Increase Retail Sales With Meetups
I just returned from the monthly Italian language Meetup here in Little Rock. Meetups are informal social gatherings of people with similar interests in a particular topic. Topics for Meetups range from political to cultural to intellectual to fun.
Meetups are usually held in books stores, coffee shops and restaurants. As Meetups occur mid-week, on what are usually slow nights for many small businesses, Meetups often bring additional traffic and sales.
For instance, this evening there were six individuals at our Italian language Meetup. The Meetup was held at Boulevard Bread Company, an Italian bakery which also serves full gourmet meals. Among the six of us, three ate full meals and three had light snacks. All had imported Italian beverages. Altogether about $60 in additional sales were generated by this one Meetup. As the Italian language Meetup occurs on only one mid-week night each month, an addditional 16 nights are available for other Meetups at the same location. Potentially, an additional $1,000 or more in sales could be generated simply by hosting nightly Meetups at this one location.
While dozens of Meetups take place in Little Rock and much larger cities, smaller communities are largely untapped. All a small business need do to tap into the Meetup network is offer space for small gatherings. Ideally, small businesses should share some affinity with the Meetup group hosted. For example, gardeners might Meetup at a local plant nursery. Our Italian Meetup chose a bakery which carries Italian products and where the owner visits Italy twice each year.
Now, if we can only get that Entrepreneurs Meetup going…
The Meetup idea doesn’t seem to work very well in smaller communities. The Meetup groups in Joplin, MO are mostly going extinct for lack of attendance and even those in the larger city of Springfield seem to be struggling. The biggest groups and the only ones that appear to have had much in the way of real attendance were those associated with Howard Dean and I think they were driven by campus activity (not that selling to college students isn’t a good way to increase retail sales). The only other group I know of that meets even semiregularly is the Bookcrossing group and I’m not sure that the organizer even knows what Bookcrossing is as she assings books to read each month. Anyway, I’m ranting on somenoe else’s blog and I have my own spaces for that, so I’ll wrap up with my final thought: for Meetups to be a source of revenue for businesses in smaller communities, those businesses will have to get involved with promoting the Meetups as well as promoting themselves to Meetup organizers.
Comment by Tom Hanna — February 11, 2005 @ 4:34 pm
Good commenting, Tom. Sorry to hear that Meetups are not working well in the Joplin area.
Yes, the business hosting Meetups can assist in building a Meetup group by posting a Meetup poster with the details of the Meetup.
I noticed this past week that Meetup has posted some new tools to help market Meetups. I particularly like the flyer with tear-off tabs which I plan to trial this coming monh here in Little Rock on the UALR campus.
Let’s find out what others have to say about Meetups. Comments anyone?
Comment by Timothy Lee — February 12, 2005 @ 10:46 am