SeminarSavvy.com

Waiting for registrations to arrive is one of the toughest challenges to face as a seminar promoter. While enduring this nail biter, you might find yourself pondering whether it’s time to pull the plug and cancel your event.

The danger in cancelling is that you might make the call too early, thereby missing out on the rewards of all of your promotional efforts. You also risk damaging your relationship with the people who have already signed up — especially if they have purchased airfare or incurred other expenses to
travel to your event.

Here are some things to consider while making your decision:

• How far away is your event? The closer your seminar gets, the more registrations should arrive. When plotted on a graph, most registration curves swoop upward dramatically in the last week before an event.
  Unless you’ve tracked registration patterns for your seminar before, you’ll have a hard time predicting
  whether the lack of response you’re seeing is normal or not.
• Where will most prospects come from? If you’re marketing locally, you can expect people to wait until the last minute to register because they can do so without having to pay through the nose for airfare or without risking not being able to secure a hotel room.
• When do you have to guarantee your food and beverage counts? If you have zero registrations, you’re 14 days away from your event and you have to tell the
  hotel today how many lunches you want, it’s more tempting and understandable to want to cancel. But if you have registrations and you’re just not happy with the numbers yet, it’s harder to justify.
• How well did you market your event? If you were scrambling to pull your marketing together at the last minute and you skipped most of the promotions you were planning, the lack of results is probably more due to poor marketing than prospects waiting until the last minute.
• What’s your break-even point? How many registrations do you need to break even on the expenses you’ll incur by running the event? (Do not count the money you spent on marketing — that’s already gone. Consider only how much it will cost to put on the event vs. cancelling.) If the number is low, keep waiting — it’s worth the extra time to see if you can still round up the registrations.
• What’s the cost of cancelling? Consider any penalties you might incur with the hotel. And consider the cost to your reputation — especially with those people who have already signed up and made plans to travel to your event.
• What’s the cost of running with your current registration numbers? Could you tolerate the amount of profit (or size of loss)? Could you focus instead on the ability to deliver on your promise of a great event for the few people who have registered? Could you reframe the event as great practice for delivering your content since it’s not going to be the big money-maker you hoped?

If you decide you must cancel, be sure to allow adequate time to notify registrants. For example, pull the plug on local seminars a day or two before so you aren’t scrambling to reach them the night before your planned event.

One popular (and cheap) approach to filling seminar seats is to involve affiliates.

(Affiliates are people who will promote your event in exchange for commission on every sale they generate. Ideally, they will have their own opt-in lists of subscribers who hang on their every word.)

When you have affiliates who are highly influential and have the power to bring a lot of registrations, it’s worth your time to set up a customized landing page for their traffic.

Rather than sending their visitors to your general landing page, create a page that incorporates the super-affiliate’s name, phone and even a video or audio message. If your affiliate is going to be a guest speaker at your event, you can also highlight the specific things they’ll be discussing.

A customized landing page becomes exceptionally powerful if your super-affiliate will be a guest speaker on a preview teleseminar (where prospects can sample your content and decide if they want to sign up for your paid event).

That’s because your super-affiliate will probably (and should) send a promotion teasing his/her list about the content of the preview call. If readers are interested, they’ll click the link and expect to see more information about that particular call and how to get signed up.

If you take them directly to a salesletter for your paid event, to a landing page that discusses ALL of the preview calls you’re hosting (and your super-affiliate’s email doesn’t mention that his/her call is one of a series), or to an opt-in page doesn’t mention preview calls at all … you risk confusing your affiliate’s visitors.

Confused visitors leave without opting in … and without registering for seminars. Your affiliates won’t earn the return on investment they’re making to promote your seminar … and in the future, they’ll be less likely to want to promote your events.

 RECOMMENDED RESOURCE:

The Affiliate Inferno training program offered by Russell Brunson and Stu McLaren is top-notch for learning how to build a successful affiliate program. Russell and Stu have different approaches to building affiliate programs — take your pick about which approach best suits your event and your personal style.

A few years ago, a seminar marketer was picking my brain about how to fill more of his seminar seats.

When we started talking about his competition, he mentioned as an aside that his biggest competitor had published a book that had been on the best-seller list for several weeks.

“Do you think that’s helped him?” he asked.

Well … heck, yes!

Publishing a book gives you 3 distinct advantages over non-authors:

1. Name recognition. The better known your book is, the more name recognition you have. This, in turn, makes you a bigger attraction as a speaker.

2. Credibility. Even if you self-publish, people are impressed when you can hand them a real, printed book.

3. Leverage. If people are interested in what they’re learning in your book, they’ll often be interested in continuing their studies with you. So make sure to promote your seminars in your book.

* Mention your seminars in the book content (”During one recent seminar, an attendee came up and asked me ….”)

* Include a generic mention of your seminars in your bio and/or on the page listing details about your resources (”For details about the author’s seminars, books and home-study programs, visit ….”).

* And if you really have your act together, include a special offer to entice readers to attend your seminar, such as a coupon for discounted tuition.

Before you sit down to write a single word of copy, think carefully about who you really want to see sitting in your seminar seats. Analyzing your perfect attendee up front will make your copy more effective — and also make it easier to write.

If you try to be everything to all people — all people being the myriad types of folks who could benefit by participating in your seminar — your copy will be blah and will likely appeal to no one.

But if you can pick a primary audience to focus on, you can speak directly to their problems and desires.

During one recent project, the primary audience we were targeting changed as the copy developed. The client initially chose to focus on an audience that was large and somewhat desperate. But as the project developed and feedback came in from various trusted advisors and potential attendees, the client realized that shifting focus to a smaller — but more lucrative — audience would be a better strategy.

As a result of the change in focus, we had to rework some of the copy. Verbiage that appealed to the first audience would repel the second group. It added more work to the project … but in the end, we had a stronger letter.

As you implement your marketing plans, follow my client’s lead and keep your ears and eyes open. It’s better to invest a little extra time reworking your marketing pieces than to stick to a flawed marketing strategy once you have feedback that recommends a shift in direction.

The signature on your outbound email is a fantastic free tool to promote your seminar. That’s because an email signature flies below your prospects’ marketing radar. Most people don’t think twice about deleting promotional messages. But this promotional message is tacked on the end of a more personal message that WILL get through.

For best effect:

• Keep your message short. A one- or two-sentence message is plenty.
• Focus on benefits — what are the top 1-3 benefits or things attendees will get at your event? Alternatively, list your seminar title, tagline, the dates and location.
• Link directly to the page where readers can find full details about the seminar. Don’t drop them off at your home page and hope that they stumble their way to your seminar page.
• Want to use your email signature to build your opt-in
  email list of prospects who are interested in your seminar? Use your signature to promote a free teleseminar or other giveaway that’s related to your seminar topic.
• If referring to yourself in your signature, use the first
  person (”I,” “my,” etc.) not the third person. For example, “Discover my top seminar marketing secrets at …” rather than “Discover Jenny Hamby’s top seminar marketing secrets at….”

Promoting your seminar in an email signature obviously
won’t fill your seminar to capacity on its own. But it can
be enough to fill an extra seat or two … and the potential
profit more than justifies the two minutes it takes
to create this type of promotional message.

Are the links you’re including in your email promotions harming your marketing efforts? Could be … even if you don’t spot any obvious problems before you send your messages.

As the resident marketing expert for Business Expert Webinars (http://www.businessexpertwebinars.com), I help speakers plot their marketing strategy, as well as dissect past marketing campaigns that didn’t perform as expected.

In preparation for a recent consultation, the client forwarded an email he had sent out to promote his upcoming webinar. When I opened it, I saw a huge problem — the links he had included were so long they took up nearly two full lines!

Not only was this almost painful to look at, it was likely causing problems for a huge portion of his audience — if the link breaks, the link becomes inactive. The only way to follow the link is to copy and paste it into your browser window … and many people don’t know to do this.

The quick fix: use Tiny URL (http://www.tinyurl.com) to shrink long and ugly links down to a manageable size. Here’s an example:

http://www.on2url.com/app/adtrack.asp?MerchantID=43243&AdID=396893

turns into http://tinyurl.com/6gnuep — much better, isn’t it?

As it turned out, it was fortunate that this particular client had sent the email to me. Because on his end, the link looked fine — it was an embedded link, so the long and ugly version wasn’t visible on his computer screen. Once I returned the email he had sent to me, he could see the problem … and then fix it.

For many professionals, a huge benefit of attending seminars is the networking they’re able to do with other participants.

If you want to leverage your audience’s desire to connect with other professionals to generate sales, however, you can’t assume that your audience will think of this benefit on their own. Make sure that your promotional materials play up this unique aspect of attending a live event.

Here are 3 ideas to get you started:

1. List networking as a special benefit of attending your event. Tell readers how many and what type of networking opportunities you’ll be coordinating (for example, extra long lunch hours).

2. Send out an advance registration list a couple of times before your seminar. Show prospects which individuals have already signed up and/or which companies are sending employees to your event.

If you receive a registration from a well-known attendee or industry expert, send out a special promotional email focusing solely on that individual. The opportunity to meet this individual might sweeten the pot enough to get some previously undecided prospects to register right away.

3. Include testimonials from past attendees who raved about the networking opportunties and quality of attendee. If you can get them to include specific results in their testimonial (”I struck a deal that put $50,000 in my pocket during the first morning’s coffee break”) … even better.

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You’re swamped. Your seminar is months away. So you think, “I’ll figure out how to market the darn thing later … when I have time.”

Except you never have time. Then all of a sudden, your seminar is mere weeks away … and you haven’t done a thing to promote it.

Whether you’re promoting a weeklong conference or an hourlong teleseminar, it’s critical to hash out a marketing calendar soon after you book your event. Start by figuring out which audiences you want to contact, when you want to contact them, and how you’ll get in touch.

Then add additional deadlines to your calendar for various stages of production on all of your marketing pieces. For example, set deadlines for having the draft and final versions of your copy done, for having your web site launched, your direct mail pieces designed, your mailing lists rented, and so on.

Without these deadlines spelled out in advance, it becomes easy to get too busy to properly market your seminar. Before you know it, you’ll be skipping promotions because you don’t have time to get the pieces pulled together.

One common question among business owners who want to use seminars as a sales tool is whether it’s best to be upfront about the event being a sales presentation or to disguise it as an educational seminar.

My answer: Tell the truth.

If your presentation is truly nothing more than a sales pitch for your company, service or product, then say so. You may end up with fewer registrations (the thinking being than many people won’t want to be sold), but those who show up are likely to be highly qualified and very interested in what you’re selling.

If you want to go the educational route, then make sure that you are, in fact, offering educational information. If you position your event as an educational seminar, you need to send attendees out the door happy that they invested their time with you, even if they don’t buy whatever you are offering.

Not sure which approach will be best for your audience? Try it both ways, and track your results. Keep records on how much you spend, what exactly you do to promote the event, how many registrations you receive, how many people show up, and what type of people show up (e.g., their age, education, net worth, type of industry or whatever other demographic and psychographic criteria will help you get a picture of who is responding).

Also track how many people respond to the call to action  you make at the seminar, whether that’s signing up for a free consultation or making a purchase right then and there.

When you are marketing your first seminar — or assuming marketing responsibilities for a seminar that’s already been done before — it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all there is to do.

So what’s the very first thing you should do?

I start by researching the audience.

Read industry publications. Study your competitors’ marketing. Survey your audience.

If you work for a training company, talk to the trainers and other people who have helped market your events before.

And whatever you do, don’t forget to actually TALK to at least a few past attendees. Even a short telephone interview can provide tremendous insights into what your prospects want and need from your event.

Knowing what makes your prospects tick … what problems keep them up at night … how your seminar helps solve their problem … and what they want your seminar to deliver — these are the secrets that will help you create compelling copy and a smart
marketing strategy.