Case Studies
Moving Forward, Here Are Some Ideas For Building Lists |
a. Go through your existing contacts to find different interest groups that you have been a part of. Segment people you know from this association, job or club and invite them to fill out a survey about the organization. Have them leave names and email addresses at the end to receive a copy of the results. They will complete it to find out what everyone thinks of them or those they know.
b. Attract organic search engine traffic into a doorway page sequence to capture names and email addresses.
c. Network in social sites (such as Facebook) to drive people into your doorway page sequence.
d. Interview other people that have big follower lists. Organize the interview recording and content for that person’s followers to listen. Have them sign up to hear the interview.
e. Write a report relevant to a particular user group you are interested in attracting. Invite them through an association to come to your squeeze page to get a copy of the report after they give a name and email address.
f. Write a survey and offer the survey results to everyone who participates so they have to enter their names and email address to get the results.
g. Google’s advertising sends people directly to your squeeze page.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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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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Inside Tips On Outsourcing |
In my experience, contractors who are always bidding on work in Elance and those types of sites are always bidding for a reason. The contractors who are not bidding are not bidding for the opposite reason. They are good and don’t need to chase work. There are techniques to flush these guys out. A lot of them set minimum bid alerts so they are notified of high value jobs. One way is to post high value jobs to attract their attention and get conversations started with them. Another way is to search for the best ranked or highest earning contractors. Track their previous job types to see which ones match closest to your job requirements. Never measure a contractor based on the rating system because a lot of them give each other good ratings even if they’re not good to preserve each other’s scores. You should track down the busiest, highest earning contractor that has worked on job descriptions just like yours and contact their previous employers for verbal feedback and reference.
Also, never contract a big important job completely to an unknown service provider and always pay through escrow to guarantee output on providers you don’t know well. These are small tips for mitigating your risks when dealing with freelance providers. Never try to go outside of the system that you found them in, as it’s safer to work in a middle ground.
Don’t select the cheapest bids, look for quality stuff. If you have multiple outsourced talents working for you, you may want to consider hiring a project manager to interact with them. Regular meetings and teleconferences over Skype are recommended to keep updated on the work status.
The best way to work is to find outsourced talent that you can have a permanent need-based relationship with. This adds security and saves the time it takes to source new workers. Almost all of the strategies that I have discussed in this book can be offloaded to separate service providers – however you will need to plan your overall strategies in detail before getting the work started.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Why Outsource? |
I’m sure all of you must have heard of Thomas Friedman’s famous “The World is flat” book. I find it strange when I still see people working 20 hour days (literally!) trying to keep up with all of the different threads in their event plans. It’s strange because they can actually get the same work done in a better way (through specialized professionals) without having to have complete control over every single aspect of their launch. You can get a personal assistant to manage your schedules and appointments. You can get a sales person to get to resellers or sponsors. You can hire a SEO expert to optimize your event page and website. You can get writers to send out your blog posts or email campaigns. All you have to do is the high level strategic work and people management.
You may tend to get overwhelmed with work when there are so many things to do in online marketing. Instead of compromising or having to pick and choose opportunities, a better idea is to offload the work to reliable service providers. While having your own onsite employees increases control, confidentiality and expertise; it also has the disadvantages of management overheads, facilities and costs. When you don’t have the time or energy to get the work done in-house, it makes sense to consider having someone else do it for you.
One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing is to cut down on management overheads and employee issues. With a wider worker database, you can find more specialized people at cheaper rates. The best part is that if you don’t like them, it is easier to replace them. When looking for offsite workers keep in mind that outsourcing has some cons as well. Some of them are; less control of the work, up charges, and having to prepare thorough work outlines in advance.
There are over a dozen good sites for finding professionals; I’m just going to discuss two of the most popular ones.
oDesk as an outsourcing platform: I understand that it’s difficult to rely on other people for the work when the success of your events depend on it to be completed on time and quality. That’s why, some of outsourcing platforms have incredible ways in which you can monitor the work that is being done by your contractor live - as it happens. Also, you can choose to only pay for the work that is accepted and according to your requirements. oDesk.com has these little controls in place to make sure you don’t have to spend an extra cent without getting the right value from it. All you have to do is set up an account and put up a job opening. Interested service providers will contact you by bidding for the project. You can pick and choose or interview them as you like. You can also search their database for good matches and invite them to place a bid.
Elance as an outsourcing platform: Another great site, which I have also used, is Elance.com. Elance has a huge network of service providers from all kinds of areas of expertise. You’ll find both companies and individuals there and will be able to hire them based on their interviews, past experiences, feedback scores, and so on. The risk of hiring the wrong folks is mitigated by going through their portfolios and profiles thoroughly. Weak providers can be identified and avoided easily. Again, all you have to do is set up an account and get going.
Payment Processes: Your payment methods can vary based on your preferences. Some of the outsourcing websites have built-in third party services of Google Checkout, paypal.com or moneybookers.com. Otherwise, you also have the option of using credit cards through a banks merchant facility applied to your accounts. Security is taken care when it comes to third party services, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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RSS |
Content creators syndicate a web feed which allows users to subscribe to it. A web feed is a data format that provides updates on frequently changing web content. A number of web feeds can be made accessible in one place through aggregation; this is done by internet aggregators.
One of the most common types of frequently updated content comes from blogs. There are tools designed specifically to source content from multiple blogs in the RSS format to you, so that you don’t have to go to each blog to read it. Just like in real life, you don’t go around to all the different radio stations listening to the news at their station, you turn on the radio where each show is beamed into one place where you decide which channel to listen to. RSS feeds are like the radio channel and RSS feed readers are like the stereos that pick up the signal and play the sound. RSS readers bring information from different websites and blogs (radio stations) across the internet that you ask for into one place – so that you can read it at your own expediency.
RSS feeds can also be aggregated by the blog search engines. Many aggregators take the individual blog entries from all of the blogs they index and make them searchable. This enables people to search for specific topics and find more information about them. These RSS feeds can be pulled from the aggregation engines into other people’s sites.
I’ll discuss advanced ways of marketing by syndicating content across multiple networks to build multiple back links for SEO, whilst driving massive traffic and networking credibility in my next book. “Social Traffic 2”, which will be a detailed guide to walk interested parties through planning, building out and executing a huge revolving door event launch campaign using social media.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online your first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Inside Scoop |
Since this is one of my main areas of interest, I have explored cross syndication techniques using every possible scenario and situation. I’m happy to share some pointers with you guys, to help you get up to speed with it.
1- These tips are about getting organized; first of all, make sure you have separate email accounts for personal emails and subscriptions. You can even implement a tracking code like adding yourself to each list using the list owner’s first name instead of your own along with your email address. This helps identify the source of each email and what other marketers are doing with their lists. If you get an email that says Dear Rodger from John, you know Rodger has sold or is sharing his list with John.
2- Get a password manager. Having unique passwords for every place that you register to is important for your security. Roboform.com, a $19 plug-in that stores all your forms and passwords works brilliantly. It enlists the sites in an alphabetical order on clicking and automatically logs in for you. The reason I use it is because it syncs up easily across browsers and users, it allows me work under one set of passwords across my entire team.
3- Google Reader account helps to parse through piles of content published daily across the blogosphere. You can subscribe to important blogs that you want to follow in the industry to help you in keeping a tap on things. I use Google Reader because it’s an online RSS reader and can hence be accessed from anywhere – since I get to travel around frequently. Also, because my Google reader shared items easily sync up with Friendfeed and Gmail. These tips are about pulling the best, recent and relevant content in your niche so that you’re the first to know about things in your market. You cannot be “the” authority in your niche if you are not on the pulse of what’s happening in it.
4- Set up all networking accounts in your real name, contact details and email addresses, as these are your signature and online footprint. Even if you are working for clients, unless a client is paying you to build them a personal profile network (not recommended) as this is personal.
5- For bookmarking and article marketing sites I use to “not” recommend setting these accounts in your name or your company name at all. This is because anything you do in these sites to promote your own stuff is considered self serving. If you work these accounts under different identities the links and referrals count. One account alone won’t generate a lot of traffic for your content pages, but if you have 5 different bookmarking accounts that you religiously bookmarked in, it will help get your content to the top for those keywords and tags. If you can get to this point you will be one step closer to the tipping point for your content being distributed to thousands by 3rd party users.
In saying that, the new Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect widgets will make the web increasingly interconnected. I can see these Social Networking giant killers pairing of with different bookmarking sites so we can sync our bookmarking and social networks, this will allow us to bookmark content to one audience across the net. That said, my advice of late is to keep everything you do under one consistent profile as the web is merging into one big web platform that we all share anyway.
These tips are to help you get organized enough to attract and manage masses of content, so that you are able to sort it and distribute it to your followers in a streamlined daily flow putting you at the top of the information trade in your niche.
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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