Growing Your Audience by using Summits
Note: Our show name has changed to the Market Your Message Podcast. Please excuse us as we transition.
When it comes to growing an audience, this is where a lot of coaches and entrepreneurs fall short. It is time to implement strategies that will help grow your audience. So,
– if you feel your audience is drying up
– if your audience isn’t growing fast enough
– if you feel like you’re attracting people who are not your ideal clients
Then you might want to start doing summits. Summits will grow your audience quickly, and most importantly your audience will be filled with people who want what you provide. What are summits? The Google definition says,
It’s a collaborative online event in which speakers are interviewed by a host. It’s like an online conference with the collection of online interviews from six to 30 experts on a particular topic.
For those of you who might not understand, a virtual summit It is pretty much an online conference. A conference is a room full of speakers gathered to discuss their particular subject matter.
The goal is for those viewing and listening to walk away feel refreshed, and as if they received a good amount of information. That’s the idea of a virtual summit too. So now you may be wondering how this helps you grow your audience.
There are two ways that your audience can grow from summits
- Being Interviewed for a Summit
- Hosting a Summit
You might think being interviewed for a summit wont help you, but being interviewed in a summit helps you grow your audience just as much as hosting a summit does. With summits comes marketing, ads being run by the host and other speakers advertising the summit. That means EXPOSURE!
Lets say there’s about 20 speakers advertising the summit.
That means your face is being shown on 20 different platforms.
So again it is very beneficial for you, and might I add, with less work being interviewed in summits.
You might think being interviewed for a summit wont help you, but being interviewed in a summit helps you grow your audience just as much as hosting a summit does. With summits comes marketing, ads being run by the host and other speakers advertising the summit. That means EXPOSURE!
So usually when you’re being interviewed for a summit you give your 30 minute interview and you’re done. And though it’s beneficial, you pretty much walk away with the exposure.
Either way you look at it, summits are going to be beneficial, but hosting a summit is even more beneficial for a coach.
Hosting summits is even more beneficial because now you’re also able to generate funds and leads.
That’s another reason why summits are important. You can get 500+ leads in 30 days. If you are not getting that many leads and you’re running summits, I can almost bet it’s because of the marketing plan. You’re not marketing enough to get more people, or you might not be choosing the right speakers. Your speakers might not be holding up their end of the bargain when it comes to marketing your summit. And because of that you aren’t getting any more registrants.
For the most part, if things are flowing correctly, you should be getting a minimum of 500 leads in 30 days.
With a Summit comes exposure and positioning.
You being able to bring all these speakers together, positions you as an authority.
Let’s say you are now growing your business. You really don’t know a lot of people in the industry yet, but one day someone says, “Hey, I want you to come and be a speaker on my summit, and I want you to talk about networking”.
Now what happens? All of the other speakers on the summit are going to look at you because you are on a summit with them. Do you see how quickly you start to position yourself? And then if you take the opportunity network and get to know your fellow speakers, you can take this leverage further and possibly create opportunities and collaborations with these speakers.
So as you can see, being in a summit and hosting a summit is going to position you in so many ways.
Things to focus on when planning your summit
- When it comes to planning a summit, it can take anywhere from three to six months. So if you have not taken three months to plan out your summit, that’s probably why you didn’t get a lot of people registering, or why your conversion rate wasn’t as high as it could’ve been.
Now, during those three to six months you get to outsource. When you do your summits the only thing you should be responsible for is showing up on the interview to interview your speaker. Now during these couple of months you need to make sure that you have a good marketing plan for your summit.
You need to understand the importance of building the buzz for your summit, because if you do not market your summit then your speakers are not going to want to come back. When people become a part of your summit, they want to know that they are not wasting their time. They want to know that it’s not only about coming and giving value, but that they’re going to benefit from it too.
The point of joining a collaborative event like this is making sure that it’s a win-win on both sides, so your marketing has to be on point.
- The next thing to focus on is your topic. Your topic is very important because it is your message.
This is specifically what attracts people to you. If your topic is not on point, then you’re not going to attract the right people to your summit. And ultimately, if you are not attracting the right people to your summit, then you’re not attracting the people that will buy your offer at the end of the summit.
You see where I’m going with this? The reason the topic is important.
Number one, your topic helps you target the right people. What I just shared with you is not only important for the summit, but also for brand messaging as well. If you feel like you’re attracting the wrong people, you’re going to have to go back and see what type of content you’re putting out. Content that you’re putting out and the topics that you speak about is why you’re attracting the wrong people.
Number two, your topic is going to help you get more conversions. - Now let’s talk about your speakers. You are preparing the summit in hopes to grow your business, grow your audience, so you need to make sure that your speakers are going to give you valuable content, and that your speakers are going to keep up their end of the bargain.
Now how do you choose the right speakers?
Let’s say you come up with the 20 speakers that you want to interview for your summit. One of the things you can do is research those speakers and see if they’ve been in other summits, offline events, speaking events, and see if they promoted the event. See how many times they posted that flyer, and if they were really genuine.
The next thing you want to do is make sure that whatever the speaker is going to talk about in their interview, is aligned with your topic for your summit, as well as the offer that you’re going to sell. If not, you will not get high conversions at the end of your summit. - Now as stated the way you market your summit is important. There’s two things that you should think about when it comes to your marketing.
Seeding your summit. Again, it takes about three months to plan out your summit. During those three months, you want to be doing a lot of seeding and letting people know that something is coming.
The structure of your summit. Structuring your marketing plans to be able to fit each person. So what do I mean by each person?
There are three types of people that are always buying from you.
The person who’s oblivious. They do not understand that they even need this yet. That’s where your educational content, your marketing plan is going to come in.
The person who knows what their problem is, but they’re not sure if you’re the solution for them. They are trying to weigh out their options, so you need to have content that also speaks to them.
The person who knows they have a problem and they know that they want you to be the person to help them, but they have objections. Now you need to have content that answers their objections.
When you structure out your marketing plan be sure it fits these three types of people. - Lastly, let’s get into the importance of leveraging. A lot of people do summits and then you never hear or see those interviews again. That’s because they’re not leveraging all of that time that they put into the summit.
If you’re going to put in the time to host the summit, be sure to leverage off of this opportunity. Be sure to leverage off of the exposure and any connections you make with your speakers. Stop putting in so much work and not leveraging these opportunities to grow, because there are so many ways that you could grow and help your business.
Ways You can use Your Summit
- Your summit can be used as a standalone product. Let’s say you just left black Friday and created new products, but you had summits that you’ve done in the past. You could package up and use it as a standalone product.
- It could be used as a bonus to other offers.
- It could be used as social proof, which is the most important.
Do you want to grow or not? There’s no business out here that gets where they’re going alone. You have to tap into your network and build relationships. Get out there, build relationships, use this summit strategy to grow your audience and position yourself.
You want to host your summit, but the number of tasks seems never-ending and you just don’t know where to begin. Not anymore! Use this plug-n-play pack and cut your to-do list in half!
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