SeminarSavvy.com

“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.