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.

LinkedIN

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 :)