SeminarSavvy.com

My last post about the hugely inflated phone bill got me thinking.

The primary reason I didn’t act immediately was that I didn’t have time. I generally dislike having to deal with customer service, and faced with a lengthy to-do list, it became easy to put off calling AT&T “until tomorrow.”

The odd thing about my experience was that I had to technically switch companies — from the “old” AT&T to the “new” AT&T — to take advantage of the flat-rate monthly billing plan. Why they wouldn’t have switched all customers of the old company to the new company is a bit of a mystery …

That’s when I started wondering — how many other deals am I not taking advantage of because I’m assuming that my current vendor is giving me the best pricing? And how much am I losing as a result?

I don’t know about you, but I have about a thousand things that are more important than shopping for better deals. Wait, I think I just found a project for my new assistant.

Tell me, what do you do in your business to monitor costs and ensure that you’re getting the best deal available for the products and services you buy on a regular basis?

When I opened my long-distance phone bill last month, my mouth literally dropped open. In the past six months or so, my bill had doubled. But I could shrug my shoulders and rationalize the expense, because I knew I had been participating in an extraordinary number of teleseminars lately. Seeing a number over $500 (might not be a lot for your business, but it’s about 4 times my average use), though, caught my attention.

Yet here we are a month later … and my bill is approaching the $300 mark. The pain of paying more money hasn’t yet become less significant than the “pain” I anticipate in having to sit in queue waiting to talk to a potentially unfriendly, unhelpful, unenthusiastic customer service representative.

There are two marketing lessons right there in that last sentence:

(1) As marketers, we have to battle our customers’ sometimes ill-founded prejudices and unsavory past experiences to win their business. Figure out what types of beliefs your customers hold about you/your company/your profession/your industry … and use your marketing materials to prove that you are NOT what they think you are.

(2) As with any type of change, customers will not register for your seminar (which really is a form of committing themselves to making a change by learning whatever it is that you’re going to teach them) until the pain of NOT making the change becomes greater than the pain of making the change. Use this to your advantage by driving home how much they are hurting themselves by choosing to NOT learn the wonderful information you’ll share.

As for my phone bill, a big thanks to my friend Jill Hendrickson of www.WeightLossItalianStyle.com, for the heads up about AT&T’s long-distance plans (oops, make that the “new” AT&T). I’ll now be paying a whopping $36.95 for what cost me $500.83 last month. Since I’ve been an AT&T customer for the past 8 years, I’m a little confused about why I had to sign up with the “new” company … but that’s a topic for some other day.

As marketers, it’s really easy to fall in love with our events, services and products. But just as when we fall in love with our human sweethearts, we tend to focus only on the positive aspects of our objects of affection … sometimes to a fault. WE can see the value in attending our seminars, buying our products or hiring our companies … and it’s easy to forget that our prospects are not necessarily wearing the same rose-colored glasses.

That’s why it pays to get periodic reality checks. Especially before launching (or even starting the development of) a new seminar or product.

Surveys are a great tool for soliciting customer feedback. You can be blatant about the purpose of your survey — “I’m planning to hold a seminar about XYZ. Is this something you’d be interested in attending and if so, when?” Or you can conduct a more traditional type of survey to get insight into how your audience thinks and feels about the topic.

I’m in the midst of conducting the latter type of survey on a topic that I’ve become more and more interested in over the past few months. I sent the survey to my opt-in list, and although it’s too early to draw any conclusions, the information I’ve collected so far has been really fascinating. Some assumptions I had made have been validated; others have been shot down. And I’ve received loads of detailed comments in the “Other” field. I’ll share more when I have more data.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: I used SurveyMonkey.com for the current survey. Awesome tool! Very intuitive to use (a huge plus for people like me who don’t want to fiddle around with learning new technology) … and one usage plan is free.  

Another tool that’s popular among the Internet marketing crowd is the ASKDatabase.com. This tool is a smart choice if you like to ask open-ended questions and/or if you get a lot of comments in the “other” field on your standard survey questions. Rather than reading and trying to make sense of a huge list of comments, you can use the ASK(TM) Database to analyze the feedback and draw conclusions.

I attended an event offered by Barbara De Angelis over the weekend. One of the things she does extraordinarily well is transforming her seminars into experiences. Not only does this make her seminars more engaging and fun, it makes them more memorable … which becomes a great selling tool when it’s time to market the next seminar.

If you want your seminar attendees to have more vivid and transformational experiences, here are some tips:

1. Set the stage. Having a stage with a podium and projection screen is a bit, well, ho hum. You can argue that such a plain-Jane set up keeps the focus on the speaker, which is true. But it’s also boring. Dress up your stage to give your event some personality.
2. Make participants interact with each other. And don’t just limit yourself to an icebreaker activity at the start of your event. Get participants out of their seats and interacting with each other throughout your entire seminar.
3. Look out for the newbies. People who have not been to your events before and people who are uncomfortable in groups of strangers may feel out of place at your seminar. Add stickers, ribbons or codes on attendee nametags to distinguish people who are new from people who have studied with you before. Then ask experienced attendees to “adopt” the newcomers around them.
4. Use the group for learning. Sitting in a chair writing down down ideas and lessons you’re getting from a speaker is great. But sharing the things you’re learning with other attendees will deepen and cement your new knowledge. Incorporate small-group activities into your lesson plan so everyone can learn from their fellow attendees.
5. Give them something to remember you by. Sending attendees home with a small gift will help them remember the experience of your seminar. This could be as basic as a pencil and notepad. It could be something larger that feels more like a real gift and less like a promotional item, such as a tote bag (got this one from Dr. Ralph Elliott, who gives away great tote bags when you attend his Clemson University program, Effective Seminar/Conference Marketing). Or it could be a unique gift that has special meaning for the attendees.

Using other people to help promote your seminars is a powerful marketing tool — especially when you are first starting out and don’t have your own mailing list.

But relying on affiliates (other people who promote your events to their lists for a commission on each sale they generate) has a big downside: many, if not most, of your partners won’t follow through and promote your seminar as promised.

The problem isn’t that they don’t believe in your seminar … or that they are “bad” people. A lack of action is usually due to your affiliates being so busy running their own businesses that they forget about or run out of time to send your promotions.

Three things you can do to help your affiliates promote your seminars:

1. Provide a timeline. Spell out when you want  affiliates to take action … and what action to take.

2. Provide the materials. The more work you do for your affiliates, the less they have to do … and the easier it becomes for them to execute. So give them the promotional materials you want them to send to their lists.

3. Follow up. Your affiliates are busy. Help keep your seminar front and center by sending reminders about upcoming actions you want them to take.

Do you think marketing is hard? Let me clue you in on a little secret. A lazy way to marketing success is paying attention to all of the not-so-smart (dumb, if you want to blunt and politically incorrect) things other marketers do … and then do your best to avoid the same mistakes.

Take, for example, a seemingly insignificant goof made by a well-known seminar promoter who uses free preview teleseminars to drive prospects to his live events. When I went to download a call that I had missed, I discovered this easily corrected mess-up: a file name of 478707POEUJZ.mp3.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to realize that letting your computer randomly create a file name is a wasted marketing opportunity. And you don’t even have to be an iPod user with 2,394 songs in your iTunes library to quickly understand how difficult it would be to find that call you downloaded three days ago when the file name is 478707POEUJZ.mp3 and not something helpful and descriptive like SeminarSuccessCall#1.mp3. (That’s a made-up name, so don’t waste your time trying to figure out who I’m talking about!)

Is changing your preview call recording names going to make or break your registration numbers? Nope. But will it remove an opportunity to look sloppy and disinterested in your customers’ experience? Absolutely.

Tip: even if YOU know to give your recordings descriptive names that tie to your event, it doesn’t mean everyone in your company does. So if you’ve delegated the job of uploading recordings to your website, as I know this speaker has, incorporate this handy tip into your process … or at least pass this message along.

Do you have grand plans of taking your seminar national? Then you absolutely must use Internet marketing as a foundation for your seminar promotion plan.

(Disclaimer: I think pretty much every seminar business should be incorporating online marketing into their promotion mix — but especially if you want to bring your seminar to the entire country … or the world. The Internet allows you to reach a much larger market more quickly and cost-effectively than direct mail, advertising, and other forms of “traditional” marketing.)

Start by putting up a direct-response sales site. Incorporate one or more offers for people to opt-in to your mailing list. Then start driving traffic to your site.

With a sales-oriented web site and a sound Internet  marketing plan, you’ll be able to put your seminar in front of potential attendees across the country when they are out actively looking for you. Once this component of your plan is implemented, incorporate other marketing channels and begin cultivating a deeper relationship with the people on your mailing list.

Recommended Resource: Of all the different sources of good Internet marketing information, The Internet Marketing Center is one of my favorites. They publish a monthly newsletter that’s a great source of information not only for beginners, but also experienced pros. Sign
up here: http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/996608