Staying Front and Center
As a seminar promoter, your primary goals are getting prospects to pay attention to your promotions and to sign up for your seminars. To succeed, you have to overcome two obstacles.
#1 Lack of awareness.
Consumers are bombarded with advertising messages each day, from the time they get up until the moment they close their eyes at night. It’s physically impossible to pay attention to every message you’re exposed to. Out of necessity — if not to preserve your sanity — you have to ignore most of the messages you hear and see.
This is true even when you have a relationship with the person or company sending the message. At most, prospects give messages a three-second glance before hitting the delete key or tossing it in the trash.
As a result, there are huge portions of your list that only vaguely aware that you’re offering a seminar. Because they’ve been ignoring your messages, they simply aren’t aware of what you’re promoting or of what a tremendous value it is.
#2 Lack of trust
Attending an event is a big commitment. When promoting your seminars, not only are you asking prospects to spend their money, you’re asking them to invest their time with you. This is by far the toughest sale.
If prospects are unsure about your qualifications, unfamiliar with your work, or don’t fully understand how your seminar will help them, they won’t see your seminar as a smart investment of their time.
One way to overcome these two obstacles is by strengthening your seminar marketing materials and plan.
From a content perspective, you can make sure that your copy fully describes what attendees will learn, how they’ll benefit, and what problems you’ll help them solve.
From a planning perspective, you can contact prospects more often and with a wider variety of marketing tools to break through the clutter.
But there’s an easier way to build trust and awareness: Publish a newsletter or e-zine.
Newsletter marketing offers 3 key benefits:
- You can demonstrate your expertise. For greatest effect, your newsletter should include helpful information, not just promotions. The more valuable the information, the more likely it is that prospects will hold onto your newsletter and refer to it when they are actively seeking the solution you offer.
- You can fly below your prospects’ marketing “radar” when promoting your events and products. Because the thrust of your newsletter is education, prospects are more likely to open and read it. When you slip in mentions of your event, readers won’t be as resistant to your message. In fact, providing valuable articles can whet prospects’ thirst for more information … making them more receptive to whatever marketing message you put after your article.
- You become a welcome guest. Providing quality content builds trust with your audience. When they get used to receive interesting, valuable information from you, they’ll be more likely to welcome and open your other messages, including promotions for your events.
Another reason you should publish newsletters? It’s a great way to force yourself to regularly create content for a blog or articles to distribute via online directories. Repackage your content for these alternate forms of distribution, and you’ll raise your visibility and SEO rankings, as well.
Tags: awareness, building relationships, Newsletter marketing