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.

Do you own or operate a small retail clothing business? If so, do you find it difficult to compete with some of the larger retail chains out there? Do you ever find yourself watching those celebrity-filled fashion shows on TV saying, “our clothes are so much nicer than that”. If that’s the case, then perhaps you should consider hosting your own local fashion show for your retail clothing boutique.

Hosting a local fashion show for your small retail clothing store could be hugely beneficial to your business. It’s a creative way to spend your marketing dollars. Here are a few positives that your clothing store can get out of running an event like this:

• The fashion show would generate you a ton of brand awareness through local media outlets, blogs, etc.
• You can easily afford to promote it, and run it, by using free online social tools
• The audience can be made up of top customers, local media, etc. You can create some great promotions around getting tickets for the live event.
• During the show you can sell merchandise to live audience members
• Before, during, and after the event you can use the story to drive new fans, follows, blog readers, etc. for your small business
• The fashion show would create a lot of word-of-mouth buzz around your community and hopefully drive new customers to your retail clothing store

There are probably even more benefits to running an event like this, but you only have so much time to read this post and I only have so much time to write it…The key for small business owners to pulling this off is that the tools to do so are now available to you at a price you can afford. Online social tools can help you promote the event, share the event with the world, and converse with fans post-event. I’d imagine that you could run your own local fashion show for less than $1,000 if you get creative. Tools like YouTube and Viddler allow you to post a video from the show online. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and your company blog will allow you to promote the event both before, during, and after. Your fashion show may be so cutting edge for your local community that it gets picked up by local news stations, which will add some great PR for you and your small retail clothing shop.

Hosting your own local fashion show for your retail clothing boutique can seem like a daunting challenge for most time-strapped business owners. With that said, if it’s something that you believe can really make a positive impact on your business, then go for it. Before getting started, break the event down into more manageable pieces. Here are the 5 main steps we’d carve out for executing a highly successful local fashion show.

1. Local Fashion Show: Event Planning
2. Local Fashion Show: Pre-Event Promotion
3. Local Fashion Show: Event Hosting
4. a href=”http://www.catalystmarketers.com/fashion-show-post-event-promotion/trackback/” title=”Post Event Promotion”>Local Fashion Show: Post-Event Promotion
5. Local Fashion Show: Return-On-Investment

Over the next week, to two weeks, we’ll be breaking each one of these components down. The goal being to provide our readers with a clear framework on how to execute an event of this magnitude for your small business, through the use of online social tools.

Consider subscribing to the Catalyst Marketers blog to receive the next part in the Host Your Own Local Fashion Show Series.