CEO Marketing Insight Interviews: Ilana Eberson

Ilana Eberson started her networking business in 2007. She actually started as a personal matchmaker, helping singles find their one true love. Although she found the work rewarding and made many successful matches that evolved into marriages, she found herself making business connection matches and thus The NYC Business Networking Group (NYCBNG) was born.

Her first group started in New York in 2007 and quickly became a success. By 2009, she was ready to expand and took her talent, connections, and drive to start the 2^nd group in Sydney, Australia.

With more than 15,000 professionals on board and actively involved, she branched out to other major cities. She currently has four employees and seven partners working with her as they not only produce some of the best small business and niche networking events but also offer private event services. Today BNG has networking groups in NYC, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Dallas, Sydney Australia and a recently started LGBT group. She shared that they are rolling out in cities across the USA as they find the right partners in each city.

Today BNG’s business model is one third their own events, while two thirds of their revenue is derived from their private event services to a very targeted and pre-screened community. Eberson shared that they also get involved in recruiting and casting for television shows with some of their media partners.

Although seemingly unrelated segments, Eberson explains that the networking community generates not only new members to their events, but prospects for their private event services as well as for sponsors, exhibitors and media partners.

On top of all this, she also revealed that she is currently working toward rebranding B3Global to better reflect their global reach—one busy lady indeed!

Mardy Sitzer: Are you using or planning on using marketing this year to grow your business?

Ilana Eberson: Yes, we are always marketing—how can you be in business without marketing? Marketing isn’t planned because it is always morphing and so we are always trying something different.

Marketing is a core part of our daily activities, about one to two hours every day we focus on our goal of driving traffic to our website and growing our social networks. We currently have over 12,000 members and connections between LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

MS: What marketing efforts do you expect your sales growth to come from?

IE: Our greatest growth comes from our social media marketing and from our blog. Our blog has daily postings that we cherry pick from news sources and to date we have nearly 2,500 articles. We get a lot of activity from Twitter but LinkedIn is our favorite as it is the most professional environment and we have over 7,500 connections. We find that Facebook is too expensive to compete but we do really well with the Q&A and discussions on LinkedIn—it also allows us to research and develop relationships as well as prescreen for our best prospects.

Besides our group on LinkedIn, we list our events on over 25 business sites for exposure and although we are currently working on the meetup platform we have a new website in development that will house all of our groups in one place, making us more global with regional access.

We post testimonials, photos and videos, which bring us a lot of high value traffic and prospects; we run ticket contests, host giveaways and work closely with our sponsors to offer our members value-add deals.

MS: Would you like to offer a tip for other entrepreneurs?

IE: Concentrate on relationships, not sales. I see a ton of people at these networking events and those that are trying to make a sale aren’t as successful. You never really know the immediate value of a contact and so work on the relationship first.

Also, I recommend trying different things—you have to be nimble in marketing. Try something and give it time to ‘rinse, lather, and repeat’. And always be testing. Always measure. There are a lot of free resources so that once you get traction then you can hire.