online Social Tools (3)
• April 26, 2010 -- Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Post-Event Promotion (0)
• July 14, 2010 -- Passion & Creativity Go a Long Way for Small Business Owners (0)

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