Social Media Marketing and Successful Seminar Selling – Part 2

location iconStrategy and Growth

My previous blog on Philip Calvert’s session to business leaders at a past MD2MD meeting focused on human behaviour and how it would impact on the way we market and present at a seminar.

In order to maximize the potential to fill an event with delegates, planning and marketing should commence 5 months before the seminar.

So where do we start?

Objectives – Have clear, defined objectives of what you want to achieve.

  • Why are you putting on the event?
  • What do you want to achieve form it?
  • What do you want the delegates to do as a result of coming to the seminar?  Buy a product? Provide a testimonial?

Subject Matter – What subject matter are you going to use?  Ask the audience/potential delegates or use a survey tool like www.SurveyMonkey.com.

Target audience – who would you like to attend and how many?

Locations – Hotels and meeting rooms are common venues, but by choosing somewhere a bit different your event may appeal to more people.

Once you have decided on the above, what are you going to offer your delegates?  Everyone loves to receive something; food, discount vouchers, a free book, free membership to a networking group or a discount on future events.

Interestingly, you are likely to get more people attend an event if you charge, than if you offer it for free or at a very low cost.  What encourages even more people is if you charge and make it more appealing by offering, for example, discounts for:

  • Members of a group (business link, federation of small businesses, your industry body)
  • Existing clients
  • If connected to you on LinkedIn
  • You can also offer incentives which will highlight the value they will receive;
  • A free book
  • A lovely lunch
  • Free membership to your networking group
  • Discount vouchers
  • Immediate booking discount
  • Something of value to take away

Try to pick 3 discounts or incentives and, when including it in your marketing material, put what it is worth.   If the total comes to more than the ticket price – even better!

Bob Bradley

Bob is a specialist in running high value added service businesses, having run five such businesses as General Manager, Managing Director or Chief Executive. His last employed role was as Chief Executive of a £16M, 200 person family owned business having previously been Chief Executive of an AIM listed company for which he raised £5M funding and which he grew from £4M to £12M in three years through two acquisitions and organic growth, and a corporate PLC subsidiary where he was Managing Director responsible for delivering £10M profit on £45M turnover through 450 staff.

Bob is now following a portfolio career providing entrepreneurial business leaders with mentoring and coaching around business leadership, business growth, merger integration and exit planning.

Core to his portfolio is MD2MD. Having experienced for himself the value of having a strong sounding board of fellow Managing Directors he founded MD2MD in 2004 to provide groups of business leaders with a confidential environment within which they can support and challenge each other to raise their game as leaders and by doing so improve the success of their organisation.

More about Bob

MD2MD membership

  • You meet your peer group privately for structured confidential conversations about real business challenges. You meet online for 90 minutes every 3 weeks.
  • You attend one of a selection of open workshops led by top professional speakers sharing best practice on a wide range of leadership topics.
  • You join our annual conference LeaderFest and our annual ‘Retreat to advance’.
Apply for trial membership