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Auction Listings Are Vital to the Success of Fundraising Auctions

Fundraising Auction Tip: You should always provide potential bidders with a printed Auction Listing of both your Live and Silent Auction items at any Fundraising Auction. A printed Auction Listing is vital for several reasons:

An Auction Listing informs bidders of the order of sale, and what is coming up next. If you keep your bidders guessing, they will simply not bid.

If bidders are not 100% certain of what they are bidding on, they will not bid. A printed Auction Listing should answer any and all questions about what is being sold in order to encourage bidders to bid as much as possible.

Bidders often need time to plan their bidding strategies, especially on multiple and/or larger value items. A printed Auction Listing helps them to do that.

Couples often need time to consult with each other about what they are willing to spend on something. A printed Auction Listing helps them to do that.

Potential bidders need to know the specifics, the benefits, and the restrictions on any item they are going to bid on, especially on travel and/or other higher value items. A printed Auction Listing should answer all of their questions, in writing.

After bidders see that they have lost an item to another bidder, a printed Auction Listing makes it easier for them to re-strategize on what else they can bid on.
Printed Auction Listings generally come in 3 forms:

Printed in the Event Program or Auction Catalog.

Printed on loose sheets of paper and hand-inserted into the Event Program or Auction Catalog.

Printed on loose sheets of paper and hand-delivered to all attendees, or left on each dinner table in the room.
Auction Listings cost practically nothing to produce and they can make the difference between the success and failure of a Live and Silent Auction. You should never conduct a Fundraising Auction without one.

A Case Study

Let me share a real-life experience with you. Once I was hired to conduct a Fundraising Auction for a nationally renowned organization. The event was held in a major hotel, in one of the country’s largest cities, with several hundred “black tie” participants attending. It was an extremely professional event, with the music, singing, lighting, speeches, and awards all perfectly timed and choreographed. Everything was done to perfection… exception the Fundraising Auction.

Although I had signed an agreement to serve as their Auctioneer nearly one year in advance of the event, no one bothered to contact me for any advice or help. Approximately one week prior to the Auction date, I contacted the group to see if they had replaced me with another Auctioneer. But they said that I was still their man.

Upon arriving at the event I asked for a copy of the Auction Listing. I was told that there were none. I’m not sure whether they felt that the Auction Listing wasn’t necessary, or whether someone forgot to have them printed. This was never made clear. When I asked what I was to use at the podium, I was told to copy the list of Live Auction items from a committee member’s computer. It took me about 30 minutes to copy three pages of hand-written notes in order to prepare for my role as their Auctioneer.

I knew that they had created a PowerPoint program showing the various Live Auction items. When I asked whether the PowerPoint slide order corresponded to the order of sale I had copied from the committee member’s computer, I was met with a blank stare. The committee member left to check the slide order, and returned to let me know that the slide order did not correspond my notes, and he provided me with the correct slide order… hand-written on a paper napkin. This forced me to re-arrange my three pages of hand-written notes before taking the podium.

There was a Live Auction Table with descriptions of the Live Auction items that were to be sold, but the table was not clearly marked, and it received significantly less attention than the Silent Auction Tables, which were clearly identified. Since the Live Auction Table was located adjacent to the “Raffle Table”, it appeared that most people thought it was part of the raffle and therefore paid very little attention to it.

According to the event program (which did not include an Auction Listing), I knew approximately when I was to begin the Live Auction. At the designated time the Master of Ceremonies announced the start of the Live Auction to the several hundred people in attendance, and introduced me as Auctioneer. As I approached the podium I realized that photographs of award winners were still being taken… directly in front of the podium where I was to stand… which required me to stand aside for several minutes until the photographers were done. Can we say “awkward moment”?

As the photographers cleared, I approached the podium and began my Live Auction introduction. Approximately one minute into my introduction, the “Raffle Committee” approached the podium and stopped my Live Auction Introduction in order to pull the 8 or 9 Raffle Winners. These drawings lasted about 5 minutes. Upon it’s conclusion I was allowed to resume the start of the Live Auction.

When standing at the podium two intense and extremely bright spotlights were pointed directly at the podium. The lights were so bright that I literally could not see the center 1/3 of the room. I could see the tables on the right, and on the left, but was totally blinded when looking straight ahead. It took perhaps five minutes before the spotlights were turned off.

While at the podium and describing Lot #1, I had to ask someone to start the Lot #1 PowerPoint Slide… because apparently no one was assigned that job.

So with only the Auctioneer’s verbal description, and a PowerPoint slide, it appeared that few people in the room had any idea about what we were selling… or when we were selling it… until it was announced by the Auctioneer. As a result, bidding was extremely light and the final results fell several thousands of dollars short of where they should have been
The learning experience is this:

The Live Auction is where you place your better items, and where the real money should be made at any Fundraising Auction. Let bidders know as far in advance as possible what you will be selling, and the order of sale, so they can get excited about the Auction, and plan their bidding strategy accordingly.

Auction Listings are absolutely vital to the success of both Live & Silent Auctions. In my opinion, revenues at this Auction fell thousands of dollars short of where they should have been, because no Auction Listing was provided to the guests.

If bidders are not perfectly clear on what is being sold, including both the item’s specifics, benefits, and restrictions, they will not bid.

When you have a committee of volunteers, especially volunteers having full time jobs and/or very busy schedules, the services of a professional Fundraising Auctioneer can help to keep the committee on track.

And once you retain the services of a professional Fundraising Auctioneer… use the services that you are paying for.

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Inbound Marketing Mojo – School’s in Session

A good outbound approach is one where a marketer is engaged in pushing out the business’s promotional messages to the target audience. Inbound marketing companies prefer to utilize the other option-and that’s the pull approach. The pull approach is designed to share messages to those who are already looking for the merchandise and services that the organization is offering. The bottom line is, facts are facts – all the conventional outbound techniques including direct marketing and telemarketing are no longer king of the hill. Each conventional outbound technique generates only 10 percent of leads. Two third of brands prefer inbound approaches for promoting their business and reaching their audience.

The inbound methods such as organic rankings, paid search, and PPC are gaining ground quickly. Social media presence and engagement is another spoke of inbound marketing which is increasingly impactive.

So have you made the transition with your business? Still thinking about if and when?

That’s understandable, these are rapidly changing times in terms of marketing paradigms, of that there is no doubt. We can however distill a few reasons why you might want to consider making the switch, and sooner than later.

Reasons to Make the Switch to Inbound Marketing Strategies

There are various reasons why inbound marketing trumps outbound marketing. One reason may be the long-term value of inbound marketing campaigns, as opposed to the “quick surge” qualities of typical direct marketing campaigns. Through inbound marketing, marketers invest in long-term worth versus those quick and temporary surges in traffic, which certainly are a staple of traditional outbound marketing campaigns. You send out 20,000 postcards, you get a surge of activity. Ebb and Flow. With inbound marketing however, it is a continuous campaign that you feed over time, and the results are spread over a much longer timeframe.

Inbound marketing can be broken down into numerous, relatively simple actions. However it will take a concerted effort to bring all of those simple tasks together to bring an effective inbound strategy to fruition.

One of the fundamental tasks is deciding on what content is to be shared with your target audience. We live in the digital age, and, as people are exposed to more and more information and digital marketing, they have developed mechanisms in the brain to help process and filter that information. In a nutshell, people filter out 90% of the marketing messages they see online. So how do we get past the filter?

There are many ways, such as powerful calls to action, but our focus here is on visual media – images, infographics, and video. Humans are extremely visual creatures. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get past the filter with words alone. So we use our natural inclination towards visual engagement instead. This is why visual media is a centerpiece of an effective inbound marketing strategy.

So now we know what kind of content to share – focus on visually engaging media. Now, we have to figure out what platform to use to share that media. You guessed it – we want to use the social media hubs that have the highest visitor use and popularity – Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google+, and other Web 2.0′s.

Next we have to decide how often we will share visually engaging content on those popular social media hubs. The best approach is to reach a minimum threshold of activity on at least 3 hubs, perhaps Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, or, if you prefer, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. When we say reach a minimum threshold of activity, we mean fully fill out your profile for your business, and then engage with others on those sites as necessary to begin securing some followers/fans/likes/plus 1′s on those sites.

Now, once you’ve reached the minimum threshold, you can focus on 1 or 2 and ramp up your activity. For Facebook, a great approach is to write a few short, engaging posts, attach engaging pics, and then do one-time “boosts” of those posts where you basically pay per thousand impressions through Facebook’s CPM network. A tutorial on Facebook Ads is outside the scope of this article. But trust me, it’s fairly intuitive. And the idea is to write and share, then “boost” selected posts however far you want. $20 a post for your first few is plenty. Once you have your audience growing, you can elect to let it grow organically, occasionally boost, or boost all your posts. That part is up to you and is dependent on your online marketing goals. Again, the idea here is to pick a few popular hubs and get the ball rolling.

So this is basically what inbound marketing is all about. It’s about letting your prospects find you rather than broadcasting your marketing message to the masses hoping it reaches a prospective customer (as in traditional outbound marketing). No need to be overwhelmed. No time like the present, as they say. So why wait? Go ahead and take the plunge!

Is Your Small Business Using Internet Marketing Strategies to Attract Customers Like a Magnet?

Smart business people are leveraging the power of Internet marketing strategies to attract more qualified customers to their small business. Small Businesses that you would not expect to find on the Internet are now using online marketing to draw in customers like a magnet. Traditional small business marketing methods are expensive and the results are not measurable. Positioning yourself as the expert in your field and providing valuable information to your potential customers will magically attract qualified prospects to you. This article will provide valuable small business marketing ideas to help you develop marketing strategies for your small business.My time is limited, and I have found that using the search engines is a great way to find products and services that meet my needs. The information available on the Internet lets me compare products and services and get reviews from other customers who have purchased the products I am looking for. Last week I purchased a generator for my home through the Internet, and I needed to find a local electrician to install it.   I hate calling people from the yellow pages, so I decided to search the Internet for someone who could help me. I found three different electricians. Electrician A had very good information on their website about some simple electrical jobs and things to watch out for when picking an electrician.   Electricians B and C simply had a “yellow page” website with a phone number and address. Because Electrician A had shared valuable information with me first, I already trusted him more, but I wanted to get three bids to make sure I paid a reasonable amount of money for my job.I sent all three electricians an email asking for a bid on my job. Then I spoke with each of them on the phone to answer their questions and give them directions to my property.Electrician B bid on the job sight unseen. Electrician A and C both made time to come out to my property and look over the job before bidding.Electrician A made a couple of good suggestions that actually saved me money and helped me avoid a costly mistake. Electrician C bid almost twice what the other two electricians did. After getting all of the bids, I chose Electrician A because he took the time to come out and look over my job, and actually helped me save money, even though he did not have the cheapest overall bid. Electrician B, who bid on my job sight unseen, had the lowest bid, but would have actually cost me more money because of the issues that Electrician A had pointed out when he took the time to come out to my property to see the job before bidding on it. Electrician C looked over the same job site as electrician A, but did not give me a lot of confidence when he did not point out the same issues that Electrician A had.  The combination of a website with valuable information to help build my confidence coupled with free advice to help me save money actually won this electrician my business. This is an example of how effective marketing a small business using the Internet coupled with a consultative sales approach can help attract and win customers for your business. Because of their power to attract customers, I have implemented these Internet marketing strategies in my own small business. I have a website that has valuable information available to the prospective customers who search for my services. Because of this useful information, the customers who find me already trust what I have to say. They know something about me before we even speak with each other. This helps filter out the tire kickers and helps me leverage my time to work with only those customers who truly have an interest in my services as a small business Internet marketing coach.By reading this article you’ll learn why it is important to market your small business on the Internet. You will learn small business marketing ideas that will attract more customers to you who are already interested in what you have to offer. You will learn how to gain the trust of these customers allowing you to win more business and make more money.Why it is so important to market your small business on the InternetMore than ever, people start their search for information about products and services on the Internet. In fact, as a business medium, the Internet is growing while many other sectors of the economy are declining. Your customers are looking for you on the Internet…trust me I know this. The question is “are they going to find you when they search?” and if they do, “will they learn enough about you to trust you and contact you to do business?”  Many people no longer think of the yellow pages when they are searching for information about a product or service. The major search engines are the most accessed websites on the Internet. Google has over 91 million searches per day, and Yahoo has over 60 million searches per day, together they represent 151 million searches per day. Now the population of the United States is just over 304 million and the population of the whole world is just over 6 billion (Wikipedia – Jul 2008). One out of every two people in the United States could be searching for something or one out of every 40 people in the world could be doing the same. This is a staggering number of searches every day, which reinforces the fact that people are relying on the Internet to search for and find quality information. You can see why, more than ever before, it is important to have an Internet marketing strategy for your small business.How to attract more customers to you who are already interested in what you offerOk…so now we can agree that your business should be on the Internet, but how can you be sure that your business will be found out of all of the others out there? How can you effectively market your small business on the Internet? Probably not the way you would think. Hype-based or hard selling techniques no longer work. The way to attract customers to you is to offer valuable free information to the people who find you.   They will find you because you will use the same words that people are searching for when describing your products or services. This is called search engine optimization (SEO) and all it means is that when you write the content for your website or blog, you use the words that people are typing into the search engines so that they can find you when they search. If you are using a replicated website, it is very likely that it has not been optimized to be found by the search engines. Search engines hate replicated websites.Your small business marketing strategy should include writing articles about topics that are interesting to your customers. To do this, you have to figure out who your target customer is, and what they are interested in. This is probably the hardest part of your small business marketing strategy. This is the essence of attraction marketing and is how you will build an audience for your information, which in turn will draw customers to you like magic. Then it is just a matter of placing your content all over the Internet so that it is found when your customers search. If you are a local business, there are ways to localize your content, so that customers in your geographic area can find you first before you competitors when they search.How the value you provide helps you gain the trust of your customersOnce your customer types in the search words at the search engine and your content comes up, you have started building trust and credibility in their minds. The more valuable the content you offer for free, the more trust you will build. The more frequently your content comes up, the more credibility you will gain. Securing the trust of your customers is the hardest step in making the sale. Using these small business Internet marketing strategies does this hard step for you, so that when your customers come to you, they are ready to learn what you have to offer. If the valuable free content that you offer is perceived to be more valuable than that of your competitors, you will differentiate yourself in the eyes of your prospective customer. If your content comes up first on the search engines, you are guaranteed that your customer will see what you have to offer. If what you offer is of value, you have just won a customer.You too can leverage these ideas for marketing your small business on the Internet There are many tools that you can leverage today for your small business marketing strategies. Some of these include websites, blogs, articles, images, Google maps, videos, etc.  In addition to these, there are many social media options to help build your reputation with your customers. These include such things as Face book, MySpace, Squidoo, and Twitter.For example, my small business has a website which I use as the hub of my business activities. I have written articles, such as the one you are reading, which are found by the search engines when my target customers type in certain search words. My articles then link back to my website for my customers to find more information about my services. In addition to my articles, I have Squidoo lenses, and a Face book page which also link back to my website. My offline marketing also has the link to my website. Again, the target of all of my marketing is to drive prospective customers to my website where they can prequalify themselves by learning more about my business and requesting more information if they are interested. Notice, I am not chasing customers, nor am I wasting my money on the yellow pages. Instead, I am attracting customers to me through the valuable information that I provide. You can easily implement these same marketing strategies for your small business also.If winning more business and making more money is important to you…If all of this information is a bit overwhelming to you, or you just don’t know how to get started, I suggest that you find someone who can guide you through developing and implementing the Internet marketing strategies for your small business. Find someone who can show you the ropes and teach you what you need to know to be self-sufficient.Don’t just sign up with anyone who claims to build or host websites, though. Not everyone knows the secret of attraction marketing like I have described for you here. Find someone who understands these concepts and has demonstrated their ability to apply them the way that I have demonstrated it to you when you found this article. When you do find someone, the more they know the more costly their time will be.  Look for someone who knows just a little more than you but who isn’t so good at it they charge you a fortune. They can show you how to set up your small business marketing strategies on the Internet, or if you don’t have the time to do it, they can do it for you. Now you know how to easily win more business and make more money. Leveraging an Internet marketing strategy will help you with the hardest part of establishing any business relationship. It will help you gain the trust of your potential customers before you have even spoken with them yet. You will be able to attract more customers to you, and the ones you attract are already interested in what you have to offer. After that, all you have to do is offer great service and close the sale. These great small business marketing ideas can give you a leg up on your competitors, and help you grow your small business.   Now you know why it is so important for you develop an Internet marketing strategy for your small business. As a customer, I have found that small businesses who provide valuable information to me when I am searching for products or services are much more likely to get my initial inquiry about their products or services.  Businesses who are not on the Internet or who have a replicated brochure website are usually not in the running at all. In fact, I usually forget to even look in the yellow pages. My first stop to search is now the search engines like Google or yahoo. I have implemented these small business marketing strategies in my own consulting business. Now I have customers calling me, instead of me trying to chase them or spending thousands of dollars on ads that don’t bring in anyone. Give me a call or shoot me an email and I’d be happy to spend 20 minutes on a free consultation with you to get you started on the right track.

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