Yesterday I told you how Full Calendar can make it easy to alert the online and traditional media about your upcoming events. Today, I am going to share some other tried-and-true ways to promote your events while using your time wisely and spending very little money.
What I know for sure is that once you create the first event notice for Full Calendar, it’s just a matter of leveraging that same information against the other media that make sense for your message. You are not re-creating the wheel. You are just making the same wheel spin faster so the right people sign up to benefit from what you have to offer.
Since I sell out my Publici-Tea™ Workshops consistently and have for the last 18 months, here are the best ways I’ve found to get the mission accomplished:
- Share the relevant details with the benefits clearly and compellingly stated via your ezine, your website, and your blog.
- Write and share a press release with the relevant media in your own backyard. The best way to find the right contacts at the local newspapers is to visit the “contact us” section of their websites. Don’t just “spray and pray” your press release and hope for the best. Target it to the person at the newspaper who is responsible for covering similar events.
- Twitter about your upcoming event, offering a convenient online link to learn more and register.
- If you have an online shopping cart, deploy the “broadcast email” function to alert your customers that something special is coming up. Share the relevant details, and invite them to participate and spread the good news to people they know who can benefit.
- If you offer an affiliate program and have active, enthusiastic affiliates, let them know about your upcoming event and invite them to spread the word to the people they know who can benefit.
- Create an event at the social networking sites to which you belong, and invite your friends to help you spread the word so others can benefit.
- Create a new signature file to accompany every email you send that makes it easy for people to learn more about your upcoming event and register.
- Take promotional flyers to events where you speak or to events at which you display your marketing materials, and share them generously with others.
- Extend a special offer to registered guests to bring a colleague or friend with them at a preferred rate.
- Invite VIPs and other people who can influence large communities of potential guests to attend your future events as your special invited guest as a means of evaluating your offering for their extended networks.
These suggestions to promote your events assume that the marketplace is hungry for the information you have to share and you have compelling solutions to offer for very real problems that potential event guests are eager to solve. Before you walk down the seminar/workshop path, make sure what you are offering is a hot topic for which your ideal customers are willing to invest time and money to learn more.
For example, if you are offering still another retirement seminar that sounds boring and “blah, blah, blah” as you write about it, chances are the message will fall flat as you share your news with others. Take care to share your information in a manner that clearly articulates how event guests will benefit and what you bring to the party to make the session particularly worthwhile. Set your offering apart from others that you’ve read or heard about. Give your event a memorable, appealing name that will raise eyebrows, bring grins, invite curiosity, and inspire registration action.
Once you have a winning seminar idea, go forth and promote it systematically by using these tried-and-true methods. You will invite more of the right people to sit at the table to benefit from how you serve and welcome more opportunities to do exactly that.
When people sign up for your event, be sure to find out how they learned about it. You’ll learn which of the methods are producing the most powerfully for you so you can be encouraged to keep working the system to your advantage for future events.
Remember, this is a system that must be worked consistently and tenaciously over time to enjoy ongoing rewards. As with most marketing and publicity efforts, anything you do only one time is not likely to deliver the bounty you crave. You must make an ongoing, consistent, and tenacious commitment to enjoy ongoing, consistent, and rewarding results.
As you re-read the list of tried-and-true methods to inviting more of the right people to participate in your events, take note that most take a little bit of your time and hardly any money. In these demanding times, that is welcome news for all.
