Getting Bums On Seats
You’ve reached the point in your journey where your knowledge brand is happily scaling to success. Your personal brand is growing through keynotes, books, podcasts and more. All that hard work is bringing licensed trainers to the brand: this awesome group of people who love what you do enough to want to be part of its growth. Taking it to new regions, new heights; ultimately growing it on a global level.
Now everybody involved has a commitment to get events booked and sold.
Part of the licensed trainer program should cover a recommended plan for regional marketing and selling of events. Trainers are responsible for marketing their events to their peer circle and local market.
Before they start, you need to give them clear guidelines on brand usage. Logos, slogans, brand content, products and materials, should be exploited only for the marketing of workshops and events associated to the knowledge brand.
It’s essential to set out clear guidelines for marketing on a regional level, but what about your obligation to the marketing of these events? After all, attendees are buying into your knowledge, which is being distributed through a local trainer.
Let’s take a look at some of the way we can market and sell our brand workshops on a global level.
Slack community
Slack has grown from a messaging app for teams to one of the most ingenious ways of engaging and supporting a community on a global level.
Through Slack you can create open dialogue channels for your whole community, direct messaging for one to ones, create event groups, send email, sync with Trello; it doesn’t make coffee yet, but who knows.
Slack is slick and it’s the ideal channel to promote your brand workshops on a global level.
To make it successful add your students, subscribers, peers and trainers; those trainers can add their students and peers, and hey presto you have a community of like-minded peeps to engage, discuss and promote your workshops to.
And you don’t have to only use your own community. You’ll find many industry communities used the Slack platform, so join those relevant to you, and you have a another channel of event promotion.
This level of Slack community comes at a price. It’s free to get started, but the bigger the community, the higher the cost. Be wise about how you grow the community, and make sure every member brings something positive.
Articles
Written content is still an essential part of online marketing. Whilst video is certainly the latest SEO darling, fresh written content on your website is just as relevant for spreading the word. If you are confident enough to combine the written article with a video, then you’ve cracked it. Your video can be footage of previous workshops, an intro from you, an interview with the trainer, mixing written and video content, means happy visitors who like video, happy visitors who like to read, and importantly happy Google.
If you already considered a thought leader, and are engaged in the LinkedIN community, then become a LinkedIN publisher is a great way to promote brand workshops. The trick is to write a relevant piece, without making it a sales pitch.
If you have a company page, keep it updated with a calendar of brand workshops.
I am not a fan of direct sales messaging on LinkedIN, but creating a group first, means you can direct message only relevant people and create discussions around the workshop topic or regionally segment event messages.
LinkedIN also offers paid-for advertising, allowing you to target views by location, industry, job title, etc.
Email Marketing
Never underestimate the power of email marketing. Done properly it’s one of the most effective ways to deliver your message to a targeted, engaged audience. Overdone it will drive your subscribers to distraction, literally…
If you are going to create a successful email marketing campaign, you’ll need to consider who you are writing to, what do you want to tell them, how do you want them to feel.
You’ll more than likely be fighting for space in their promotion folder, so a catchy and direct subject line is vital. Use an email marketing tool, such as MailChimp to create a well designed email and personalize the greeting.
Make sure you include links throughout the email including in the header, images and signature to workshop sign-up pages, articles and videos. Highlight the trainer(s) and region(s) and any early bird discounts.
Helping your trainers to market their events through brand mailing list is a great way to increase the number of attendees.
If you use an email marketing platform you can automate the campaign to send a series of messages on the run up to the event and use segmentation to target your audience. The more targeted your message is, the more powerful.
If you have a high number of subscribers in Germany, create a German segment and promote each month the events in Germany. Creating separate emails for every geo-location would be time consuming, instead focus on the larger audience region, or those with a higher velocity of growth.
Emails can also be tracked and open rates analyses, allowing you to resend emails to subscribers who haven’t opened the initial email, or a push campaign to those who have opened it several times.
C’mon get booking, places are limited!
Landing pages
A landing page is about as in your face salesy as you want to get. Visitors who visit your website via a landing page have already been exposed to our event marketing and are interested to find out more. So here’s where you convert the hell out of them!
Your landing page has to be persuasive, it needs to clearly tell the visitor what the event is about, where, when and important what is the unique vale proposition? Why should they book this event? What are they can to find here, that they won’t find anywhere else?
Make the content visual, here less written word is more, so you have to be extra clever with the wording: lists are good, include reviews from past attendees and break it all up with visual content.
Every landing page needs a call-to-action, a book now or register now button that links straight into your event registration or booking page. This is a no frills, taking no hostages, sales hook going on right here!
Social Media
Social media marketing isn’t just a hype, it’s a very real tool for any event marketing strategy. The problem is most of us don’t know how to use it well, and end up spending too much time, or too much money on an ineffective campaign. And there’s nothing more depressing than being the only one to ‘Like’ your post.
As you scale your knowledge brand and brand workshops grow you won’t be able to stay on top of social media marketing for every event. Instead set out guidelines for your trainers to use social media in a way that stays true to the brand.
Provide them with visuals and templates to use on the run-up to each event, and a recommended schedule of what to post when. Suggest they use teasers to promote their events. Everyday reveals a new update: about the trainer, guest speakers, location, extracts from the brand content, past attendee reviews, media coverage, ticket promotion and sales. By revealing a little each day, and across their various channels they are creating anticipation and capturing the attention of your followers, keen to find out more, until they click… and hit your brand event landing page.
Now watch while bums fill seats :)