How To Never Worry About Filling An Event Again

Featuring Richard Lindner

About Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner is the President at Digital Marketer, and brings his experience and skills to the forefront of many of the most important marketing campaigns we execute. This year alone, Rich will oversee the delivery of more than 1 billion permission based emails in multiple markets.

Why go live?

Q: Why have you guys decided to go after live events in such a big, big way?

A: For us, it really didn’t start with anything other than let’s see if we can do this and let’s see if people will come, but what it ended up doing was really being the brand that launched Digital Marketer.

Why events?

Q: What made you say, “You know what, let’s do an event. We’re a digital marketer, let’s do an event.” What was the mindset there?

A: We wanted to get feedback. We wanted to figure out, really, as we’re a young company, where do we want to go, what do our best customers want from us, how can we best serve them as we’re expanding our product line?

How to monetize?

Q: Just on a side note, Richard, after your first T&C did you come up with ways to help monetize the buildout?

A: What we did was we productized the content that was evergreen on the individual sessions and we were able to sell that post event as productized content and standalone information products, and that allowed us to recoup and even become profitable. You’re talking six, seven months down the road.

What’s the mindset?

Q: Is there a different mindset that you as president of Digital Marketer would go through if you’re hosting a free event in terms of getting people to show up?

A: You have to make sure that you’re targeting. … I think determining and really being crystal clear on that goal and saying let’s reverse engineer this all the way.

Is it easier to target now?

Q: If you’re talking specifically to your avatar and these days with the targeting that you guys know how to do and that we’re going to talk about briefly, it’s a much easier process now isn’t it?

A: We were just touching on it a little bit. Are you going to go with a preview model? Are you going with a content model? Are you going with a multispeaker, multisales event model? What is the model of the event? We have to change and modify the even program to accommodate.

Talking to customers with an end goal

Q: Before you even throw ads on the internet or do what you do to market, you’ve got to understand how you’re going to talk to that particular customer that’s going to want that end goal. Can you just kind of solidify that again because I don’t want people to forget that?

A: Relational equity and the understanding that we have to add value first to build that relational equity before we can make a withdrawal if we want to truly have a long lasting relationship, is important.

What’s the next step?

Q: Step number two, where do we take them? A: Step number two is if this is the before and the after then who would

experience this? Who would benefit from it? That goes a little bit to the avatar, but if you said here’s the changing that’s going to occur, here’s the transformation that’s going to occur at the event, the next question is who would most benefit from this transformation.

Simplified next step

Q: How would you simplify step two for people? A: Step two is making an offer to a targeted list. Again, your email list. It’s my

job as a marketer, to aggregate attention. If I send out something huge announcement or exciting news as the subject line, it’s going to get opened.

New entrepreneurs

Q: Say people, new entrepreneurs, don’t have email lists. What would be their step two there? They don’t want to just go have a cold conversation or do they?

A: You need to say I’m willing to spend X amount of money to put on a live event. Included in that budget needs to be marketing, especially if you don’t have a list. You’re going to have to say of the, I don’t know, 25,000, 50,000, it doesn’t matter, whatever the number is, of that budget, I’m going to devote 25% or 10% towards customer acquisition. If you can do that, you can fill an event without having a tribe and you can actually use your event to start to build the base of that tribe.

Continue the process

Q: Let’s take it a little step deeper, a little step further. Where do they go from there?

A: Now, it’s time to start to scale. If you haven’t—if you don’t believe you can fill the event, there’s some questions to be asked there. One of the questions you have to ask is between today’s date and the date of the event, and the assets that I currently own, do I believe that I can fill the event with no additional heavy lifting?

Continue the process

Q: You wanted to take it somewhere else it sounded like. Did you want to go post event? Is that where you were taking it?

A: It’s a balance where eventually your marketing is going to get dialed in. Now, what you’re doing is, you’re creating campaigns. You’re creating outbound marketing for prospects that you’ve identified.

Combining messages

Q: Do you ever suggest having a conversation that would meld the two, meaning, just kind of assume that they aren’t coming? You kind of have that one conversation to that avatar?

A: Either you have to water down the message enough to where it works for two very different segments of people; people who have taken some action and no action. Focusing on those two different messages, those two different avatars, is really important at this phase.

Combining messages

Q: Since we’re down that road, would you suggest a blanket mailing to the San Diego area for that particular avatar that they’ve identified?

A: Should we go buy a blanket mailing? No, you shouldn’t. Should you figure out where your people are already going and congregating, and say how can I get in front of them or how can I get the person who kind of owns that area that they’re already congregating in to vote for me as if they were a blogger or an online kind of authority? Yes, you should. Yes, you absolutely should.

Traditional PR

Q: Are there any holes that we want to plug here before we send you off? A: There’s traditional PR. I mean if we’re talking hustle, get a local news

affiliate to run a story, do press release. You’re in hustle mode. You’ve got to be outgoing. You’ve got to tell people why it’s important and you need to tie it back into a news story.

Three tips

Q: Three things for those people who are listening and watching ninja strategies to fill rooms if you are maybe an experienced marketer, intermediate to advanced marketer?

A: (1) You have people on your list. Your main focus there is being able to tell them why they should be there. As long as you can reach those people, you’re good. (2) Do what you say you’re going to do. (3) Remember, give me a reason to buy other than the one I’ve already said no to.

What to Avoid

Q: What is the biggest thing that they want to avoid when hosting and getting people to an event? What was the biggest mistake you made maybe?

 A: Initially, the biggest mistake that we made was assuming that everyone that registered would show up and pricing accordingly.

What to Avoid

Q: What is the biggest thing that they want to avoid when hosting and getting people to an event? What was the biggest mistake you made maybe?

 A: Initially, the biggest mistake that we made was assuming that everyone that registered would show up and pricing accordingly.

Closing summary

Richard covered: How to build excitement What to offer, and who it is for Scaling Reasons to attend