Here Are Some Considerations And Questions To Ask Yourself When Building Lists |
1. Where (in your sales funnel) are you going to place a squeeze page to capture names and email addresses?
2. What is your call to action? What are you giving away of value worthy of them giving up their privacy by allowing you to email them? To get people to subscribe you need to give them something of value. Your opt-in page must be dedicated to that call to action – it should be your best sales pitch. Just hiding opt-in boxes on a page with multiple objectives won’t work.
3. How is your page designed? Every page needs to be tested for each type of audience. If thousands of prospects land on your page but don’t sign up, then it needs to be modified until it converts people to customers. (Use Google analytics to track traffic and conversions)
4. Which list can you start with and how will you segregate it? How are you planning on building your lists moving forward? Are you going to have a different list per event that is broken into 3 sub lists of leads, prospects and customers or are you going to have one master database of leads, prospects and customers for your company? Auto responder software will allow you to send broadcast emails to different people, regions but they cannot filter by your events. Here is what I mean by filters: You can have the flexibility to send an email to all of your leads for your August event who signed up in July from an IP address in California. You can also send an email to all clients who signed up sometime last year who live in the USA. But in any case, you cannot filter by event or lead type without building a list for each.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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List Building |
Building lists of customers, prospects, attendees, audiences should be a constant process. Once you have people on your lists make sure you start building a strong relationship with them. These lists are like an asset for every event organizer. They are an invaluable part of launching successful events and should be treated that way.
Building your lists is an ongoing job for event marketers, but it is one of the most important time investments that you can make in your business. Having qualified leads in your list that are at least interested in talking to you, are a hundred times better than blind advertising. Adding a new customer is a onetime cost, and will remain profitable as long as he/she is in your active lists. You can benefit from that single customer throughout your event marketing career by repeatedly engaging and maintaining a relationship with him/her. If you don’t have something of value to offer to a prospect right now, it doesn’t mean that the prospect won’t be useful in your future event marketing endeavors.
Lists are basically people who have asked to participate in your conversation. Be careful not to send people off to the wrong lists, or ones that are not directly specific to what they signed up for. Always segment your lists into leads, prospects and customers, as it improves your individual communication with them.
To get people to subscribe you need to give them something of value. Your opt-in page must be dedicated to that call to action – it should be your best sales pitch. Just hiding opt-in boxes on a page with multiple objectives won’t work.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! If you want to source the best JV partners in your niche, you need a software that sources those selling the most product’s in your niche!
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Launching At The Apex |
Typical launches follow a traditional hype cycle with the excitement rising up to launch (where it peaks) and then decreasing all the way down until it reaches a minimum constant level. To the left is what a hype curve typically looks like:
When we talk about the revolving door techniques for launching your events, we are essentially looking at a curve that looks something like the graph below:
So, we have the sudden rise in hype with the help of emotional triggers and social marketing effects such as event pages and groups. These triggers are placed in such a sequence so as to raise the hype to a maximum level at the day of the event. That’s when most of your sales targets from tickets and sponsorships will be met. But we don’t want you to stop there – with this strategy you can have post-launch hype building and then well-timed smaller re-launches to ensure that the hype curve always stays above the typical constant plateau. The smaller scale launches can be anything from event videos to smaller local events - anything that gets your fancy. There is no limit to the potential amount of revenue you can make out of your events if you plan them correctly. I have been talking about these strategies for a long time.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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Timing Your Run |
Before you can time your run, you need to have your story ready. Think about it, if you had a chance to sell your launch to an audience, you’d better have your pitch (story) prepared and ready to roll.
I’m going to share a trick to building your story quickly: Go through the process of pitching it to someone who can play the devil’s advocate – have them question and challenge anything in your pitch. Things that you say that are not believable, salable or cannot be effectively backed up will automatically be skimmed out or refined. I often play the devil’s advocate to help my clients strengthen their pitches. We record the sessions and transcribe the final (hiredhand.com). Each further session’s would bring you closer to satisfying your devil’s questions and the words that you choose (or script) will keep improving until it covers every conceivable challenge. When pitching to these people, notice the areas in the pitch that trigger the most attention and participation.
Arrange your final script until it is concise and yet leaves nothing unanswered. When you can give the final script to a different prospect to read through without the need for them to ask any further questions, you have successfully built your sales page. Once you have done that you need to plan a story around it and break the story down into a sequence that spreads over your launch timeline. This sequence should include all the different media content you will be using to tell the story along the timeline. Your timeline to launch should have all of the different aspects of development, marketing and sales planned out. You can build separate timelines and schedules for these different components if you want.
You have your full sales pitch written out and refined down to a format that has answered any possible objections. Now we could send this pitch out to all your prospects in the mail as one big sales letter but we won’t do that. We are going to divide the script down into sections. Let’s suppose we break the entire pitch down into 6 sections (the number of sections will be determined by the size of the campaign and budget). These sections need to spread out in the timeline from the start of the pitch to the end.
After defining the sections, we have to determine where to introduce our arsenal of emotional triggers to encourage the audience to take action. Once this is done all that’s left to do is to plan your content. You will need 6 different pieces of content to tell each section of your story. For content, you can have videos, podcasts, audio interviews, press releases, and articles; there are so many low cost options these days that choosing the right combination is often the toughest thing to do.
And that’s exactly what you need to do next. If you are going to outsource any part of the process, I would recommend paying experienced consultants to guide you since there are countless considerations to think about and having the wrong strategy can cripple you. Unless you have an experienced social media specialist on your team, please bring in a consultant at this step to work through finalizing a plan that you can execute on your own.
The idea is to end up with multiple pieces of content that will tell your launch story over a time line; each piece will hit carefully planned triggers at appropriate times in the story. Every event will be different so we don’t want to step you through a plan, but here is an example:
Try to focus the opening sequence on something that’s entertaining, shocking and full of suspense. For the second piece I try to focus on people’s favorite subject: themselves! I create content that suggests that what I am doing represents a great deal of value to them. For the third piece (in this example), I portray as a tribe member. I create content that helps me bring prospects closer to accepting me as one of their own, at the same time try to stamp my authority as someone who is worthy of listening to. I need to establish here that I have a right to be telling them the story I am about to ask them to buy into.
The next piece builds the storyline in an interactive manner. A great video with prizes or competitions works well in conjunction with blogging. Once you have engaged the audience into the conversation and you know they have embraced the storyline, it is time to provide a little social proof of the people behind the story to show that a lot of people are following it. You can do this through video testimonies or through emails to blogs with lots of comments. A great trigger can be to have celebrities endorse your event in interviews.
This is the point where you should be feeling a groundswell of momentum. Now is a good time to start giving very subtle and discrete suggestions of scarcity. Doing this too early will hurt you, so if in doubt hold off, you should feel the momentum notch up a little when you do it. Done right this message will grow a life of its own and you won’t have to say another word for it to become your best friend by the time tickets go on sale.
If all is going well you are ready to hit them with the big one: Exclusivity! Open the tickets to a select number of sales and promote the reason for the early release. Make sure the reason for an early release of tickets is built into your storyline and try to have separate prices for them as well. Build some content that is likely to be distributed by users explaining the early ticket sales for them to redistribute throughout the internet. Put the tickets up for sale and close the doors as soon as you sell out to your select handful of people. Promote this so that your market can sense that the next release of tickets will also be exclusive.
If you play this well you will have an audience who is listening, has brought into the story and is in a buying frenzy mindset awaiting the tickets.
Your launches can take anywhere between 2-12 weeks of prelaunch hype leading to a day or weeklong massive launch. In your subsequent launches, you can have shorter timelines of 3-8 days using the exact same sales cycle.
Remember these techniques can be applied to any event anchored launch campaign. If launching a product these steps are the same, except copies of your product are the tickets and the product launch is the event.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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Mind Mapping |
Ever wondered how our mind segments thoughts in little pockets and somehow manages to form links and relationships with them in real time? Ever wondered how multi-dimensional relationships spark up and roll like a movie in our minds every time a thought is triggered. It’s amazing, and yet next to impossible to physically capture all of that information.
Although it’s impossible to capture everything, people have tried to come up with software applications that can help us organize our thoughts in a more structured way. A few notable ones are; Mind42, Mindomo, Mind Meister, Wise Mapping, and FreeMind.
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Being event marketers and planners we’re always juggling thousands of elements or thoughts in our minds at all times. We also manage to train ourselves to multi-task without making it feel like a burden. So, having useful mind-mapping software to plan and launch events is actually something I recommend to most of my friends and clients. A few benefits off the top of my head are;
- It’s great for your entire team or clients to get together and brainstorm in one place.
- It helps in streamlining your thoughts in an organized way without being restrictive.
- It ensures all stakeholders of the event are on the same page
- It is a great way to map out ideas and find possible alternative options for different things, e.g. venue backup plans, etc
- It give a complete picture of the event and makes clients understand the dynamics of the plan.
- It gives you a good reference guide while implementing the plans
- It is easy to come back to it after the event to see what things worked best and what didn’t. For example, if you’re marketing your services online, you’ll be able to see which of the social marketing tools helped in building more pre-launch hype.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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The Perfect Blend |
Your launch story is simply how you present information to your prospects. What are you about? Why should they care? I’ve always wondered why some launch stories hit it big and others just fizzle out like they never even existed.
We all want big successful launches and it turns out that a lot of it is in our hands. If you are marketing your services or launching products, you need to really know how to tell effective stories. Story telling is an art that you can learn and adopt for your businesses and it helps define complex things into simple words. We come across countless situations where we can benefit from this skill - when you’re in an elevator with a potential business partner, when you get a chance to meet an investor, when you’re pitching to your clients, when you run across an old school friend on a weekend getaway and most importantly, when you are about to launch products or events in the market.
Telling a launch story is about summing everything up nicely and presenting it in a way that can influence your potential clients or audiences to take action. This is done by hitting the right mental triggers to the right people at the right time.
The mental triggers that you choose to hit will depend on your individual products, but we can safely say that the old tested rules of “hero play” still apply. And boy do they work! We, as humans, are attracted to stories of drama, intensity of emotions, shock, winning. We want that adrenaline rush. We want that human to human association. We want that heroism. We want to listen to people who understand where we come from. If you can incorporate these into your story, you’re bound to have a greater impact and response from your targeted audiences.
Make your key message (verbal or email) as informal and relatable to your audiences as possible. Make it like a conversation between two people. Here is a structure that you can use for your message:
1- Start with reiterating the fact that you are just like them and have a lot in common. The purpose of this introduction is to get the attention of your key targeted audience.
2- Then name a few frustrations that you have (related to your launch). “I’ve been looking around for cool places to hangout, where I can just take my mind off work and network with likeminded people. But there is just no such place in the entire town…” This should make them think “Yes. I totally get it”.
3- When you’re sure you have that nod, talk about how you aspire for things to be different. You can throw in ideas and thoughts and let their minds wander off. Don’t limit their thoughts to specific examples, let them imagine as much and as far as they can.
4- Finally, when you know that they are excited about how all of this can turn around, present your solution and discuss how it can benefit people like them.
It takes very little time to come up with good meaningful stories that you can use to turn your business around. Having the right strategy for your launches is important for the success of your ventures. If you don’t market your events well, you may not be able to draw the attention that it otherwise deserves. Remember how we discussed that events are like revolving doors of launches and re-launches? The more hype you can create in your launch, the more revenue you will generate for even bigger and better launches.
You have to make your events news-worthy to create the initial buzz. Have stories within stories. Make people want to share the “did you know that….” stories about your event. A great way to do that is to have interesting themes for the event and streamline your entire promotions based on those themes.
The more different and unique the themes are, the more interest they will generate. So, think creatively. Look at it this way, if you can get people to blog or talk about you - you are getting free media coverage worth thousands of advertising dollars. It’s a win-win for both you and your targeted audiences. They want something interesting to talk about, and you want to be talked about.
I am sure most of you would agree that we can’t just expect people to get excited about our events just like that - they need to have an incentive to. These incentives are based on basic human feelings - joy, thrill, excitement, suspense, comfort. Understanding what causes these emotions and what effects they have on the moods and actions is important for creating the right kinds of incentives for your audiences.
When you have built the brand of your events, you will know exactly what emotional bracket you want to trigger to build hype. Different events play on different human emotions - New Year’s Eve at Times Square plays on thrill, happy family picnics play on joy, the Macworld plays on suspense and curiosity, concerts play on fun, soccer matches play on excitement and tribalism, talk-shows play on comfort and product launches play on value.
Once you figure out how you want your audiences to feel before your event, you’re already half way to creating hype. Let’s call it the ‘event’s emotion’ for convenience. All of your marketing messages, communication, interactions, advertisements, letters - everything has to trigger the event’s emotion. If you manage to touch their feelings, they will form an invisible relationship with your event - whether they know it or not, you just managed to touch their heart! This will put them in a position where they will be more likely to attend the event or tell others about it. That’s your attention magnet!
This may sound like you are toying with people’s emotions - but that’s not the purpose of this exercise. Always remember, the New Year’s party at Time Square will thrill everyone present and give them a natural high. But what would happen if nobody knows what New Year’s at time square is? What would happen if nobody knows what it ‘could’ potentially mean to them? Well, they’d rather stay home and watch TV. Unless you tell them what to expect from the event, you cannot expect them to come. That’s it - you’re just setting their expectations straight using event emotions.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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Your Story |
A story is a message or idea that we communicate with people. It is meant to be consistent throughout the campaign, across multiple channels. The marketing messages, blog posts, website content, emails, everything; needs to be aligned to the story. Please don’t confuse the word ’story’ with something fictitious - it’s just the actual and real message that’s sent out for the world to see.
Planning events or businesses requires creativity. You need to find new ways of targeting customers, new ways of promoting events, new ways of building communities, new ways of planning themes. Everything works at a fast pace these days, which puts the customer expectation bars high. You can only expect to meet those bars if you can differentiate your services and products significantly and manage to stand out from the crowd.
So, instead of looking for best practices or easy ways out, take time out to design your events as if they are a painting. Paint out new ways of blending all of the different elements together to make picturesque memories. That itself is your story, you can decide how you want to paint it.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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Reputation & Credibility |
Marketing is all about spreading the word to the right people at the right time. There isn’t any exact formula that you can follow for that - it’s about having a sense of timing and understanding your market perfectly. Most of the credibility that event promoters or managers gain is based on their past portfolios, experiences and the grandiosity of their ideas. All of this is easier to demonstrate and show today to prospective clients because of the way the internet has evolved. Everything has become pretty much an open platform. This also means that junk content from not-so-good professionals will flood the space as well. This makes it even more important for you to be able to stand out amongst the crowd and speak in a way that reaches out to your audiences and clients alike.
I call that inspiring content. Content that makes people think, talk, discuss, comment, react, share, and learn.
Many people worry that social applications (like Facebook) only begin to help in marketing events after a critical mass is already achieved in your following. In my own experience I would agree that greater hype is built when more people are talking about it. However, having said that, the powerful thing about social media is that you can attract more people to your page without knowing them. Initially when you’re just starting out, it doesn’t matter how many people you have on your Facebook network, what matters is how you get through to the people who could potentially be interested in attending your events or buying into your launch campaign.
For example, let’s suppose your target audiences for an event are college students and frequent travellers (25-35 age-groups) in Florida. We already know that the market demographics on Facebook are skewed towards college students and professionals. So the potential of your market size is considerably huge. Theoretically, all you need to do is reach out to these people!
I’ve noticed that when events are built into fun activities, they can turn into great powerhouses for generating hype. You can build a page on the social networking applications with customized navigation to get the people involved in the pre-launch stage. You can get them to plan some elements of the event, or have competitions (e.g. poster design competition for the event). These competitions can be linked to real-life prizes like accommodation discounts, free tickets, free drinks etc. To add an additional incentive, you should also be able to show a list of other people who are attending. There has to be an incentive for people to participate and refer you to their friends.
I believe that once you have found your potential customers, they will market your event further for you. In many ways, it depends on how you are branding your event. So, to sum it up, even if you are a small shop or are planning a local club party, you can create movement and traction online if you play your moves well.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Etiquettes |
It seems that people tend to misuse social media and networking sites for their marketing campaigns leaving users irritated. It is important to be careful in your social media strategies and implementation because one wrong move can defame you in seconds in the online world. Although these things may seem obvious to most people, I will still share them with you so that you can run through your plans to make sure you don’t unintentionally push the wrong nerves. As event managers or marketers, your reputation and credibility are things that need safeguarding.
I consider these an understood underlying part of my preaching, but if we’re not on the same page about them then there is a chance you may misinterpret my social media strategies and harm your events or businesses. So, here goes:
If you are leveraging social media for marketing your events, product launches or services please make sure of the following:
1- You send messages to only those people who are interested or have opted-in to hearing from you. No random catching-strangers-in-the-marketplace.
2- If you have found your demographics online (randomly), then try to build a relationship of trust with them before pushing marketing message down their throats. Make them your friends by helping them or providing them value. This is always a mutually beneficial relationship.
3- Even if you have built a relationship with prospects, make sure they are open to hearing about your event, instead of giving them attendance ultimatums. You don’t want to drive the traffic away but instead attract them.
4- To attract that traffic don’t fabricate things about your event that are not true. There is nothing worse than finding out that you have been deceived into buying tickets. Always deliver what you promise and promise what you can deliver.
5- Don’t chase prospects. Draw them into your story by elevating your overall intent. If your story represents value to others, they will find you.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! To get search engine traffic you must own software that’s capable of showing you everything the search engine spiders see.
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Speaking The Lingo |
Always remember that the people you are marketing to are part of your community. They are a community of people supporting your services, attending your events and communicating directly with you. If you want more people to contact you for services, or manage their events, or attend the events you are managing and so on, then it is important to build initial trust and credibility first.
Secondly, you need to be an active part of the community itself. Participate with the audience, ask them questions, discuss ideas, share thoughts, request feedback. This communication helps people in opening themselves up to you and become more inclined to use your services or attend your parties later on. Also, it is the best way to get a feel for audience expectations and early feedback on your events. Credibility comes from sharing insight, discussing thoughts and adding value to conversations. When people start to respect your opinion as a good one, they will become more inclined to becoming your customers.
The escalating online trends in social media, the increase in fancy new gadgets - all of these factors have paved ways for you to communicate with your market on more direct levels. This direct interaction brings you to a downright human level and potentially breaks all gaps between you and your customers. You can talk to them. You can listen to them. You can communicate with them. You can build loyalty. You can build relationships of trust. You can do so much, just by leveraging different tools to form a bridge between you and your customers.
Some people believe that if you want to be ‘accepted ‘ or ‘liked’ by a group of people online - you have to be like them. Shel Israel puts it this way: “Humans are tribal by nature. It is in our DNA. It has to do with why we are passionate about sports teams and rock bands. It has to do with why most people want to marry people of their own race or religion and it has to do with the unfortunate human tendency to mistrust or downright dislike people of apparently different tribes,” (Shel Israel http://redcouch.typepad.com)
From my perspective, however, I have seen how the boundary of the concept of tribes strips down and evolved into something much bigger and tolerant online. The subtle anonymity or behind-the-curtains-feel of being online has changed our criteria of tribalism. Instead of race or ethnicity, tribes are formed based on authority, thought leadership and recognition. For instance, experts of a certain niche group are more revered than newbies.
Understanding the dynamics and cultures of a network or group is vital for surviving in it, and the only way to show them that you are one of them is by speaking their lingo.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! If you want to source the best JV partners in your niche, you need a software that sources those selling the most product’s in your niche!
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