Digital Marketing Strategy: Promote Online Events with Confidence

1. Welcome: Hey guys, I'm Maggie Stara, and as a digital marketer, I have been planning and promoting online events for my own brand as well as for my clients since 2016. The reason I'm so passionate about this topic in particular is because really great online events have that magic of being able to combine the buzz of an in-person event with the convenience of being able to watch everything from your sweatpants at home. In this class, I will be taking you through all of the steps of planning a spectacular promotion strategy for your next live online event. By the end of the class, you're going to have a really solid understanding of what marketing efforts you need to be focusing on during the different stages of promotion from the teaser phase to the promotion phase and through to the retargeting phase, which will happen after the event has already ended to help you convert anyone who hasn't yet taken the action that you want them to take. We'll also be taking a look at how to analyze the audiences that you're looking to target with your event and how to approach your pitch to them on the event itself to make sure that you're not just getting people to your live event, but that you're getting them to take action once they're there. This content is perfect for anyone with a good knowledge of the marketing world who is really looking to enhance their skills within strategy development in particular. The beauty of this is that these skills are incredibly transferable to other areas of marketing. So once you gather all the knowledge from this class, you'll be able to use it to also plan your next product launch or promote a side hustle or a membership site, or even an evergreen offer that you can use to get leads into your business and then sell your offer on autopilot. I'll be sharing with you lots of hands-on experience as well as handy tools and resources and everything you need can be found within your class guide. So make sure to go ahead and download that within the projects and resources tab of the class before you begin. We'll be going through the entire process together step-by-step so you'll walk away from this class really confident in your approach and ready to kill it with your next online event. So now if you're ready, let's get into it with the next lesson and I'll see you in class. 2. Work Backwards: Where a lot of people often go wrong in executing a profitable strategy for their live online event is by creating a major disconnect between the event itself and the promotion efforts around it. This can especially happen in larger teams where maybe sales, marketing, and project management teams and maybe other teams, are all working separately in their individual areas and maybe aren't talking to one another. The infamous Fyre Festival is an excellent example of just how terribly everything can go, if you create an excellent promotion around an event with minimal execution strategy and zero connection to the actual offer that you want the event audience to purchase at the end of the event. While, our folks, in this particular class is on the promotion of online events, this is just one piece of the bigger puzzle. We want to make sure we're not creating this massive disconnect between the expectation and the reality throughout the promotion efforts and the execution stage as well. Because even solo business owners like myself, who might be responsible for every element of their event, still make that mistake more often than we care to admit. The key element we are going to be focusing on in this particular lesson is to get a really thorough understanding of your offer and the target audience, before even thinking about how to promote the event and to who you actually want to be promoting it to. I am going to be taking you through these exercises, so that we can demonstrate how I would actually do this for myself or for a client. For that purpose, I've actually invented a bit of a fictitious event that I'll be looking to promote, which is going to be a live webinar during which I'll be pitching my 997, 12 week group coaching program that's designed for business owners who want to create a digital product offer for their audience. The reason that I've chosen this particular offer is because it's a bit of a higher price point, so there are some more complexities to a customer journey for this type of offer. But we will talk a little bit about how to adjust that strategy, if maybe the offer that you're looking to promote with your event is a lower ticket offer, or maybe it's a much larger offer, or it's within that B2B space and offering ongoing subscription services perhaps. We will talk a little bit about how to adjust this. But no matter what your offer is, the steps within the actual planning and research stages we'll be talking about 1st, will be largely similar. Let's get into that now. Head over to your class guide and scroll through to where you can find the spreadsheet link and the button to access it here. Once you click on that, it'll open up in a new tab for you and you'll be able to head on over to File and Make a Copy, if you do have a Google Drive. If you don't have a Google Drive or you're not comfortable storing this on your Google Drive, you can also download it straight to your computer, but please do not request access. You will have a button here that says Request Access, please don't press that because I won't be able to grant you access because that means that everyone would be making notes in the same documents. You want to make sure you are making your own copy so that you can make all the edits in the world, and no one else will have access to those except for you. Then I want you to go through and just write down your answers to the questions in this very 1st sheet. To save us a little bit of time, here is one I prepared earlier. In case you can't tell, I'm a big fan of cooking shows. But I've already got one here filled out with my fictitious event and offer detail here, so we can actually go through a few things together without you having to watch me type it all out. You can see that I've gone through and answered some of these pre-prepared questions here. But keep in mind that you may not have answers to all of these or you might actually want to add your own, which will help you to map out your plan a little bit later on. I've outlined my goal and my average lifetime customer value. For example, if you know that on average about one out of every three people who buy your $997 program also buy additional items worth a certain amount, you can then calculate based on your total revenue divide it by number of customers that your average customer lifetime value is more than this particular offer for this particular event. The reason that this can be really useful is because you might actually realize that you can spend a lot more on acquiring one customer during this one event, because they might be worth a lot more in the long run. Their lifetime value might be 10 times the cost of this initial offer value, and that can be a really great way to justify your advertising costs to additional decision-makers in your business, if that's not you. Because you could say, okay, we spent 300 bucks acquiring one customer who actually only bought one $350 offer here, but we know based on our data is that we have a lot of repeat business and the average value is actually $2,000 or $10,000 per customer. This is going to work out in the long run, even if we spend a little bit more on acquiring that customer right now. This is also a really, really great time to check-in and make sure that your offer, your event, your audience, and your promotion efforts all connect, because everything within this one tab of your spreadsheet, should play together really well. For example, my goal here is to get people to sign up to my $997 coaching program for business owners wanting to create a digital product for their audience to bring in a more passive revenue stream into their business and bringing leads on autopilot. The pain points that I solve with this is allowing business owners to bringing in additional revenue stream into their business, build passive income, and also to shorten the learning curve through my knowledge of this market and this particular product offer. Then the event that I would be using to promote this offer is four simple steps to launching your profitable online course, and the sub-headline would be something like Learn the Exact Steps to make an extra $1,000 a month in your business this year. Then when we get into the promotion efforts, I would be looking to piggyback off of industry partnerships with the likes of Social Media Examiner, maybe the business section of Forbes, Digital Marketer, anyone that really targeting this particular segment of my audience in a way that's really aligned with the offer I'm looking to actually sell to them. I would also be looking to maybe feature on podcasts like Entrepreneur on Fire, Goal Digger podcast, and then when we're talking about the YouTube world, I might look to collaborate with people like Modern Millie and Louise Henry, who speak to this segment of the audience but are actually not direct competitors. They don't have offers that compete with my offer because that would make it unlikely that they would want to promote me, but their audiences exactly the audience I'm looking to target, and they might be able to leverage off of my offer by entering into an affiliate partnership, for example. They could have me on as a guest on their YouTube channel and then maybe promote my event to their audience with the intention that, if somebody signs up through their targeted link and then ends up purchasing my offer, they get an affiliate commission from their audience signing up to that. Now, we'll be going into more details about the promotion efforts specifically once we map out the promotion strategy in a later lesson. But for now, the key is just to make sure that everything you're writing down in this promotion efforts category make sense with everything you wrote about up here in terms of your event and your offer, and likewise down here, which will be your details about your audience. I've only written one customer avatar, but I really encourage you to write up to three different customer segments that you'll be looking to target with your offer. If you're only going after one, that's perfectly fine, but three is that maximum number you want to be aiming for. Here are some questions to help you really narrow in on who is it that you're looking to target with your event, with your offer, and with your promotion efforts. I have chosen Emma, who's 29, is engaged but has no kids, is Canadian, she's a small business owner of a graphic design business. She loves watching YouTube tutorials and Instagram Reels, IGTV, TikTok videos. She's a very video heavy person, and this gives me a bit of insight into how I might be able to advertise to her and the platforms that I might want to use. She checks Facebook a lot more frequently than her emails, which might mean that I put more efforts towards chatbot blasts about the event rather than email marketing. I would definitely do both, but this is again, just giving me a bit more insight into who she is. She wants to bring in more passive income into her business, because graphic design in itself is trading hours for dollars, so she wants to make sure she's not go-go all the time. She also wants to find new ways to bring in more clients into her more active graphic design stuff as well. This offer would actually do both of those things for her. She's struggling with a lack of ongoing work and lack of clients because it's very ad hoc. Again, graphic design, that's just the nature of it. She has taken several trainings and even bought a few paid offers, but nothing's really worked and she wishes that she could have someone who would actually keep her accountable for achieving these future milestones within her business. Her fear is that really, she'll just end buy another program that she won't follow through on. That is really, really key because these are some of the objections that I might be able to tackle with my promotion efforts, specifically with my retargeting efforts. Because from this, I know that I would be able to get her to the training, but actually getting her to buy that offer might be a bit tricky because she's already bought a few of them, but she's just never really had a great deal of success with it. This is just a bit of extra vignette, spending her time doing yoga and exploring nature with her fiance and their dog, who I've named Sausage. That's a little bit more about how I might be able to target her using language around freedom, do you want to have more free time to spend with your loved ones and maybe using some images of hiking, nature, dogs, all of that stuff. This is again, just stuff I would get through research of my current audience, and I have included some resources of how you can do this within your class guide, so make sure to check that out. You want to just get into the heads of who your people are? What's bothering them? What problems do they have that you want to solve? How have they been burned in the past, that you can make sure that they know that you are not just another person who's full of empty promises who's not going to deliver, if that's something that they've been burned with in the past. The reason that all of this stuff is quite important is because it's going to help you determine your promotion strategy. It's all going to impact it in some way, shape, or form. If, for example, you're looking to pitch a $40 offer at the end of your event, that's a pretty easy sell for somebody to say yes to, even if they don't really know much about you yet. But if it's $1,000 or $12,000 recurring membership fee, then people are going to really get need to trust you and like you before they say yes to that price tag, which means the length of your promotion of the event and that nurturing that happens before people even show up to the event is going to have to be much, much more in-depth and much longer as well. Likewise, who your audience is is going to depend on how you approach a promotion as well. If you're looking to target C-suite level executives, you're probably going to be looking at something like LinkedIn. Whereas if your audience is stay-at-home moms, you're probably going to be targeting them through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and all the other platforms that they're more likely to hang out on. Now in terms of the length of your promotion and how much time you actually have to organize everything, that might help you determine whether you have any time to set up affiliate partnerships, or podcast features, blog post features, and more organic content production, or if you just have no time and have to shift straight to paid efforts straight away because you're going into crunch time. If we're bringing this back to the example of the Fyre Festival, their end goal was to promote their Fyre app through the event. Problem here, aside from the fact that the event was a complete disaster, was the fact that the people who were attracted to this particular event were not actually the people who would be likely to purchase or use the app itself to book Beyonce to come to their next dinner party. So is really important to know exactly what you're hoping to sell to whom and how, before you even begin planning your event and the promotion around it. We are going to be using a lot of this information later on, when we talk about how to structure your promotion plan. But for now, let's get into hiking, sneakily check out what your competitors are doing online with their own online event promotions, and how you can use this knowledge to really enhance your own strategies as well. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Do Your Competitor Research: You have now written some rough notes on the who, the what, and the how of your event, and we'll be using this information a little bit later on. But for now, let's get into a few ways that you can sneakily gather data on your competitors to see what you might be able to use in your own strategy. Now it can be tough to have the right timing with the stuff because maybe you're planning an event in January and your competitors have just finished promoting their event, and you really wish that you remembered a bit more about their promotion efforts to be able to gather data on it, but that's exactly why I actually subscribe to a lot of competitor stuff to be able to keep an eye on any future promotions and try and go and periodically to take some screenshots of any ads and emails, landing pages or anything else to do with their promotion efforts and events so that I can use that to brainstorm in the future. I am going to take you through how to deep dive into your competitor's strategy, and I really, really encourage you to set aside a day once a month or once a quarter to actually go in and checking in how competitors are doing and maybe go in and actually gather some stuff to gain inspiration for future promotions, but also really stay on top of any new product launches or innovations your competitors have in the works so that you can also stay a head of the game in terms of business growth. For this exercise, we're going to be using the second sheet in your spreadsheet to write down a list of possible competitors. Now keep in mind that in this day and age, it's not as simple as I own the store and my competitor is the guy who owns a similar store down the road. Your competitor might be someone who is on a totally different side of the world to you, who sells a similar product, or someone who runs a similar business in your local area but has a totally different audience. I just say that keep your mind open and start writing down anyone that you think of as a possible competitor that you can learn from, because chances are a lot of them will not actually be currently running promotions, so you want to have a big enough sample that you can choose from to then narrow it down by the businesses who are running some promotions and campaigns that you can actually have a look at and use for brainstorming as well. Now once again, for this example, I'm going to be looking to do a live training, which will pitch my 9,997 12-week group coaching program for business owners and entrepreneurs wanting to create a digital offer like a course or training for their audience. My competitor in this case that'll be using is Amy Porterfield because she teaches marketing and online course creation globally, and her audience is really similar to mine. Now of course, I would go through more competitors, but this is just an exercise for you guys to get a really good feel for how to do this, and if you are really not sure who your competitors are, you can jump on over to something like Instagram and use hashtags that you think people would use if they're trying to attract the attention of your target market. For example, for me, I would be using hashtags like hashtag digitalmarketing, hashtag coursecreation, hashtag socialmediamanagement, all of those different topics that are within my particular area of expertise, and this offer that I'm looking to promote. If Instagram is not right for your audience, then you'll just have to deep dive into some of your analytics to see who your competitors are, and you can use some of the tools that I'm going to be using here today for that as well. The reason that I do know that Amy Porterfield is going after my ideal audience is, generally speaking, people will have a help mission statement on their website like this; Hi, I'm Amy. I teach business owners, educators, and entrepreneurs the profitable action steps for building a highly engaged email list, creating online training courses, and using online marketing strategies to sell with ease. Perfect. That's exactly what I would want to do in this scenario, so this is the right person for me to be studying in terms of how she's done her events and her promotion efforts around them. This is where I could go and check out all the different platforms that she might be using for her organic marketing, and then checking on some of the paid marketing as well. Who are they targeting with their efforts? So we already know that for her, it would be small business owners and entrepreneurs, and aspiring course creators, so that could be Freelance, creative, anyone but I think that category sums that up. We'll take a look at these two areas in just a sec, but I also know that she does use some particular people that have podcasts and have an audience of their own that's quite similar to hers for partnerships and affiliates, but don't worry too much if you can't identify these or if there aren't any. Finally, I would like to encourage you to take some screenshots of the ads and landing pages. I've included a really good tool inside of your class guide so that you can use that as a Chrome extension, and it will take a screenshot of the entire landing page because bear in mind that these will not be alive forever, so if you do want to use them for inspiration or just for research in future, just take a screenshot of it, put it somewhere in your Google Drive folder, and put the URL here of the folder where you're gathering all this competitor research so that when it comes down to promotion time or in the future, you can access that really easily. You don't have to depend on them always running promotions because again, that doesn't happen when we want it to happen the most. Let's go ahead and jump into seeing what Amy's doing with her Facebook ads and Instagram ads. First, she's running 87 different ads at the moment, and a lot of them are promoting different offers. There's a lot of different offers and different stages of awareness, but the ones that I would be most interested in would be promotions around live events. This masterclass seems like it would be a good fit for that, and I could take a look at how she structured her ad copy, and clearly, this is her introducing herself, so this is a completely cold audience telling them who she is, what she does, and how she can help them. That might be really relevant to me promoting my own event to potentially audiences who have never heard of me. Whereas other ads that she's running are little bit more friendly and obviously running to people who already know who she is and are a little bit more just results focused and that leading with impact that you can do when your audience already knows a little bit about you, so you want to know the Number 1 way that I get results in my eight figure online business. That might sound a bit bragging to somebody who has no idea who you are, but if it's an audience that knows her who has been following her around for a while, and she's just using this to warm them up to something new that she's got as an offer, then that's perfectly fine. This is where I would go in and take some screenshots of these and also just click into them so I can see what the landing page looks like and how she's promoting on the landing page itself, and then of course, the next step will be to actually sign up for it and see how she's dealing with the follow-up after somebody has actually signed up for the event. I would go through and analyze all of these different ads, then maybe head over to LinkedIn and under posts, you can head on over to ads and see how she's advertising there, so obviously, she is actually promoting digital course academy students and alumni, so she's maybe promoting something new to existing customers already, which is cool. I could just jump in here and this is how I would find out that she's doing some paid affiliate or collaboration with Jasmine Star. Again, that would bring me back to this and being able to fill this out for myself and take those screenshots and extra notes on her strategy in her approach that I might be able to incorporate into my own strategy, and then in terms of organic content, yes, you can definitely just go to these different platforms and observe, but you can also just head on over to similar web, and if your competitor is big enough, it doesn't have every website under the sun. I know that a lot of especially people in my space, so people in the digital marketing and social media marketing space, are on here, so if your competitors are big enough, their website will likely be on here, and this will give you a bit of a shortcut to the analysis part of organic and paid approaches well. So what this is going to show you is exactly how much traffic they're getting to their website, where that traffic is coming from, what sources they're using, which will give you a really good idea of determining how much effort they're putting into things like SEO, because obviously search results are really big, or socials or mail, their display ads. All of that stuff is in here, so you'll be able to actually identify a lot. Also if they are actually using paid ads on Google itself, you'll be able to see their paid keywords that they're advertising for. Obviously at this stage, they're not using any search ad traffic for Amy Porterfield, but they've got a lot of really good organic keywords here. In terms of socials, this will give you a really good idea of where you can focus. You can see that through to her website, most of the people are coming from Facebook, some from YouTube, little bit from Instagram and Quora, which is also an interesting thing because they're obviously using this as another strategy where on Quora they can maybe going and answer some questions and promote Amy's programs as a solution to people's problems that are asking these questions on Quora, and then of course, WhatsApp as well. But I would say looks like largely Facebook. That would be through Facebook groups and their Facebook page as well, and then you can deep dive into that a little bit more, no display advertising at this stage, but then you can see what her audience interests are, and then finally, if you are really struggling to think of other competitors that you want to put inside of your spreadsheet. Then you can come in here and check out who Amy Porter fields competitors are, which are going to be in this case, my competitors as well. So it'll lead me down this research rabbit hole and I can maybe see if there's additional people who I can target off of who might have launches, who are even more similar to what I'm looking to launch or promote in terms of my event. Then of course, the final step is going to be to come in here and fill out your spreadsheets so that you have a lot of data to go on when you actually sit down to map out your strategy. Those are Steps 1 and 2 of the competitor research, and then Step 3 will be to actually put yourself through their sales and marketing efforts as a perspective customer, this can feel a bit funny, but you will learn a heck of a lot by going through this experience. If you're a local competing business, then one thing you might want to consider is using a known brand of the email address, so just setting up as sort of a fake Gmail address that you can use to put yourself through their sales and marketing funnels so that you can see what emails they send you leading up to the event that you're registering for, and then once you actually attend the event, you can brainstorm a lot of ideas about how did they structure the event? How did they peach their offer? What's their price point? Is there any urgency or scarcity to their offer? Then about their follow-up structures, do they have emails that you get if you didn't purchase? Do you see any retargeting ads after the event? Where maybe your competitors are actually not doing that well with their promotion efforts, which is potentially an opportunity for you to learn from that as well, but if they're not maybe running any promotions at the moment, then I encourage you to go wider with your efforts. You can think of other businesses that are marketing to your target audience that are not necessarily competitors, and there's still something to be learned from those efforts there. For my example, my target audience would be business owners who want to create a more scalable digital offer for their audience. If there's no one who's a direct competitor offering this type of product or event, then I might be able to look at other people who are looking to target that same audience, like digital marketing agencies or PR agencies or software tools aimed at this target market. Then I could also just look at people who I know are always marketing some sort of live events like Tony Robbins and Simon Sinek, TED Talks, Meetup, all of these brands that can just give me some ideas about what I might be able to do, because it's always easier to start with some inspiration, even if it's not quite a competitor, than to be starting with a completely blank slide. Make sure to check your class guide because I have provided you with a list of brands that are constantly promoting live events online, so you can use them for your own research if maybe your own competitors are not running things as actively as you would like to so that you can draw some inspiration from these. In the next lesson, we're going to be deep diving into some more live examples of promotions and see what we can learn from these for our own strategy. I'll see you there. 4. Examples of Event Promotions: I am aware of the fact that even with all this knowledge and all these tips, for some industries it's just always going to be more difficult than others to gather enough competitor data to be able to inform your strategy off of, and that's just due to the fact that some industries are not known for running live online events, or running them really well. I thought I would create this additional lesson for you in which I'll be taking you through three profitable types of promotions, for three totally different types of events, and different types of offers as well. Hopefully these are going to give you some ideas about how you could potentially structure your own, even if your competitors are not actively running live events at the moment. Let's get straight into it. The three types of events, and the three examples we'll be looking at to do with each, will be a membership community, a live event, and an event that's selling on autopilot at all times, and the reason that I've chosen these particular event types is because, or first of all, I've actually gone through two of them as a customer, so I know a little bit more about their sales process, but also they're businesses that I've observed over the years. I know a little bit about how their offer has evolved, and how their programs have evolved as well, and it's because there are three completely different price points, but also business and offer structures. We can get a really good idea of the different types of promotion efforts that are required based on your individual price point and also your offer setup. We're going to be starting with the lowest price offer first, which is going to be The Creatives Platform from World Nate and Intrepid Introvert. So these guys are basically social media influencers, they've built their own individual travel brands, and they started a membership community a couple of years ago to help people to do the same. It was initially priced at about $20 US a month. Now it's at $97 a month or $970 a year for the membership. The event that's attached to this membership community is a free web class, which is tips for growing your social media following, but it always changes slightly. I've seen these guys do a few different webinars over the years that all lead into the funnel of getting people into their membership community. I know they're testing a few different things in terms of some live and pre-recorded webinars as well. But generally what they do is they do a couple of live webinars, they take the best one in terms of interaction with people asking questions, and one that maybe they felt went really well, and then they turn that into a pre-recorded webinar, that appears live. I'm going to show you exactly what that means in just a second. But the thing that I really like about these guys is that they have a little bit of urgency to their approach, where they offer a discount through e-mails after somebody attends the event, that seems timed, even though it's not, but it does give people a bit of an urgency of, "Okay, cool, if I take advantage of this discounted offer, I can join the community for a cheaper price." That's really great, but the thing that I don't particularly like about their purge is the fact that both their event and their program are based on their own personal experience, and they're not really applicable to the audience as a whole. I found that mainly they're telling their story of how they grew their personal brands, and how they've made all this money traveling and collaborating with brands around the world, but it's not necessarily applicable to their audience, but let's just have a look into their Facebook Ads library, so this is The Creatives Platform. This is the event that they're advertising. Currently they only have one ad running, which is quite different because until now I saw them running at least five ads at a time. There also not running any retargeting ads, which again, is a lot of marketing dollars lost potentially, by not getting people who are on the fence to convert from retargeting ads. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. But their event is, "How we grew our Social Media brands workshop." If you go into it, you'll see that it's a WebinarJam link, and it looks like it's a live event. It says the next one's in 21 minutes. Register for it now. Looks like it's all live, but it's actually just a recording of a previously live event. But this is a bit problematic, because do I want to know how somebody grew their Social Media brand? Sure. But would this be better if it was spun in a slightly different way, where they would go, "Here's how you can grow your Social Media brand, and travel the world while you get paid to work with brands all over the world." That's a bad title, but you get the point. Going from a me, me, me focus to a, you, our audience, focus. That's a bit of a problem that I found with both their actual event, and the actual membership site as well. But like I said, this is the e-mail that you get after about 10 days of attending the webinar, and if you don't purchase at that $97 price point, you get an e-mail saying, "Hey, why don't you get a 70 percent discount instead? Can we convince you to join the community for $29 a month instead?" That's a bit of urgency and scarcity. It also says, "We don't have too many coupons left." That's that scarcity angle. This is a good strategy, but again, they're depending or counting on the fact that e-mail will work. I would definitely supplement that with some paid ads, and I honestly think 10 days is too long. After somebody attends you event, if they don't purchase your offer within a couple of days, I would say two to three, that's when you want to offer them some discount. I don't even remember what I did 10 days ago, so I don't think I would have that sense of, I really need to get this thing after about 10 days. I think that's a little bit too long. But the one great thing they have going for them, is a members only community, and I think this probably does a lot for them in terms of reducing refunds, because for me personally, I joined a month-long trial for these guys two and a half years ago, and I'm still a part of this community. They're obviously not removing people who are no longer paying members. But it makes the community look a lot bigger than it probably is. There's about 7,000 members, not sure how many of them are paying active members, but the community itself is quite active. There's quite a lot of people offering support, and ideas, and answering questions, whether they're paying members or not, it's still a really big value to their paying members. That's something for you to consider. Is there something similar that you can create around your own event, where there is that community support and collaboration that is going to really help your members feel like they're a valued member of a community, and that they're part of something bigger, rather than just purchasing your offer and then being on their own. I really think that there is something to learn from this part of their approach. Now, the second live event I wanted to talk about is Marie Forleo's B-school. I'm sure a lot of guys might know Marie Forleo. But if you don't, Marie Forleo is a brilliant entrepreneur and also a brilliant business mind, and B-school is her offer that she opens up once a year for enrollment that is $2,499 as a one-off offer, or $239 for a 12-month payment plan, where her and a bunch of entrepreneurial experts will teach this community of people, both through pre-recorded content and live in-person workshops and Q&A's, how to grow their business, how to scale online systems to put in place productivity. Basically anything you could possibly know, want to know about owning and running a successful business, they cover within this program. The event that she hosts that lead into this offer promotion is an online business building workshop. That's a three-part video series, and I know in the past she's also done a lot of live webinars. I'm not sure if she did it this year because we're at the end of the promotion period. But I know she does do quite a few live webinars with her audience to get a bit more of that interaction. But really the brilliant thing about this particular event, other than the fact that it is very much a live offer that only opens up once a year, there's very much that urgency and scarcity angle in that offer is the fact that Marie actually does almost like an 11 month promotion period for this offer. What I mean by that is that she spends the entire year creating content, hosting Marie TV, appearing on podcasts, building her email list, and doing as much as possible to promote her brand so that by the time she actually opens up enrollment for B-School and does these last-minute events that promote B-School, people are pretty primed to already say, yes to whatever she's selling because they've been following along her journey throughout the year. This is the three-part training series that she offers where it's ready to bring your dream business to life. Learn how to get laser-focused on the task that matters, cut through the noise, and build a profitable business that makes a difference. Very, very aligned with her offer, which is B-school. The thing to learn from her approach in terms of advertising is that she's running a lot of ads. She's running 85 different types of ads at the moment, B-School closes shortly, you'll see it on her website. It says time is running out, B-School closes soon in 20 hours, 15 minutes, and 13 seconds. You've got that constant reminder on her website and in all her social media profiles that it's closing for enrollment and that's why she's running a lot of ads at the moment. But, all of her ads are very audience-focused. It's not really about her, it's a lot about the stories of her audience and that community feel, building that trust factor. Join B-School today, 100 percent risk-free. We only open up once a year. You don't have to figure everything out on your own. Do you dream of getting paid to do what you love? You matter, your dreams matter. Steph was a science teacher. These are all telling the stories of how her students have succeeded, which is totally different from what we saw beforehand with the creatives platform, which is very much me, me, me. Here's how I've done this amazing thing. This is very much the total opposite approach of, here's what why amazing students have done as a result of what I've taught them and it's very much audience-focused, fan-point-focused. How can I help you? If you were to scroll down through the 85 different ads, you'll find a mix of different ads promoting different stages over her audience's awareness of her brand. It'll be, ads promoting the three-part video series. Then ads promoting B-School and then ads promoting people who checked out B-School but haven't purchased yet, to try and retarget them and make sure that they know it's closing and making sure that they don't miss out. It's very much targeted at different stages of awareness but always focus on the audience. Now finally, I wanted to talk about Sunny Lenarduzzi, and her program and her structure, and her promotions as well. She's got a final goal of a $6,000 program, a mid goal that a 597 program that is being sold at a discounted rate of 397, and then the event that she uses to promote that mid goal is growing your business and your brand online using YouTube. The mid goal is then a YouTube for bosses program, which is an introduction into growing YouTube channel, and then people who then purchase that program get absorbed into the authority accelerator program with a salesperson. That's $6,000 price tag is not actually listed anywhere online like it was for Marie Forleo. This is just something that he sold on an actual live call with a human who then goes through and makes sure that the program is a good fit for you. There are a few things for us to look at there, first of all, Sunny's got about 170 ads running at all times, including Google ads for the authority accelerator program, much like Marie Forleo has for B-School, if somebody is googling it to try and find out more about it, she's making sure that that keyword is being targeted with Google search ads, but for Facebook and Instagram specifically, there are 170 ads running, and again, different stages of awareness. She's running some ads that are just specifically for people to get to know her and her story and just somebody that doesn't know anything about her to get to know her. She would then retarget them with ads for the training, which then leads to YouTube for bosses, which is that mid-level goal. Then retargeting those people with the live training, which is then going to be up-selling people into the authority accelerator. This is a mix of live and pre-recorded running on autopilot programs and promotion efforts. It's a lot of different complex moving pieces, it's really important that if you were to do something similar to this, that you have a really good idea of what's happening when and the sequence of events and making sure that audiences are being excluded from retargeting efforts, especially for discounts if they've already purchased that thing. Because if you were to Google, buying YouTube for bosses and going to this link, it'll say 597, about then the actual ads run to a different landing page where you can say, "Hey, you can actually get it for 397." You want to make sure somebody does buy it for 597, that they're not then being retargeted with ads, that sell it for a $200 discounted price. But once again, just looking at these ads, the thing that's quite unique about this is that the lower ticket offers will be promoted through pre-recorded trainings that may appear live because they might have actually been live at some stage and they're just now being shown as a pre-recorded training, but then the higher ticket offer, which is $6,000, has two stages of live events. It's a live training, this one is how to turn your experience into your empire. How I used course creation to grow to six figures a year and how you can too. It's a live event. Then there's an additional live element to that in the fact that people can sign up for a sales call then takes him to a live salesperson who's going to pitch them on the offer. That's very different to what a lot of other people are doing. Like Marie Forleo, where she's publicly listing the fact that her course costs over $2,000, it's a higher ticket offer. But she's built up a lot of reputation throughout the year to then make sure that people really don't need to be sold in a personal way and on a live event or with a live salesperson. Whereas with Sunny, she's gone down a very different path where there is a lot of that live element angle to her sales process. But she's also running a heck of a lot of ads at any one time throughout the year which then obviously also helps her to build up an audience to launch to when she does have live events or live promotions. That's the benefit of not just running ads and not just promoting yourself during launch time or during the time of your live event, but doing it consistently throughout the year so that when it is time to promote a live event, you actually have this backlog of an audience that's read your articles, that's watched your videos, that's maybe already purchased from you for your lower ticket offers. By the time they're like, "Okay, we've got this live event that's going to be pitching a $6,000 offer," you have an audience to sell to. Hopefully, that has helped you to give you some context around what you might be able to do with your own event promotion, and now in the next lesson, we're going to be getting into exactly how to plan this out within the different phases of your promotion strategy. I'll see you there. 5. Your Teaser Phase: At this stage in the class, you have jotted down some notes about your offer, your event, your audience, and hopefully done a little bit of competitor research that's going to help you to strategize your own promotions for your event. But now it's time to actually put it all into action and plan out your profitable promotion strategy. The methods of promotion that you choose to focus on here will be determined by the questions you answered earlier about where your audience's hanging out online and what's working well for your competitors and all that good stuff. But depending on your budget and resources, you can also allow yourself to get a little bit creative and think outside the box of this stuff. You might be able to offer existing customers rewards for recommending your event or offer to their friends, which is exactly how Dropbox grew their multi-billion dollar company. Or you get your community involved like Exploding Kittens, the $20 card game that raise $8.7 million through Kickstarter. Of course, these aren't examples of promotions of live events, but they're really good examples of out of the box ideas that really succeeded in growing these businesses. Just don't be afraid to try out different things and see what works. But for the purpose of what we're doing here with this class, I will be taking you through the three different phases of your promotion strategy and giving you some ideas for what you could do at each different phase. But please bear in mind that you absolutely should not think about doing everything that we're about to talk about. You should create a really tailored strategy based on your own research of your own business and your own audience. I'll be showing you exactly how I would go about creating this strategy for my own fictitious event and just a little bit. But as with everything in the marketing world, less is often more and instead of trying to promote your event on six different platforms and spreading your time and your budget way too thin, you're always going to be better to just focus on two to three avenues and then maybe try something else for your next event depending on your results. Let's now go ahead and actually see what you can do at different stages of your events, starting with the teaser phase. Depending on your event, you can actually tease your existing audience about an upcoming event as far as four weeks in advance or maybe even longer. For example, Adobe MAX is a massive creativity conference where they have hundreds of speakers and workshops going on at the same time. They begin promoting months and months in advance to get creators and attendees excited as well. Use your own discretion in terms of the length of promotion at this particular phase but just know that the focus will largely be around organic efforts at this stage, but I will be giving you some ideas for paid efforts as well. Let's go ahead and take a look at these now. If you think that you can do on an organic level at this phase is things like adding a line about the event in your regular newsletters or adding it to your email signatures or adding just a simple banner to your website. Or just creating really valuable blog or video content that's teasing the event details and uncovering a few different things about it but not actually actively promoting it like in this example from TechCrunch over here. Finally, another thing that TechCrunch actually do really well is adding some details about the event to their organic social media banners and their organic content promotion on social media. They've got their event details on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and on Facebook here as well. Obviously it's not super moon device friendly and probably looks good on mobile and not great on desktop. That's a bit of a flaw in the system, but they do have some really great details about the events that are coming up. But you can tell that they're not actually actively promoting anything yet, they're just teasing some details about it. You can see that in the past I've actually set up Facebook events to promote their events to their Facebook audience in a way that's a little bit more native to the platform, that might actually push it out a little bit better on the Facebook platform from the algorithm's perspective, because Facebook obviously wants you to be using their event function. This is a really great way to set that up but obviously they're not doing this for their upcoming events yet because it's a little bit too far in advance and it's something they might do during the actual promotion phase. They're still in the teaser phrase and something that they can do on LinkedIn as well. At the moment, they're just promoting things in a little bit more of a teasing phase. They don't have any ads running for the event itself. They have those educational ads running but nothing to do with the actual upcoming event. But when they get a little bit closer to the day, what they can do on LinkedIn, which is a really cool function as well is going to the admin tools and create an event on LinkedIn and then one really great thing about doing this is that you can add additional people in as admins of the business page that are on your team or employees of the company to allow them to invite their network to the event. That's something you could do and then remove them once the event has ended but it's a really great way to actually expand the reach of your event and the organic promotion that you can do on LinkedIn, especially if you're in that B2B space, or your audience is really hanging out on LinkedIn, I definitely encourage you to check this out. The last example here I have is of Louise Henry. She hasn't actually switch this over yet. She is teasing an event that has already ended. But the key there is that she has used her YouTube channel art to actually promote that free challenge and put that link there. She's done something similar with her Facebook page. Currently because she's actually in the retargeting and the offer promotions stage because this event has already ended, she is actually using this banner art to promote her paid offer. But if I was to click into it, I can see that in the past, before the challenge had ended, she was using this space too actually to promote the free workshop. Now that she's ended that free workshops, she's able to actually switch this over to promoting her event. This face can be really valuable, just make sure that it is friendly across devices as well. Then my last tip would be for you to actually utilize tools like Instagram, where you're able to add some dynamic media like this boomerang over here and then utilize the countdown function here. Making sure that that's correct and right for your brand, you could say something like, "Hey, countdown is on," and get people excited. Now you could obviously re-post this again once the event is little bit closer to the date. But let's say I'm doing this a month out and I could actually schedule up for a particular time when the event starts. It's not an all day thing but this could get people really excited and then maybe putting some words around this to make sure that people know they can tap on that and get a notification when the event is starting. That's another cool thing you can try out during the teaser phase of your promotion. Now this time can be used for promoting complimentary content to your target audience that adds value, builds trust, and builds up your email list for when you do begin promoting your event. For example, you could use blog posts, educational videos, eBooks, all that good stuff, and you can also explore some potential PR opportunities. Think about if there are any industry publications where you might be able to be featured during this phase to attract your ideal customers. 6. Your Promotion Phase: Nearly 2/3 of webinar registrations happen less than a week before the event, with about 17 percent on the day of the event. So as we head into this next phase, it's really important for you to not plan to actively promote too far in advance for live events because you might actually be wasting precious marketing dollars. Test this out for yourself. But I believe that the sweet spot to begin more aggressive promotion is somewhere between 7-10 days before events for small to medium size events, so adjust that depending on the size of your event. But you will then continue promoting all the way up until the event begins, and then also make sure to schedule all of your paid advertising, in particular, to stop once the event has started, unless you're may be able to offer replays or allow people to sign up during the event period if your event is going on for more than a couple days. You could consider leveraging some employee promotion. You could encourage team members or employees to share the event on their personal LinkedIn pages, or even other social networks if that's right for your particular brand and your audience. You could encourage existing customers to share the event on their social media profiles and maybe even give rewards for recommending someone who ends up actually signing up for the offer at the end of the event. You can look at organic posts and videos, and then, of course, incorporating live videos on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube can be a really great part of your organic strategy at this stage as well, as well as organic emails to your existing audience, teasing the event. If it's right for your brand, you might also consider chat bot reminders asking people to opt in if that's a part of your existing strategy. Now, this particular strategy sits somewhere between paid and organic, but giveaways can be a really great way to get more eyeballs on your event if it's a paid event in particular. You could tell your audience that they can win free tickets to the event if they sign up to the contest, and then you can use a tool like KingSumo here that will give them free entries to the contest after they sign up if they share the contest on social media and everywhere else and get their friends to sign up too. In terms of paid promotion at this phase, you could consider using affiliates or partnerships with other industry leaders. These can be podcast hosts, educators, business people, or basically anyone that can help you promote your event to their audience which is similar to your target audience as a paid collaboration. Now, influencer marketing can also be a powerful tool, so you can use a service like Tribe to connect with influencers in your desired space. But, of course, be cautious about the fact that influencer's audiences are not nearly as targeted as partnerships with industry leaders, but primarily your efforts of this phase will likely be through paid ads in different formats. This is where you can get a bit creative and test out different video, images, story ads, feed ads, different placements, different formats. Basically anything and everything that you can think of, of course, in a way that's not too overwhelming, but testing out what works for your particular audience. Now at this stage, it is important for you to remember that you should be promoting the exact same event to your different audiences using their own targeted language. Down at the bottom here is an example of how marketer Cat Howell has done this in promoting the same offer to her marketed audience and her coaching audience using their own specific language in the ad. 7. Your Retargeting Phase: Then finally, we head into the last phase, which is the retargeting phase. The retargeting phase is what happens after your event has already been hosted and everyone's already watched the event, maybe watched the replays, and it can be the most powerful part of your promotion efforts. I really encourage you to not skip this phase, because it's your chance to really convince the almost buyers, or overcome the objections of the people who are still maybe sitting on the fence of should they buy your offer, is it right for them. This is your chance to really convince them that this is the right thing for them. While this phase is going to be largely about your paid efforts, it can still be a really good idea to tell your social media audience that you're going to be jumping on a live Q&A about your offer with people who still have questions about if it's the right thing for them, and you can also email this update to your event attendees who did not yet purchase to let them know you're going to be going live and allow them to submit questions in advance. Now, make sure to always prepare some FAQs for your live in case people don't ask anything, but it can be a really good idea to hype the session up. Now, you can also have a final post-event email sequence. That's going to be usually 1-2 emails that will just feature some past customer reviews or success stories, and any additional Q&As that might help get people over the line. Retargeting runs are ridiculously effective and actually relatively easy to set up. I have included some resources within your class guide that will help with this, if you haven't set up your user tracking on your website or your event page yet. But you can retarget people via LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads, and more. There's so much you can do with this, but the most effective approach will involve a multi-channel effort. That means that your remarketing efforts will follow your event attendees around wherever they go online for a select period of time after the event to convince them to take action. Let's take a look at some live examples of different retargeting efforts from Sunny's program that we looked at in a previous lesson. These are just some examples of ads she's running that have that urgency and scarcity angle saying, "Hey, doors are closing soon, are you coming? What are you waiting for?" Even though technically, this doesn't actually close. I know that her offer remains open, but it makes it look like it does. It's giving people that bit of urgency to say, "Okay, cool, I have to jump on this." Then the next strategy is for her to retarget people with customer success stories. If they're not really going for the urgency or scarcity angle, maybe they'll go for the, "Hey, these are people like me who have had really great success with this in the past." Maybe I would listen to them over the person who's actually selling the offer. Then she also has some abandoned checkout ads for people who really wanted to buy the offer and maybe got as close as actually checking out, and then just didn't hit "Purchase" to play on that and guilt trip angle that might work for some other people as well. With everything you do with your retargeting, it's really important for you to remember that once you have all of your correct tracking pixels installed on your website or your event page, platforms like Facebook will do their absolute best to match people who come to that page to their existing profiles on the platform that you're using to advertise to them. But they can't always guarantee that a match will be made, which is why it's also really important for you to have some final emails up your sleeve to send to your email subscribers, because you do have their details and you can pretty much guarantee that that is going to land in the right inbox of your event attendees who have not yet purchased. It's also super important for you to be writing down everywhere that you're promoting this event in a Google doc or a spreadsheet somewhere, so that you can change everything over once the event is over. Especially if you're working with multiple teams on this one event, because things can get out of hand very quickly and things can get lost in the shuffle. This is an example of an ad that's currently still running on LinkedIn two months after the event has ended, and that's from Amy Porterfield, who is a multimillionaire owner, who's running a very successful business. Believe me when I say it can happen to the best of us. Just make sure to please keep track of anything and everything that you do with your event, and write down any key dates for when things need to be taken down. I also really encourage you to check out your class guide for some resources that will help you with setting up your tracking measures for your audience because you should really have all of that in place before you even begin promotion to make sure that your retargeting phase goes really well and is as profitable as it can be. In the next lesson, I'm going to be taking you through how I would go about creating my own promotion strategy for my example event. I'll see you there. 8. Map Out Your Strategy: All right guys. So I thought it would be beneficial to you to see how I might plan out my content requirements and note down any key dates for an example of my promotion around my fictitious event here. So I went ahead and filled out this third tab of your spreadsheets. You're going to find this exact same information in your own spreadsheet, but these will obviously be blank and I've just added in some details about how to go about this. Now, the key is to actually go in and put in some details about your event. Here's the example of what the blank spreadsheet will look like and you've just got a tab here that says details about the event here. That's where you go in and that's the first thing I want you to do is put in the title of your event. If you're having trouble coming up with a really catchy title, I have a resource for that in your class guide as well, but this is where you would go and put in any information about when your event is happening, your time, your date, and then the time zone as well, that's very key even if your audience is in one geographic time zone. Make sure to put that in there so you know exactly what you're working back from with these first two phases and then you will be working forwards from with the re-targeting phase. Then you want to go into your teaser phase or you can start with the promotion phase as well, and then work backwards all the way through to the teaser phase but the key is to also make sure that you have all of your tracking pixels installed. You can add in some details about exactly what tracking pixels you're installing based on the platforms that you want to advertise too. So if you are going to be advertising on LinkedIn with your retargeting ads, then you need to install a LinkedIn pixel same with Pinterest, same with Facebook, same with everything else. So you want to make sure that anything that you want to use for your retargeting efforts, you're using their particular tracking pixel on your event registration page, your thank you page, your website, and any other key pages before you even begin the teaser phase. I'll go through exactly why that's key in just a sec. The one difference between my spreadsheet here and yours is likely the fact that I have just put myself in there as a team member for everything because I would be planning all of this myself, whereas you've got an individual line item for different team members there in your own spreadsheet. Make sure to just put in all the different team members if you are working with multiple people on your promotion. Now, you'll remember from previous lessons that I would suggest that the promotion phase begins between 7-10 days on a more aggressive paid effort basis before the event. That's exactly where my important dates have come into play and the teaser phrase begins about a month before my event in this fictitious scenario here. These are some examples that I've put in there or what you can try on your organic and paid level at each phase. Absolutely does not mean that you have to try out all of those things. You can select some to put into what you actually want to action and when you want to action it by, you can also add your own but it's important to remember here that I would in this scenario, will be working on this by myself, so it's absolutely impossible for me to execute on everything here, but I've given myself some things that I think are really achievable. Let's say a month before the event, I would put in an email newsletter into my monthly newsletters, so that's a really easy one. I know I'm going to have one newsletter or two newsletters going out in March so each of them is going to have some sort of promo about the event and I would put in something in my actual email signature about the promotion and I would have all my social media banners ready by the 1st of March so it can be looked at examples of that earlier. You can refer back to these if you're not sure how to utilize the space, but I would have those ready and switched over by the 1st of March. Telling people that hey, got an event coming up. That's really simple but it can be quite effective in getting people just organically to sign up for the event. In terms of paid stuff, again, this is going to be why your tracking pixels are really key at this point already. I would put some paid advertising behind, just educational and entertaining content at this stage. I would have a few videos and blog posts ready on my website or on social media that I could put a little bit of money behind to try and build up my audience that I can then use for the promotion phase. At each of these stages, you want to be using all of the data that you've gathered in the previous two phases in your audience research and your competitor research to see how you should be approaching this, but I know in terms of who I'm advertising to this stage that they're really big fans of video. I would be looking at YouTube ads and Facebook and Instagram ads promoting blog content and video content and the aim at this stage would honestly just be for people to be educated and entertained. I'm not actually promoting the event itself at all. I would just be promoting topics that are really aligned with my event topic so that by the time I actually go through to the promotion phase, I can then retarget people who watched my videos or read my blog post here and send them some details about the event. This is where they're just getting to know me, building up that trust factor so that when I ask them to come to the event, they already know something about me. But the other thing that I want to mention here is if I'm doing any collaborations with influencers and educators in my space, it's really important for you to note some key events for things like podcast recordings because usually these are recorded well in advance of when they actually go live. You want to make sure that they're going live before your event begins because otherwise, it could be wasted efforts if you're promoting an event that has already passed because the podcast episode is scheduled to air after your event has already happened. I've done a bit of audience building in that phase and then I can move on to the promotion phase. Again, I would be working backwards from the 25th of March by about 10 days prior with my organic efforts so I would have social media posts ready on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for the 10 days leading up to the event using video format. I would have little videos teasing the event and teasing the topic and in the captions, I would say 10 days to go, nine days to go, eight days ago. Yes, it's a little bit crazy, but it honestly works really well in getting people really excited, especially if they've already registered for the event and it's just a reminder for them to keep that time open so they don't forget about it if they are registering 10 or seven days in advance. Then, I would also leverage email marketing, so promotion emails to any of my subscribers who are not yet signed up to the event and anyone who is signed up to the event, just some reminder emails on these dates that are just before the event would be happening, so two days before, one day before, and then the day of to say, "Hey, we're about to go live, are you coming?" So those would be the emails that I need to have ready and these are the dates when they would actually go out there. In terms of paid efforts, I would then be putting some different ads out to my audience based on how engaged and how aware they are of my brand. I've got some paid ads to promote the event registration to completely call the audiences who have never heard of me but have engaged with competitors or have interests in that target market based on the audience research that I've done here. If I know that they follow my competitors or they are interested in entrepreneurship and business growth and passive income development, all of those are behaviors and interests that I could target with these ads and get them to sign up for my event, then I would have a separate set of ads that would be promoting the event to a warm audience, the people who have engaged with my website, socials, and paid ads in the past, so that's also these guys who would becoming from that teaser phase that I could then retarget and then finally, I'd have some paid ads going to existing customers who might be interested in this new event and offer if it is, in fact, new and something that could be absorbed to existing customers. Now with key dates here, I would say have these ready by the 16th but turn them on on the 18th. The reason I say this is because it's always good to have at least a couple of days to troubleshoot and set yourself some early deadlines so that you're not sitting there on the morning of the day that things need to go live and you're still checking for spelling mistakes in your ads and then also making sure everything is going to be turning off by the time the event begins. This is where I would also drop a URL to all of my ad, copy and creative, especially if you're working on this with your boss or with other team members, with a client, you want to make sure that they're able to approve all of your ads at least a couple of days before they have to go live and you may not be comfortable with them jumping into Facebook Ads Manager to check them out, it can be overwhelming for people who are not used to that so you can put them in a Google Doc for them to check out. Then finally, our retargeting phase. I would just have two post-event emails to convert non-buyers, one on the day after the event and then one two days or three days after the event where I would just be teasing a little bit more about the offer, maybe sharing some customer success stories or asking them if they have any questions that I can help to answer and then finally, I would set out some multi-channel re-marketing ads on Facebook, Instagram, and probably Google display as well just because these can be quite cheap remarketing ads and these are just the ads that will follow them around on various news outlets and basically everywhere they go online to remind them to sign up for my offer if they haven't purchased from me yet. Again, I want to make sure that these are turned off after about five days following the event because if you are still retargeting people who haven't bought from you a month after the event has ended, they're just going to be really annoyed with your retargeting efforts and it's not going to be good customer experience for them because these might be people who will buy from you in the future, maybe it's just this particular event and offer that didn't quite align with what they want from you, but they might become a customer in six months time or a year's time and you want to make sure you are creating that positive experience for them. Make sure that you are turning off your retargeting ads within a week of the event. That's pretty much how you'd go about creating this for my own strategy, for this fictitious event, if I had to do it with a bit of crunch time and execute these phases straight away. But as we discussed with previous examples, it's always going to be more profitable for you the more time you have to build up that trust your audience has in you so then you really only advertising an event to them once they already know who you are, they trust you and they're ready to get on that event and buy from you because they know that whatever you're selling is going to be of really high quality. With that in mind, we're going to get into some common mistakes that people make with presenting their pitch on the live event. We're going to cover that in the next lesson and I'll see you there. 9. Nail Your Profitable Pitch: Let's assume you've absolutely freaking nailed your promotion strategy. You got more people into a live event than you could ever imagine, and you're super-excited and everything goes really well in terms of your efforts, but then no one actually buys the offer. This is so so common, and while this may or may not be within your job description to tackle as a marketer, I did want to go through a few common issues with converting viewers into customers with you anyways. So that even if you have a completely separate sales team who's responsible for the execution of the event and the pitch at the end, you might be able to help them increase their conversion rates with just a few nuggets of wisdom from this lesson that I've learned over the years of running my own events. Running these for my clients and attending a heck of a lot of live events that sometimes went really, really well with people really nailing their pitch and I wanted to buy anything and everything they wanted to sell me, and sometimes they really flopped. Let's get into some quite common mistakes in terms of people pitching on there live events, and then how to avoid these first. Then we'll also be getting into a few examples of people who have absolutely nailed this part of their events, and what you can learn from these people in terms of running these for your own events. The first mistake is what happens or doesn't happen leading up to the pitch itself, which is not focusing enough on entertainment and education during the event. It makes total sense that the main portion of your pitch happens somewhere towards the end of the event and maybe with a Q&A section to follow. But in order for people to actually get to the pitch and get to the end of your event, you need to make sure that they don't doze off, tune out and start scrolling through Instagram on their phones. The solution there is to just make sure your content is engaging, don't be afraid to use memes, gifts, animations, bright colors, music, prizes, asking people to participate in polls throughout, or anything else that's really going to make people stick around till the end and be engaged throughout. I once tested this by telling people that there were little images of bananas hitting throughout the slides of the presentation, and whoever can guess the right number of these hidden gems by the end of the event would win a prize. I know that's really, really silly, but you can bet that this is the kind of stuff that really makes people pay attention. The second mistake is giving people just one option for how to become a customer, that gives them a yes or no option. The solution to this is to give your audience two to three options of how to become a customer, any more than this and they can get quite overwhelmed and confused. But price anchoring options for them like this will actually allow them to choose how they can purchase from you instead of if they should purchase from you. If what you offer is tailored specifically to each client and the aim of your event is maybe just to book them in for a free consultation to actually discuss their needs and see if it's a right fit, make it very clear in the event that you'll work with them to make a tailored solution to their unique business. But once again, you're emphasizing the idea that you're allowing them to choose how to work with you, not if they should work with you. The last big mistake that I see people making and have also made myself is thinking that people care about the product or the service and just going about and listing its features and benefits. It's important to remember that whether you're selling a $10 item or a $10,000 item, people aren't there to buy the thing you're selling. They're buying the thing you can do for them, whether they're buying a clean apartment that a vacuum cleaner can give them, or the status and contribution to environmental sustainability that go hand in hand with owning a Tesla, people are only really curious about the features and benefits in relation to the bigger picture. The solution then is that your pitch needs to be centered around your audience's pain points and how you can solve these for them. People who trust you and your mission and your values will be much more likely to purchase from you, and that's especially critical if you're more expensive than your competitors. If that's the case, don't try to hide it, communicate the reasons behind this to your audience. Believe me, when I say that people will get behind the value of a higher price item over saving a few bucks with a competitor if it makes sense to them. To give you a product-based example of this, here's a feature comparison between these two brands. Patagonia sells their items at a higher price point than their competitors selling very similar products. But people who purchase from them understand that by buying their stuff over the other guys, this brand has established an identity that makes their audience aware that buying a product from them means it was created from recycled materials by workers who were paid a fair wage, and with an effort to consider sustainable transportation and manufacturing options and all that good stuff. Now of course, your offer may not be a product with such an obvious point of difference like this, but maybe you're a service-based business that you give each client more hands-on attention than your competitors, which is why you are priced higher, or you have a really great proven track record of customer success. Whatever your unique angle is, use that to center your pitch around, then go through and list the benefits to the customer for choosing you, and then leave the features as the very last thing that you present during your pitch. With this last point in mind, let's now get into some examples of just how powerful it can be to really get into the mind of a customer and show them that you really do understand their pain points. This screenshot is of a sales page and the story that Natalie Hudson used to sell 60,000 copies of her book, teaching women how to strengthen their pelvic floor. She beat herself during a workout video tutorial, which then led to her discovering a way to help herself and help other women who are experiencing these same issues after having kids. This is the real personal unfiltered connection to an audience that makes people go, "Yeah, I'm buying whatever this person is selling because I can so relate to how horrifying this feeling is." This is Drew Manning. He's the Fit2Fat2Fit guy who actually decided that he was going to gain 30 kilos as a way to show his clients that it's really possible to lose it all with his help. He was really, really fit, then he gained all this weight and then lost it again, and that's how he became his own test bunny of his program. Then when he began selling memberships to the same program that helped him lose this extra weight, you can bet that people were lining up to join. Of course both Natalie and Drew now sell products and services that are not necessarily aligned with these original business ideas. But the point is that they really took the time to understand their audience's pain points and pitch their offer to them in a way that really resonated with them. Now before we move on to the next lesson, I also want to throw a word of caution out there to say that you shouldn't try to fit the cause or the story to fit your business if it doesn't authentically fit. Pink Ribbons, Inc is a documentary that talks about the many, many businesses who have slapped a pink ribbon on their product to try and entice cause-driven consumers to purchase their products or services without any real thought behind the product to cause connection there. This mean they completely misalign products like this water bottle that actually contain documented breast cancer causing chemicals and even pink ribbon handguns, if you can believe it, while labeling themselves as businesses joining the fight against breast cancer. That's a little bit insane, but you can bet that businesses out there will do just about anything for profit, but you do not want to be one of these guys if you're going to build a really sustainable brand. The key takeaway there is that every business has some hook or angle that is really unique to them that resonates with their target market, so it's really important for you to find yours and use it to connect with your own unique audience. In the next lesson, we're just going to be taking a look at a few areas that I would like you to keep an eye on during your promotion efforts to make sure that things are running smoothly as you're going through the different phases. I'm going to see you there. 10. Your Three Part Health Check: There are three main areas that I'd encourage you to focus on to ensure that everything is running smoothly in the promotion and success of your event. The first is your conversion from paid and organic efforts to leads, then the percentage of overall registrants versus live attendees or the replay attendees, and lastly, the conversion of attendees into customers. So let's take a look at each of these in a bit more detail. Starting with conversion from your paid and organic efforts to lead. While it's really important for you to check this metric, and it definitely is, it's also really important for you to check how these leads are then performing for you throughout the rest of your strategy. Because if you're getting a lot of people signing up to your event, and you're really, really happy with your cost per lead, but then people aren't showing up to the event or they're not buying your product, then maybe you've attracted the wrong kind of leads. So it's important for you to note that it's actually better to pay slightly more for your event registrants and have them be incredibly aligned with your offer, as opposed to getting a lot of cheap leads who will then not actually purchase from you. The second point is the percentage of overall registrants versus live attendees and replay watchers. This is a really good health check, because if you have 500 registrants, but then only 10 of them show up live, that could actually mean that your time zone of your event is not suitable to the audience you are marketing it to, or you haven't placed enough urgency or incentive for people to actually show up live. Marketers suggest between 40 and 50 percent is a great law of attendance rate, but in my experience, anything above 30 percent is still quite a healthy event attendance rate, especially if you're dealing with various time zones. If you find this to be quite low, then I would suggest looking into ways that you can offer a limited time replay of your event to allow people to really catch up on what they've missed, or you can look at additional ways to really incentivize people to show up live and increase this percentage. Finally, getting to the most important step. Because if you have plenty of registrants and they show up live, but they don't convert, then that's where the problem lies. There are several reasons as to why this could happen. Either the topic of the event is not aligned with the offer you're pitching, and this has absolutely happened to me, and I'll do a lot of other people which is why it's important to test out different event ideas for your offer. The second problem could be that the offer is maybe not communicated clearly. Because remember that a confused mind always says no. So if you put so much value into your actual event, but then people don't see the value in actually purchasing something from you or you haven't actually presented the offer clearly enough, they will be unlikely to actually say yes to that. The third point is that maybe there's no urgency or scarcity angle for people to jump on your offer. If you leave it and just say, "Okay, this is a thing, but there's no bonus for signing up within the next 48 hours, or there's really no rush for you to jump on this." Of course, people are going to maul it over and they're going to put it somewhere on their to-do list three months from that point, so you want to make sure that you're giving people a reason to say yes to you right away. Number 4, if you haven't nurtured your audience enough prior to trying to sell them something, that can be a big flaw as well. Remember in the examples earlier, we were looking at Sonny Leonard [inaudible] offer that's priced at $6,000, but she's actually only selling this to her audience who have already read her articles, watched her videos, read some customer views, bought her lower price offer at 397, and luckily gotten really good results from it. So then by the time they actually show up to the live event where she's been teaching this high ticket offer, they're already value her advice and trust her expertise at that point, so there's so much more likely to say yes to that. Then issues just running ads to an event that was going to pitch a $6,000 offer straightaway to a completely cold audience. If people aren't buying your offer, it might be a good idea to think of where in your sales funnel you can add more value and nurture your audience more, so that by the time they actually show up to the event, they know exactly who you are and they're almost ready to buy whatever you pitch them at the end. I'm just throwing this in there as an additional metric for you to consider; is your refunds. So if you offer a 30-day refund period for example, and you find that all of the previous metrics are really great, people are buying stuff, they're attending the live event, you've got great leads, great costs all throughout your funnel, but customers are refunding their purchase following the event, then maybe the expectations didn't quite measure up to the reality of their purchase. This is unlikely, but it's a really good additional health check to ensure that your business is delivering on the promises that are made throughout the promotions of the event, and that customers are really happy with their purchase. I hope that some of these tips have helped you to get an idea which main parts of your promotion, execution, and follow-up strategy you need to keep an eye on to make sure that everything is running smoothly. Then in the next lesson, we'll go into a few additional points that you might want to consider in planning your promotion efforts. So I'll see you there. 11. Other Key Points to Consider: So as I've said in an earlier lesson, I have both been behind the scenes of planning and running online events, but even more frequently attended them as a viewer and a customer who has been converted through online events. So over the years, I have learned that often it's actually the little things that we don't necessarily think about as much that can attribute to the overall success of online events. So a lot of the points that we're going to cover within this lesson, in particular, are just things that are often get overlooked that people don't think about that have just come to a lot of trial and error or so. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes and you'll find them useful in planning your own strategy. Let's get into them now. Consistency is really, really key. It's really important for you to use the same language, imagery, colors, tone, all of that stuff throughout the promotion process. Something as really simple as calling your event a webinar in one ad, but a workshop on the landing page can turn someone off of signing up. Or if you say that during your event, people will learn five tips to something and then they attend and now it's five steps instead of tips, that's, again, that kind of disconnect in language. This is much more likely to happen when different team members are responsible for paid marketing, organic marketing, and then the event execution and there's gaps in communication. Definitely make sure that you have a document with all of the details for everyone to follow if you are working with various people or various team members on your event. Now choosing the right day of the week and the right time of day for your audience will come down to testing. Wednesdays and Thursdays have been shown to have the best attendance rates across industries, but definitely test that out for yourself. In terms of the time to select for your event, well, this once again comes down to knowing your audience. If they're stay-at-home moms in the United States, you might want to schedule it around school times. But if you're targeting mainly working professionals who are likely to be on a nine-to-five schedule, you might consider hosting an evening workshop instead. It's really important for you to experiment and test this out and measure what's working really well for your lab attendance rates. Then I want you to really consider not underestimating the power of personalization. I once sent a personal video to every single person who attended my webinar who did not purchase. Not only does this massively help with your actual conversion rates, but it will give you insight into why they're not purchasing and give you something to work on for future events because people are so much more likely to actually reply and have a chat about your event if they feel like you've put in the effort, so they're much more likely to put in the effort on their end. If you're doing any promotion using LinkedIn, you can also use tools like Expandi.io, which is an example on the left here to create super personalized invitations which will use the person's name and picture, and in the bottom there you can see an example of how someone's used this to not necessarily pitch me, but to connect with me on LinkedIn, so you can see a live example of that. This is a lot of extra flash that may not be necessary for most of you, but if any of you are looking to get business owners to your event, LinkedIn can be a really great resource for this and the more personalized that you can get with your invites, the better. So this is a tool that you might want to check out and I've provided a resource for this inside of your class guide. Now, when it comes to re-purposing your live event recordings. So you may not be looking to do this right now, but if you would like to turn your live event into a future evergreen training and you want to have that option, I really, really encourage you to make sure that you're avoiding any date and time-specific mentions. So for example, don't say, "Hey, good morning everyone or happy Tuesday", not that you would say that, but anything to do with days of the week, times of the day, or "I hope you all had a lovely Christmas". These will all make it really awkward for future viewing experience for someone who's watching the recording at 6:00 PM on a Thursday in July. So just keep that in mind if you do want to have the option of re-purposing your event recordings for future evergreen content, just make sure that you're making it as general as possible in terms of your content so that people are able to view it at any time and any day of the week. Those are just a few of the bonus tips there for you and one additional thing that I would really encourage you to do is to set some benchmarks before you even begin promotion. Things like, how many attendees do you want to have for the event? How many of them do you need to turn into customers? What's your overall budget? A lot of the stuff that we talked about in terms of your spreadsheet, but also just a few outcome-driven KPIs as well. Also if you don't have a great deal of existing data on this, you can think backwards by thinking, all right, well the offer while pitching is $1,000 and when it convert at least 10 people, let's aim to get 300 people to register on the event, knowing that we're going to get probably about 30 percent of them or more to show up to the event or watch the replay, and out of those 90 people who are going to actually watch the training will convert about one out of every nine attendees into a customer. But no matter how you actually choose to set your benchmarks, it's really important for you to know that you will probably never be right, I never have been, the number is always different to what I expect. But it's still really important for you to set some goals so that you can see how you measure up against your own expectations and hopefully see improvement over time, over your next couple of events as well. With that in mind, let's get into our next lesson, which will be all about how to take the lessons you learned in running and promoting this event into your next one to make it even more profitable, bigger, and better. So I'll see you there. 12. Test, Assess, and Adjust: Whether you're here because you are planning the promotion of your very first event or your 10th, either way it likely won't be your last, and the next one can we even more profitable if you take the lessons learned from this particular event into your next one. This is your time to really get creative and test some stuff on, but keep in mind that no one nails this stuff or anything in the marketing world on their first go. But analyzing your results is such a critical step to making sure that you're not repeating the same mistakes in the future. There are a few things that I would really encourage you to test out and also note down what worked, what didn't, and what you think you could improve on for next time. In terms of the promotion prior to the event, I would really encourage you to begin by testing out different variations of your sign-up landing page. For example, one landing page could have a video and one could be text only. Then you could also test out different calls to action or images. Now, it is important for you to not be testing too many different things all at the same time, especially if you don't have enough traffic to this page, you don't want to have six different variations of a landing page if you only have 10 or 20 people visiting every day. But I would encourage you to try out at least two different variations to see if you can try and improve the conversion rights of your landing page itself. For me, for example, I had about a 20 percent uptake in conversions when I removed a video from my racing event promotion page, which is not really what I thought was going to happen, and had put all this work into having a video on my landing page. But it turns out the text-only page actually converted a lot better for me. That's why it's really important to test this out. When it comes to testing different ads, this goes for all the platforms as well as placements, copy and creative. Again, the number of variations you are able to test out will depend on your budget because you also want to make sure that you're not trying out 50 different ad variations with a $5 daily budget for promotion, but test out a couple of different things to see what resonates with your audience and gets them interested in your event and always remember that you can try out different things next time so you don't have to try out all of your creative ideas at once if your budget doesn't allow for it. In terms of testing different audiences, of course, you want to make sure that you're targeting your key audiences, but you can experiment a little bit with different age groups and different geographic locations if you're not bound by location for your target market, and definitely different interests and behaviors. Group people based on these things, so you can see what is actually giving you that cost per conversion that you're comfortable with, because you might find that it's not really what you expect. Then once your event is complete, make sure to note down your conversions at every single stage of your promotion strategy. There are so many reasons as to why this is important, but I actually personally know a lot of business owners and agency marketers who have had Facebook ad accounts shut down overnight without explanation after spending tens of thousands of dollars on ads and all of that data can potentially be gone overnight. Now I would love to say that this happens rarely, but like I said, I know multiple people that this has happened to and it is sometimes possible to recover this information through a little bit of chat support, but it's not always the case. It's really important for you to store it somewhere that your whole team can access when it's time to plan your next event and this is especially true if you're advertising through three or four different avenues so that you can gather all of your data in one place. Let's get into a few points that you want to keep an eye on in terms of analyzing the performance of your event itself. You want to analyze your audience engagement, you can see where most of your live viewers dropped off and note down what happened during this time because maybe that can help you to reshuffle some of the information that you're presenting to keep people engaged longer because if there's one specific dip and you realize there's a particular information that was communicated to the audience there, then you might be like, okay, well this is the point that people are dropping off, how can we change this up to make sure that this doesn't happen next time? This is also your chance to check over your email marketing efforts. Were people opening their emails? Were they clicking on the links within them? Is there anything to be learned from these stats that you could take into your next event promotion? It can also be a really good idea to ask your speaker or speakers, how they found the software that you used for your event. You might be using Webinar or Jam or Zoom or [inaudible] Webinar and all of these different tools have pros and cons, and if you're not the person actually presenting, you might not realize what they liked and what they didn't like and it can be a really good idea to check with them to see if they actually would use it again next time. Of course, it is really important for you to think about the needs of your audience, but it's also really important that your speakers are comfortable presenting and using the software. Make sure to check in with them and see how everything went for them as well and if they have any ideas for changes for next time in terms of the actual presentation itself. Finally, note down any additional thoughts for improvement for your next event. You would not believe how quickly these escape your brain, and also consider that you might actually be working with different team members for future events, so gather as much data from everyone involved in this particular event in case they may be not around for the next one. Honestly, a heck of a lot of marketing dollars are lost just due to lack of procedures. Whether you're planning an event for your own business, for a client, or on the behalf of a company that you're working for at the moment, please create a process document for collecting key information after your campaign has ended, and I promise you this will absolutely pay off in the long run. 13. Thank You!: That brings us to the end of this class. I hope you've really enjoyed learning about the different ways that you can promote your online events. I really love this stuff, but I know it can seem quite overwhelming, especially if you don't have a team to brainstorm with. Please don't hesitate to just jump into the discussion section, ask any questions or brainstorm some ideas with me about something that you're thinking about in terms of promoting your own events. I'm always happy to hear your thoughts and help out and be your virtual team if you don't have one. If you like the class, I would love it if you could take a little bit of time and give me a review and let me know your thoughts. Also if there are any areas for improvement or things that you think could be added, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts and that is well because I'm always looking for improvements for my future classes. I'm always working on something here in Skillshare, so if you would like to hear about any updates on my future classes, please consider following me here on Skillshare. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you next time.