Sharon Horne-Ellstrom’s Post

Transcript

Hey there, Sharon, about event strategies to super size and grow your business. One of my favorite techniques and strategies to generate interest and to get a bump in sales, customer engagement, brand loyalty is to put on events. There's all kinds of events that we can have when it comes to our business. We can have conferences which are great for networking as well As for spotlighting and highlighting and sharing industry or business. Related information We can have trade shows, which are perfect for product demonstrations in a particular industry or for highlighting new products and services. We can do webinars. Webinars are, and I will admit, I had a hard time getting them going. But once I figured out and cracked the code on how to do webinars effectively and well, they became one of my favorite tools because you can do them remotely. You can you can do them ahead of time. You can do them with a live audience to learn what works and doesn't work. So you're testing and tweaking and improving along the way. Of delivering your event. They're also really cost effective. Webinar software is very inexpensive nowadays, relatively speaking. And you can have webinars and then once you figure out what works and what really speaks to your desired clientele and audiences, you can automate those webinars and make them Evergreen. Meaning you can show them over and over and over again on a regular basis and have them out being the little sales people for your organization. Workshops again are one of my favorite team techniques and strategies. Event types, because you can target your ideal audience, you can find out what they want exactly and in a short format you can deliver them that result. Everybody wants a result. That's why people fall off of membership sites and subscriptions is because they don't feel like they're getting the result they want. And it's usually because they're not getting enough hands on one-on-one attention to get the result they want. And workshops are a great way to do that because they allow you to. You can still do one to many, but you've got a specific. Objective and goal in mind that you're helping people to achieve in that workshop. So it's a great thing. It's like taking a short course or something in school or in college. And then product launches, of course, are a great way to create buzz, excitement, and introduce something new to your clientele and to your marketplace and to your desired audience. So what are some events strategies and what's the process we can use to use events as part of our business, assuming you haven't used them? Before think of this. Every business has some type of events. A sale is an event in the retail world, right? Every time there's a sale, every time there's a promotion, that is an event. Marketing is usually based on getting attention to different events, so. In order to. Engage our audience, build brand loyalty, get a boost in sales and to drive sales. We want to find a way to structure and plan events. A lot of organizations, a lot of businesses that I coach and work with, we have an event calendar. We create a calendar. Sometimes it's a five year event calendar, but we always have at least a one year event calendar. These are the events and the things that we're going to do. These are when we're going to launch new products. These are when we're going to do webinars. These are when we're going to do whatever strategy and what type of event is right for that. Particular organization. So how do we go about creating an event? Number one, we set clear objectives. What the heck type of well, what, why do we even want to have an event? Usually it's to build brand loyalty, engage customers, find out more about your customers, what they need, want and desire, or to test products and services that you're thinking about putting out into the marketplace on a smaller scale and then launching them via a product launch event. We want to after we know why we're having an event, we want to know our target audience who is the event for and part of those go hand in hand in. I, I want to have an event. This is my business reason. Here's my target audience. I have to know what they want and what will speak to them and what will engage them and cause them to want to be customers of ours in this event. You know, so we need to know our target audience. We need to know and decide what are our budget, what's our budget? How much money do we have to allocate to this activity, this event? And then we have to allocate the available budget or get creative on how we're going to do. The things that we want to do in order for our event to be a success. We have to decide what type of event we want to have. Is it going to be a conference? Is it going to be a trade show? Are we just going to participate in in our industry trade show because that's an event for us as well? Are we going to do webinars? Are we going to do a product launch? Are we going to do workshops? What type of event do we want to have based on the objectives, based on our customers? And based on our budget and our our resource availability, there are hybrid of events nowadays where we don't have to always do in person events, which I freaking love because it's harder for me to travel these days personally. So I like that we can do things virtually. There's lots of platforms and lots of. Event platforms now for doing in person lives from the comfort of a studio or your own home. So we want to decide if we want to do an in person event or if we want to have a hybrid event or if we just want to do a virtual event. Even Tony Robbins is doing virtual events now for since since the pandemic, almost every big name person has gone to doing virtual events. And what they've realized is that they can literally reach thousands more people for a fraction of the cost. Of bringing everybody for in person events. And there's huge advantages to the customers and the clients and the the people that participate in the events and that they don't have to travel. They can be in the comfort of their own home. They don't have to, you know, find dog sitters and babysitters and everything else. So decide what kind of an event, what type of event that you want to have. Then we have to have event planning and management. Why? Because an event is a big project. Even if you're doing a summit, an online summit, which I don't even have on here. I actually love doing summits. I pick and I treat summits like a workshop. What is the one thing my ideal customer wants to know and needs to know and wants to be able to do and apply right now? And then I get a bunch of people that are experts in that area together and we do virtual interviews and virtual summit. It's not even on my list, right? Speaking, podcasting, those are events, right? If you treat them as such. So then we want to, after we get our plan and our management, our timelines and our checklists and everything in place, we need to start thinking about coordinating the event and logistics. Depending on the size of the event and the scale of the event, it will determine your timeline and your checklist and how many people need to be involved in the project and in the planning. If you're doing an in person conference, for example. Like I think Funnel Hacking Live, I think they start planning years in advance and then like it's a whole one year push each year to to put on that event because it's a big event. I think it's at least 5000 people now. And that is not the same as doing a workshop for 100 people. I mean, the steps are the same, but implementing an actually making that happen are two very different things. Then we have to figure out how are we going to market the event. And the earlier you start marketing the event, the more likely you are to fill the event. My favorite is to market the event early enough, fill it with attendees and then be able to plan the event after that because I know that I'm already, I'm already full up. So I've made my financial objectives for that event, and then everything else is just cake. That's probably not the nicest way to put it, but it's so true, right? And then? We want to have social media, we want to actually promote advertising, social media, SEO. We wanna do a whole realm of ways to get publicity out there and get promotion and attention to our event. One of the toughest things to do for in person physical events is actually filling them and selling out on tickets. So usually when we're doing an event like that, our number one priority is to fill that event and sell out of tickets. At least the people that I work with, that's our number one goal and immediately and once we do that, then we can really beef it up and make it just the best possible event. We want to use social media, of course, to engage. We want to have engaging content on social media to encourage people to attend the event. If it's an in person one, guess what? It's just as important to encourage people to attend and actually show up for the virtual events that we do as it is the in person events. People, there's a lot of pain when they don't show up for in person events because they usually put out thousands of dollars in order to be a part of that event. Virtually the cost is less and so people are more likely to skip that and we want to make sure that we're encouraging them and doing everything we can to get them to show up. We like to do things like gamify participation and showing up. We like to award prizes and participation bonuses for people that actually show up and are engaged and participating in the event. There's all kinds of things like that we can do. We want to leverage technology. There's so much technology available now. That we can use to make all of this easier from event planning software to. Actually, event delivery digital platforms that are available now, it makes it easy to engage and gamify and have contests and do all the things that used to be pretty hard to do when it came to having events. I guess I've been doing events and planning events and. 1990. Oh, I did him in college. OK, I gotta go back to the early 1990s, a long, long time and. I think that's what got me excited about events is I got to be part of industry organizations and engineering organizations that planned events and annual outings and conferences and things and it was so fun to see those projects come together. It's even more fun when they're coming together to help you grow and build in super size your business. One of the things that people often forget. Is to remember that the once you have an event and the event actually physically ends, your work isn't over you want to have not a postmortem, but I call them postmortems or an audit of what happened, what went well, what didn't go as planned, what you can do in the future for future events, because we're assuming that you're not ever going to just do one event and never do another event event ever for the life of your business That would be silly It would be like not learning lessons when we. Do anything we want to decide we're going to implement a strategy implement that strategy have key performance indicators along the way know how it went and then always follow up and and say well what are the lessons that we learned what went super duper welcome we're going to do that again in the future. What didn't go well? What did we hate and we're never ever going to do again because that happens too That's part of the learning process in the learning curve. So we have to remember that after the event we need to continue to engage people because. Everybody doesn't buy at the event, but a big number of people will buy after the event if you give them an offer that is irresistible, right? That's the whole purpose of having events is to bring up. And bring people into our fold, so to speak, so that they can become part of our super sizing organization. So there's lots of case studies on events. One of my favorite events is Funnel Hacking Live, which I think is based a lot on the network marketing marketing industry, which the network marketing industry is awesome at events, not so great at business structure and and strategies. I guess it is for them, but not for their participants that all the members that don't make any money, but they do a great job at conferences and events and celebrations and things. So that's our topic for today. Love to know what type of event you've done, if you've done any and if not, let's get you doing something because events are an incredible way and in a great strategy for super sizing and growing your business. Any questions, hit me up. Otherwise, have an absolutely awesome day and I will of course be with you tomorrow with another strategy you can use right now to super size your business. Bye.