SeminarSavvy.com

Past attendees are a valuable, yet often-overlooked, source of leads for your seminars. Not only can past attendees endorse your seminar, they also are likely to know other people like themselves — people who should be attending your event.

Yet, some promoters don’t market to past attendees. After all, they’ve already attended … so why would they want to pay to attend again?

Other promoters will include past attendees in their marketing. They send their seminar promotions, such as a brochure or email, and hope that past participants think to forward the information to anyone who might be interested.

But you can do more. To leverage your customer relationships to produce greater results, incorporate one or more of these ideas into your marketing mix:

1. Incorporate a specific request into your seminar brochure, letter or other materials. Ask recipients to share the promotion with friends, relatives or colleagues who might be interested in attending.
2. Send past attendees a separate promotion (e.g., a cover sheet with your seminar brochure or an email blast) to solicit their help. Acknowledge that they attended your event in the past, and tell them that you’d appreciate their help in spreading the word about your upcoming seminar.
3. To make it easy for past attendees to identify people who might be interested in your event, describe your target audience to them. The more specific you are, the better you’ll be able to help jog their memory. In addition to using demographics and other descriptors (e.g., job title, education, location, age, gender, etc.), think about what your prospects want to accomplish. For example, rather than “seminar promoters,” I could describe my ideal prospects as “public speakers who are ready to host their own events,” “seminar coordinators at associations,” or “consultants who want to use seminars to generate qualified leads.”
4. It also may be helpful to include a list of complaints, frustrations or challenges that your audience is dealing with. These serve as “red flags” to help past attendees identify people who are struggling with a problem that your event will help to solve. Some of the complaints I hear include registration numbers that are falling because of the economy and not knowing where to start when marketing a seminar.

If you deliver an excellent seminar that is full of value, past attendees often will be willing to spread the word merely because of their satisfaction. They’ve benefited from your training, which makes them comfortable recommending your seminar to the people closest to them. However, you might want to sweeten the pot by offering a commission for every registration they help to generate.

Regardless of whether you offer a financial reward, be sure to make it easy to spread the word abut your seminar. Provide the marketing materials you want past attendees to use, and give them clear instructions about when and how you want them to publicize your event.