If you are a self-employed meeting planner, you already know that quite a bit of planning is required before you can even begin to meet with clients and provide services. Decisions must be made about which niche should be your main focus, which marketing methods will be most effective, how to build successful relationships with venues and vendors, and how you will manage your client contacts. If you work from a home office, there are also the issues of setting up a home office that is quiet and conducive to productivity, establishing a professional feel for your business that does not give away that you run it out of your home, and determining how and where you will meet with clients.

The issue of where to meet with clients is a simple one when working with larger companies that have offices or storefronts. In this case, you can simply go to them and meet with them on their premises. However, when you are working with smaller companies or are meeting with potential clients that are located elsewhere and visiting your city, meeting on their turf may not be an option.

If the client company is also conducted from a home office, then it is appropriate for you to meet in either your home or theirs, as long as you feel comfortable having clients in your home and you have a professional environment in which to conduct meetings. Options for meeting clients outside of your home include meeting at a local coffee shop or looking into office sharing programs that offer meeting space for reasonable rates.

Self-employed corporate meeting planners must constantly be on the lookout for new, innovative ways to market their meeting planning business. With so many people now using Twitter, this social media outlet is a natural choice for marketing meeting planning businesses large and small.

Whether you are just starting out or have a well-established business, incorporating Twitter into your marketing plan can assist you in staying on contact with previous and current clients, as well as increasing your reach and bringing new prospects into the fold.

A simple way to use Twitter as a marketing tool is to send out tweets that include tips for holding successful, efficient meetings. When sending out regularly scheduled messages that your clients and prospects will find valuable, you will provide them with useful information they can incorporate into their meetings, while encouraging new folks to follow you on Twitter in order to receive this valuable information.

By enticing new people to follow you, you can create an extensive list of contacts that will then be primed to receive other marketing messages as well. Making sure your messages or search engine optimized can also lead to new folks finding you when searching for meeting tips online.

This simple marketing strategy has proven effective for a vast array of businesses already using Twitter to reach out to their current and potential clients.

Whether you run your own meeting planning company or are a meeting planning professional employed by a major corporation, self-promotion should be considered an integral part of your job. Many meeting planners avoid self-promotion for one reason or another, but if you do not have the confidence in your skills and the motivation to get out there and get your name known, others will likely pick up on this and may not have complete confidence in your meeting planning skills.

Self-promotion is, of course, absolutely imperative for self-employed meeting planners and is a key component in landing new clients and sparking interest in your services. Making yourself available as a speaker, writing articles for trade publications, maintaining a blog and billing yourself as an expert are all excellent forms of self-promotion that will increase awareness of your meeting planning services and will instill confidence in potential clients considering using you for their meeting planning needs.

For planners currently working for corporations or non-profit organizations, self-promotion is also important. Participating in the abovementioned activities, such as blogging about event and meeting planning, offering your expertise to partner organizations or writing articles, can increase exposure for your current employer, while also positioning you for stepping out on your own at some point or increasing your marketability to potential future employers.