Effective Seminar and Conference Marketing

Jenny Hamby will be sharing tips and ideas for developing more compelling marketing copy for your web pages, social media, and mobile environments. The event is being held on Monday-Tuesday, August 29-30, in Chicago on the Magnificent Mile at the Downtown Marriott Courtyard Hotel. There is also an optional pre-conference workshop on Sunday, August 28. I look forward to meeting you there! 

Today, Jenny will share an idea on using rented mailing lists. Renting mailing lists is a time-proven, but costly, way to reach new prospective seminar attendees. One way to maximize the return on your list rental investment is using two-step marketing.

With two-step marketing, your seminar is not what you promote initially. Instead, you offer a free or low cost resource, such as a report or webinar, to entice prospects to sign up for your list. For the second step, you promote your seminar to the prospects who responded to your initial offer.

 Here are 7 tips for creating a successful two-step marketing campaign.  

1. Create a free resource that is related to the topic of your seminar. For example, offer a free report that identifies the most common mistakes your audience makes related to your subject matter or a teleseminar outlining a 5-step process to achieving a specific result.
2. Promote only your free resource. Don’t confuse prospects by trying to market both your seminar and the free resource in the same marketing piece. If you want to know which offer will generate the biggest response, split your test list. Offer half of the list your free resource; promote your seminar to the second half.
3. Make it easy to respond to your offer. The easiest way to gather responses is by instructing prospects to sign-up for the resource at your web site. However, you may want to test letting prospects call, email, or text you as well.
4. Deliver instant gratification. Deliver the free resource online, so that prospects can get instant access to your high-quality information while they are still ‘hot’.
5. Have a follow-up system ready to go before you launch your lead-generation campaign. This helps to ensure that hot prospects don’t fall through the cracks.
6. Encourage consumption. Your free resource will contain valuable information. Use your follow-up series not only to promote your seminar, but also to remind prospects to go back and ‘consume’ the free resource. By doing so, they will have a chance to experience the type of quality education you deliver.
7. Spend extra time following up with these leads. By taking action to request your free resource, your new prospects have indicated that they are more motivated than the average seminar prospect. Devote extra time and marketing dollars to reach out to them before your seminar. 

Finding new prospects for your seminars is an ongoing challenge for seminar organizers, particularly when marketing budgets are tight. The next time you rent a list, consider testing a two-step marketing campaign to see if this approach helps you generate a bigger return on your list investment.

Get lots of additional ideas at Jenny’s session in August at the Clemson University Continuing Education Marketing Conference being held on August 28-30, in Chicago on the Magnificent Mile at the Marriott Courtyard Downtown Hotel. Register on-line or call Clemson’s Kay James at 864.656.2200!