SeminarSavvy.com

Will prospective seminar attendees pay what you are asking to participate in your seminar?

The answer depends on how they perceive your price. If they think it’s too high — in other words — there is not enough value to justify the time and money they will spend traveling to and participating in your seminar, they will not sign up. But if they think that you are offering a fair value, if not a bargain, they will sign up.

I recently met with producers of a one-day sales seminar that is priced at $1,295. Is that a lot for a one-day event? Yes, the tuition is higher than what most other providers of one-day training programs charge. However, what really matters is how the target audience perceives the price. If the education and solutions delivered in the seminar are great enough, the price will appear to be a bargain.

For example, if the process taught in this particular event helps seminar participants to increase their closing ratio, and each sale is an average of $10,000, prospects are likely to consider it to be a good investment. All will take is one sale to make their investment pay off.

On the other hand, if participants read the seminar promotional materials and conclude that it will take a lot of work and a long time to turn their seminar participation into measurable, bottom line results, they may conclude that the tuition is too high.

Adding bonuses to your offer is a good way to increase the perceived value of your event — especially when the bonuses themselves have a great perceived value.

What makes a bonus valuable? Here are some questions to consider:

1. Is it sold in a store or on a web site? If so, it can reassure more skeptical prospects who might dismiss bonuses as fluff that you’ve thrown together to manipulate a sale. Knowing that your produce is really for sale somewhere can reassure these buyers that they are getting real value from your bonuses.
2. Is it something that will help your prospects save time, cut costs, make more money or otherwise solve a problem or enhance a result? Bonuses that help people get more of what they want and less of what they don’t want are valuable.
3. Who is your audience and what do they like? If you market to parents, offer bonuses that help them better parent and connect with their children. If your audience loves technology, find the latest and greatest technical doodad to give them. If promoting events to people who love being outdoors, find bonuses that they’ll be able to use while pursuing their passion.
4. What is your area of expertise? What do you stand for? Find bonuses that relate to your area of expertise — because that is why your prospects seek you out. My subscribers are on my mailing list because they want information about promoting seminars and workshops. Although I am more than a seminar marketing coach, that is what connects me to my list. Other things, such as my love of gardening, reading and personal growth, might be interesting to some people on my list.

To find bonuses, start with your own products and knowledge. If needed, create new bonuses that relate to the content of your seminar.

Also turn to other experts and organizations whose products and services relate to your seminar topic. In addition to contributing bonuses that will increase the perceived value of your event, these individuals may make ideal affiliate partners.

When promoting a local seminar, newspapers seem like a logical choice for reaching your target audience. After all, newspaper readers are local. And they are interested enough in learning new information that they’re willing to pay for and read a paper, right?

But as many new seminar promoters quickly learn, promoting seminars via newspaper advertising isn’t as easy as running an ad and filling the room.

For starters, your ad has a lot of competition — and not just other ads. Every story on the page as your ad, as well as every story in the paper, is competing for attention. In such a busy environment, it’s easy for your ad to be overlooked.

Here are a few pointers to help you get the most bang for your buck when promoting seminars via advertising in newspapers, magazines and other periodicals:

• Ask about demographics. If the readership doesn’t match your ideal prospect profile, don’t buy into the advertising representative’s hype. Take a pass instead — there are plenty of places you can spend your advertising dollars.
• Drill down into demographic data. The publication’s readership may be diverse, and your seminar may only appeal to a certain portion of the readership. So ask the advertising rep for specifics. For example, newspapers may be delivered across dozens of communities, and your audience may be more likely to live in one community vs. another. Don’t be afraid to ask about having your ad run in only certain editions of the paper or magazine.
• Investigate all advertising options. When you think of advertising in a newspaper or magazine, your mind probably went straight to a display ad. But many publications offer numerous ways to advertise. Classified advertising is an option, of course. Others include flyer insertions, coupon bags, front-page sticky notes, and belly bands (an advertisement that is wrapped around the publication). What gives you the best chance of standing out?
• Remember, frequency is key. You will not fill your seminar by running one ad one time in one publication. You may not even get a single phone call! Repetition is key to advertising success. Most studies agree that customers need to see your promotions at least 7 to 9 times before acting.
• Test ad sizes. If you’ve ever shopped for ad space, you know that it get pricey in a hurry. When first starting, invest in a small ad that’s run frequently vs. a large ad that’s run only a time or two. As your ad produces results and you generate revenue, reinvest some of the proceeds onto bigger ads.
• Go for leads, not sales. Convincing a stranger to register for your seminar based on an ad will be difficult. Instead of trying to make a sale in a tiny space, direct readers to your web site or phone number to get details about your event. Better yet, promote a free resource or gift related to your seminar topic. Promote your seminar when you follow-up with people who request the free resource.

Advertising can gobble up your marketing budget in a hurry. Use these tips to help maximize the number of leads you receive, while minimizing your marketing risk.

“What’s the best way for me to promote my seminars?”

This question easily makes the top five list of challenges I hear from newer seminar promoters, as well as those who aren’t satisfied with how their events are performing.

Their uncertainty is understandable. Because when you’re doing your own marketing, growing a business and delivering the content, you want to make sure that every dime and every minute you invest into your promotions will pay off.

The frustrating thing, of course, is that you can’t guarantee that everything you do will be a winner. Some promotions fizzle. It’s the nature of the game.

When you’re promoting seminars, workshops and other training events, there are some things you should do when marketing. For example, having a web page — if not an entire web site — devoted to your event is typically a good idea. That way, you have a marketing tool available around the clock to help prospects make the decision to attend your seminar.

Going hand in hand with the web site is email marketing (to your own opt-in list of course).

Beyond that, my rule is “if you feel inspired to try it, try it!”

If you think that knocking on doors and introducing yourself to local businesses will help, give it a shot. If you want to hang flyers on bulletin boards, it’s worth a try. If listing your seminars with a event listing service strikes your fancy, sign up to get your information into their database.

Then supplement your creativity with a bit of practical planning:

1. Be sure to customize your marketing approach to best leverage the opportunity. If you’re going to talk to business owners, stress how the organization will benefit by investing in training rather than talking only about how the attendee will benefit.
2. Track the source of every registration. That way, you won’t have to guess which marketing tools are working for you. You’ll know without a doubt whether it pays to pound the pavement while passing out flyers.
3. Use multi-channel marketing. The more ways you reach out to your audience, the more likely you are to reach a greater number of them. Plus, you’ll be less affected if one tool stops working.
4. Watch ROI. You may find that all of your marketing tools are generating registrations. But filling seats is not enough. Ultimately, you need to make money from your registrations, or your business will sink.

For some seminar producers, this means that the tuition generated must outweigh the cost of generating the registrations. Other seminar providers can lose money on the seminar itself because they will make money selling products and services at the event. But ultimately, they must make money.

When working with a finite budget, watch the return on investment generated by each marketing channel. If you find that one approach costs too much in time or money, drop it and redirect your resources to another channel that is producing a better return.

What’s the most unusual approach you’ve tried when promoting seminars and workshops? Share your thoughts below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was talking to a client of mine this morning about ways she could promote her new service. The conversation turned to Google AdWords, and she shared the results of her first month’s adventure in the pay-per-click world: 800+ new subscribers and 1 sale.

Now 800 new subscribers may be paltry results for you. In her industry, it’s pretty doggone good.

But she wasn’t overly thrilled about her results because the bottom line results were poor. One sale wasn’t even coming close to covering her PPC charges, never mind her other marketing expenses.

She felt better after I pointed out how well she was doing. Getting 800+ subscribers meant that she had generated at least that many clicks … and probably many more because not every person who clicks on your ad will opt-in to your list (in fact, most won’t).

The problem isn’t that Google AdWords isn’t working. It IS generating clicks and opt-ins.

The problem is that the process she’s using to market to her new subscribers isn’t converting them into paying customers. Although it’s technically possible that the subscribers coming from Google AdWords campaigns are I-won’t-ever-buy-from-you-no-matter-what-you-say tire kickers, it’s much more likely that the follow-up marketing is weak.

My client is far from alone in doubting her selection of marketing tools. It’s very easy to say “that doesn’t work for me” when a marketing campaign fails. (And it seems that the more money you sink into your failed venture, the faster you jump to this conclusion.)

Before you write off entire marketing channels, stop to track and analyze your results at every step in the process. For example, my client can test and track:

• How each campaign, ad group and keyword within AdWords performs (the click-thru rate). Within AdWords, she can experiment with keyword selection, ad group organization, bid prices, and ad copy to boost results.
• How many visitors to her landing page opt-in to her mailing list. She can change her offer, information requested for the opt-in, headline and body copy, and even button copy.
• How many subscribers convert to customers with each follow-up message. Here, she can experiment with the message copy, the way she contacts subscribers (e.g., via email vs. direct mail), the offers she makes in the follow-up messages, the number of follow-ups, and the timing of her follow-ups, just to name a few elements.

Analyzing results at each step of the process can provide valuable clues about where your marketing breakdowns are. And that can help you avoid making the deadly mistake of prematurely abandoning a marketing channel that can be transformed into a blockbuster with a few strategic changes.