Wanted to give you a quick update, as well as the must-read article below. Due to the coming holiday weekend, there are no LIVE! with Roy interviews being recorded this week. Though I haven’t been slacking!
I have four interviews lined up in the next three weeks — and have more in the works:
- I’ll be talking with one of the world’s leading experts on building a million-dollar information marketing business
- Also, the leading provider of “3D mail” — objects sent by direct mail that your prospects can’t ignore
- And an insider from a software company that helps businesses create automated marketing systems to maximize sales and profits, with minimal effort
- Then one of the best copywriters you’ve never heard of — though you’ve certainly heard of many of the businesses he’s been instrumental in building
… And we’re just getting started!
So stay tuned… And if you haven’t filled out that “Join Us” box on the right, it’d be a smart move to do so now.
During the off week, I didn’t want to leave you wanting… So today I’m leaking a must-read article on event marketing that’s not supposed to go public until tomorrow, on my RoyFurr.com website. Though you get it a day early here.
Here’s your must-read article…
“If You Want People To Pay Attention To Your Marketing, Don’t Make It Marketing… Make It An Event!”
I’ll get to the event marketing thing in a minute… But first a story that tells why this lesson is so important.
It’s a “Rockin’ it to Rachmaninoff” morning.
Last night I couldn’t fall asleep. Too many exciting things happening in my business.
Then, shortly after drifting off (at a time approaching 1:30 AM), my one-year-old woke up. It was my turn to put him back to sleep. 45 minutes later I close the door to his room (quietly, so he wouldn’t wake up again) to head back to mine.
10 minutes later he’s awake again, coming into Mom and Dad’s bed. I’m trying… Trying to get back to sleep. He’s pinching my arm. One of his legs is on my back – and he won’t keep it still.
It wasn’t a great night’s sleep – and that’s an understatement. Our three-year-old was oblivious – he slept right through it. So he’s up and firing on all cylinders just as early as any other day.
Sleep is overrated anyway.
So it’s a Rachmaninoff morning. But it’s blaring. I listen to Rachmaninoff like rock music. It keeps me up and gives me energy. And the coffee’s brewing.
This isn’t mere trivia about my night last night.
It’s actually a story about you. More specifically, about your business and your customers.
I’ve been in this marketing game long enough to see that almost without exception, marketing and advertising is created in an absolute vacuum. There’s an assumption from the copywriter, the designer – whoever it is that’s creating the ad or marketing piece – that the prospect will sit down with the ad as soon as it crosses their awareness, dive in with focused determination, and not look up until they’re done. (Especially so in “Madison Avenue” advertising, though direct response is definitely not immune.)
Not so, bubba.
My story may be mine today, but for every 1,000 clients, customers, prospects, and leads you speak with, there are 1,000 stories that end at a single result: they frankly couldn’t care one way or another about your advertising.
Your advertising and marketing is a priority in YOUR day. NOT in their day.
So while you send out that email and wait with baited breath for the responses to come rolling in, they’re too busy nursing their lack of sleep with loud music and their caffeinated beverage of choice, or checking Facebook, or doing whatever else they’d rather do than read another marketing message.
I don’t remember the official stat, and frankly whatever the specific number is doesn’t matter. It may be 5,000 advertising messages, or more. That’s how many advertising messages the average person in the US sees in a single day.
Too many to pay attention to. And certainly too many to care.
So what have we as marketers and advertisers done to counter this? To get our message noticed?
We’ve added to the clutter with more media buys, more exposure. We’ve gotten LOUDER. We’ve upped the promises. And the hype.
We’re like a junky getting our fix. That next hit of smack makes the high come back – for a little bit. Bigger promises, sales go up. Get louder, more people pay attention. But it just keeps pushing the threshold up. Pretty soon, everyone’s just as loud as you again, with just as big of promises.
We’ve seen this in the health and investment newsletter industries: if you don’t have 53 free reports to go along with your $39 newsletter, your offer isn’t seen as good enough.
Though these publishers aren’t alone. It’s happening everywhere.
And when the threshold goes up, the junky needs more and more smack to make that high come back.
And that’s when apathy sets in.
So it’s no wonder that when your prospect had a rough night – baby kicking in bed, can’t go to sleep, still had to get up early – or is distracted for any other reason (and to a person, we all have a reason to be distracted)…
Yours and the 4,999 other ads they see in a normal day are among the first thing they tune out.
And at some point, getting louder, or upping the promises, or doing whatever else simply for the sake of getting noticed fails to have the same effect. Or much effect at all.
You need something else to arrest the attention of your prospects. Something that doesn’t trigger their “Ugh… Another ad,” filter before you can communicate your value to them.
I probably know 50 ways to cut through the clutter of today’s over-saturated advertising world – that work if you have something that’s truly of value to your prospects. Though you wouldn’t benefit if I told you all 50 today – it’s just too many to implement.
So instead…
I’d like to tell you about the one single-most important thing you can do if you want more leads, more customers, more sales, and more profits.
And that’s event marketing.
Another story. Last year I introduced a client of mine to event marketing. They were plenty successful on their own. They’d basically grown an eight-figure business from scratch over the last few years, using traditional online direct marketing methods.
That is, they built a prospect list by offering something compelling for free to website visitors. In this case, a free email newsletter. They continued to deliver valuable content to their list, to keep them interested in their messages. Then on a regular basis, they also delivered a marketing message by email. Usually it was a small note, linking to a long sales letter. As readers became customers, they received offers for higher-priced “back end” products.
They enjoyed steady growth following this proven model.
But as their market grew and matured (meaning, was exposed to more and more marketing and advertising messages), they found it harder and harder to get response to their traditional sales messages.
They wanted something more. So I recommended they do an event.
Not an in-person seminar – which they’d been doing on a regular basis. No, my recommendation was to do an online event specifically for marketing purposes.
I should note, I’m not bound to strict confidentiality with this client. Although out of respect for them – because I’d like to share some information that’s relevant to you as a marketer – I’m going to keep details about the client and the specifics of the event confidential.
Here’s what happened.
We found a topic for the event that we thought would be of extreme interest to their readers. And specifically, the topic was related to a problem – and my client had a compelling solution.
I showed them the complete blueprint for running this event beginning-to-end. I presented it to their marketing department. We decided to move forward.
Here’s how the campaign started. And this is important. When we advertised the event, we advertised the event. The valuable content that attendees would receive. There was no talk of my client’s solution – or products that might be offered on (or after) the event. It was simply, “Come attend this event, get this valuable information.”
My client has a good reputation among peers in their industry, so we were able to get them to advertise the event, too. We offered tracking links, so if these peers referred someone who later became a customer, they would be compensated. Though in their case we insisted they not promote the client or their products – rather, the promotion should be around the event and the valuable content it would contain.
My client and everyone else promoting the event sent folks to a website that explained the event and asked for basic information – name and email address. Again, the only mention of my client was that they were hosting the event. Not that they were offering products or services.
This page converted over 45% of pre-event visitors into registrants.
Here’s what this meant for the business. By the time the event started, over 10% of my clients large list of clients and prospects was re-engaged with them around this online event. Also, because of the promotion of the event done by industry peers, they grew their list by a bit over 10% with NEW names that registered specifically to attend the event.
This equated to tens of thousands of prospects newly-engaged or re-engaged with my client and the content they would be delivering.
We followed up with all these prospects multiple times leading up to the event to reaffirm their decision to attend the online event, and to give them information on how to attend.
Then we broke my client’s website.
You see this sometimes as a marketing gimmick. But I assure you there was no gimmick to this.
We had literally tens of thousands of people trying to log on to view the event at the exact same time. We were using a webinar service that could handle the load – though we’d missed that the simple web page on my client’s site where folks went to watch the event could be a strain on the server if loaded at the same time by thousands upon thousands of folks.
Plenty of viewers got on relatively easily before the server started to struggle under the load. Many others had trouble. I guess you could say it was “social proof” of the value of the event.
Though despite the tech hiccup, the event went on as planned. The content was delivered, and the prospects and clients who attended shared afterwards that they got incredible value from it.
At the end of the value-packed event, my client made an offer for their product, related to the problem and solution they covered on the event.
Even with tech problems preventing a large number of registrants to get on during the event, the value of each registrant for the event was more than 2.5X expectations for a new lead. The 12-month revenue generated from the event was roughly 5X their base expectations from the initial planning of the event. It was well into the six-figures, for a one-hour online webcast.
And going back to the initial point I was making, it cut through the noise, clutter, and hype of a very saturated market to connect with what was a record number of prospects for my client. Once connected with these prospects – some new, some re-engaged – we were able to deliver the marketing message in a way that was not ignored, but rather actively paid attention to.
The good news?
This is actually a rather formulaic process. It’s cut-and-paste simple to apply in just about any industry. It’s an easy way to create a big revenue bump if you already have a big list. If you don’t have a list but you have (or can create) relationships with industry peers, it can also be a very fast way to grow a list and even launch a product. It can even be used offline, although that’s a whole other topic of conversation!
In short, once you have this blueprint, you have a secret weapon to cut through the clutter of today’s over-saturated marketplace, connect with prospects in a way that most other marketers simply aren’t, and get more leads, more customers, more sales, and more profits.
If you’re a copywriter or marketing consultant, this can be a high-value service you provide your clients. If you’re a business owner or marketing decision maker, this is something you can implement in your own business.
Though it’s certainly not something to ignore.
And you don’t even have to make it as big and fancy as the event I did for my client. There are bootstrapper ways to do this, and there are ways to do it that would appeal to even the most hype-averse Fortune 500 CEOs. It’s not about the content of the messages. It’s about the system. And it’s a proven system that works.
In a few weeks I’m going to be holding a free, limited-attendance teleseminar covering my blueprint to event marketing in more detail.
Before this, I’ve only shared these event marketing strategies in five- and six-figure consulting arrangements. Though you won’t have to pay me six-figures – I’m going to reveal my strategies to you, free.
I’m not ready to “officially” announce my event marketing teleseminar yet – though if you want to make sure you’re notified as soon as this is public, please visit http://www.LIVEwithRoy.com and fill out the “Join Us” box on the right.
You’ll get notification on how to join me on the teleseminar where I share what you need to know to start running marketing events that get more leads, more customers, more sales, and more profits…
You’ll also get to listen in, absolutely free, as I interview the world’s leading experts on information marketing and publishing, internet marketing, copywriting, selling, business success, and a whole lot more.
And there’s one more free bonus that could completely change the way you look at building your business, forever.
So do this now: Go to http://www.LIVEwithRoy.com and give your name and email address in the “Join Us” box. I’ll see you on the other side.
