Marketing | Everybody Needs Seminars

Jan

Seminar Marketing Response Rates

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Jenny Hamby asked:
An examplebrbrfor an interest in the previous seminarsbrbrthe response rate of less than percentbrbrwell guess what its not uncommon to people who had requested information about the clients.
The knowledge of the most economical way to boost your response rate of all the higher your conversion rate of the seminar the longer your [...]

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Jan

Offering your seminars through a local community

college can be a great way to generate income and

clients … without the hassles of renting a meeting

room, handling logistics or doing the marketing.

You turn in your course description … then show

up to teach.

Unfortunately, the reality is not so pretty. The

primary tool used to promote events is a course

catalog, which means your seminar will be listed

alongside hundreds of other courses … and your

course description will only be a few lines long.

(If you’re lucky, you might get a longer slightly

longer description online … or maybe even be listed

in a brochure that promotes 6 to 12 related courses,

such as business management courses.)

For the most part, however, people who want more

information will call the college for details,

yet the person who answers could easily not be

too interested in selling.

It’s not that they don’t care about making the sale –

non-profit organizations definitely should be making

a profit. (The difference is that profits are

reinvested in the organization vs. distributed to

shareholders or owners, as with for-profit organizations.)

The problem is that (1) they typically aren’t salespeople,

(2) they have way too much to do in a day, (3) they

don’t know anything about your seminar or they don’t

understand the true benefits of what you’re offering,

and (4) the person answering the phone may be a

registration assistant who’s trained only to register

students — not sell them on attending your event.

To help fill the seats you secure at local venues,

consider the following:

1. Ask if you can write your own course description.

You know your material — and prospective attendees –

better than anyone. Write something that hammers home

the benefits of choosing YOUR program.

2. Find out in advance what, if anything, your program

coordinator will be doing to market your seminar. Ask

how you can supplement their efforts. If you write a

salesletter, will they send it out? If you split the

cost of a separate mailing promoting your course only,

will they do it? If you offer a free preview seminar,

will they promote it? Asking these questions also lets

the program coordinator know how to satisfy the different

needs of those marketing seminars which, in turn, will

benefit them as well with a higher number of

student registrations.

3. Provide your seminar coordinator with a “cheat sheet”

that lists key details that can be used to sell your

seminar, such as who should attend, the top benefits,

answers to common questions, and questions the registrar

can ask to help callers decide if your course is right for

them.

4. Do your own promotions. There’s nothing stopping

you from sending out your own press release, postcards,

newsletters, etc. Yes, you will then be investing your

own money into promoting the “college’s” course, but

if your students turn into clients, the investment

may be worth it. You can also try negotiating a

bonus commission for any students you bring in.

Finding new and inventive ways to market your seminar to

a not-for-profit venue can only help your business in the

long run, by putting your event in front of prospective

customers in the form of students.

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Jenny Hamby asked:

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Jan

Pure Communications Acquires Andromeda’s Training Business

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Gregory Serandos asked:
PURE Communications, one of South Africa’s premier PR & Communications companies, has acquired the training business from Andromeda Call Centre Solutions for an undisclosed amount. Andromeda has developed a series of soft skills training courses for the call centre industry, such as telephone sales and customer service skills programmes. However, they also [...]

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Dec

The auction rooms for the goods owned by now bankrupt companies are filled with fancy posters of mission statements. Mission statements were a fad of the 90’s and have had their day.

Don’t know what I am talking about? Here’s the sort of thing that companies enjoyed to hang on their walls - “To deliver the best possible service, in the most efficient time to our customers in the best possible blah blah blah”.

The first problem with mission statements was that they were so filled with generic rhetoric that they could have been written about any company. They sat proudly on the wall as if someone knew what they meant and as if someone cared. They looked great and looked purposeful.

Management fell in love with mission statements. After they had been to a management seminar, managers became convinced that a mission statement was the key to success “Our employees need the statement. They give everyone a purpose. They make sure that we are all working for the same goals”. What a bunch of rubbish that all turned out to be.

I was in a medium sized corporation and I was horried to hear one day that the CEO had decided that not only was it important for us to have a mission statement, but it was important that the employees decide what it was going to say!! Umm, that to me said “Hey, I don’t know where this ocmpnay is headed so you tell me!!!”. So, at the annual conference we were all split into groups to decide that the mission statement for the company should be. Then, we were all going to get together at the end and combine the best ideas from each group.

You can guess what the mission statement became. Yep, a generic waste of time. It of course was full of “best service”, “customer focus”, “striving to achieve” etc. I think there was even a bit of environmental consciousness thrown in!

If you’re looking for direction, then the direction in a company comes from the top - from the CEO. Mission statements are no subsitute for strong leadership. What the company is about can usually be summed up in a few words. Where a company is going is best articulated from the General down through to the troops. Hanging a sign on the wall just aint going to cut it.

If the rank and file of the company doesn’t know why we’re here and where we’re going and what part an individual plays in the overall plan, then the captain isn’t doing his job. Mission statements are dead.

Fortunately now I work for a bus hire company and we’re small enough that the liklihood of someone deciding we need a mission statement is low. Bus hire companies aren’t immune though - I will always be on the lookout for the warning signs and tactfully defuse anyone who has been to a management seminar pushing mission statements!

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Dec

Tired of Seminar Breaks Running Longer than Scheduled? Use These 3 Powerful Tactics to Herd Seminar Attendees Back to Their Seminar Seats on Time

By Jenny Hamby, the Seminar Marketing Pro™

Certified Guerrilla Marketer and Direct-Response Copywriter

Effectively encouraging prospects to get their butts back into their seats is critical to your schedule. If every break runs over by ten minutes, you could be an hour or more behind schedule by the end of your day … or be forced to sacrifice valuable content just for the sake of ending your seminar on time.

Here are three tricks you can try to effectively encourage seminar attendees to scoot themselves back into their seats by the time you want to get restarted:

1. Before you start the break, have everyone synchronize their watches. It’s a natural tendency to tell seminar attendees the time you’d like them to be back in their seats. But “Please be back in your seminar seat by 10:30” will mean different things to different people, depending on what time their watches read. Some seminar attendees will think you’re giving them a 9-minute break; other might think they’re getting 17 minutes to chit chat outside the seminar meeting room. So start by telling everyone, “My watch reads 9:45 … so let’s be back in our seminar seats in 15 minutes, at 10 a.m.”

2. Herd seminar attendees back to their seats. When running his popular BigSeminar Internet marketing events, Armand Morin sends staff members out among the networking seminar attendees with cowbells, New Years noisemakers and other attention-grabbing devices.

Seminar attendees are quickly trained to start moving back to the seminar room when they hear the bells … and even when they don’t go back to their seats, they are very consciously choosing to stay out in the hallway for more networking; there are no claims of “Gosh, I didn’t know the seminar started again.”

3. This tip again comes from Armand, and it’s the most powerful tactic I’ve ever seen used for getting seminar attendees back to their seats on time: Bribe them. Give every attendee an individually numbered ticket, and at the start of each session of your seminar, draw a number for a giveaway. Armand gives away popular electronic doodads like headsets and voice recognition software. But you can also give away educational items from your bookshelves, such as your books, audio programs, and even other experts’ products that you are finished using.

Your own respect of the schedule will strongly influence your seminar attendees’ willingness to be back in their seats on time. If you announce and demonstrate throughout the event that you are committed to starting and ending on time, your seminar attendees will be more willing to show you the same respect. And they’ll do their part by being in their seminar seats by your deadline.