Breaking the Sales Stereotype: Confidently Promoting Your Conference and Engaging Your Audience
In this episode, we tackle the common question: "How do I sell conference tickets without being annoying?" As we dig deeper into this issue, we realize that underlying concerns include fears of being salesy, resistance to putting oneself in front of the event, and a lack of confidence in the value being offered.
We discuss how understanding your audience's needs, communicating effectively, and developing a consistent marketing strategy can help you create impactful conferences and events with unforgettable attendee experiences.
Join us as we break down traditional stereotypes around marketing and sales to help you feel more confident promoting your event and engaging with your audience. Plus, learn about a valuable tool that can make the process even easier by visiting our website at geteventlab.com.
Timestamps and key takeaways
0:02:39 - Exploring Questions Around Marketing
0:07:27 - Event Marketing Offering
Exploring Questions Around Marketing
Absolutely. And you kind of already alluded to it.But number one is, do I have to do marketing? I'm marketing with a capital m and big quotes around it because when they say marketing, they're talking about that stereotypical marketing definition in everybody's mind. They also tend to be asking what I do or what if some people don't like me marketing this event? What if people get mad at me? What if people start unsubscribing from my lists? What do I do if they start unfollowing me? And finally, Is there a way that I can host and market this event without actually being in front of it? And I'll say that one.
Specifically in our case because we work with so many leaders of communities and they are not used to being the face because that's not really what they want to do. Their whole thing is about working for and with communities. So this idea of them now needing to lead the charge and being in front of the pack and getting out there and putting their face out there is pretty scary.
And these are all valid questions. I think that it's like I said, it's worth exploring these. It's not bad to ask these kinds of questions. The same is true of any of the other questions we've covered in our episodes so far. But it's important to dig into why we're asking them in the first place and what's the real cause behind all of this?
So I think that one of the reasons that these questions come up is that maybe an organizer isn't actually confident or feeling like they've created an offer through their conference or event that actually fulfills their audience needs.
Event Marketing Offering
And that leads us to our third of the core problems when people are asking this question, is they think that event marketing is somehow this completely different beast from the marketing that they're already doing in their businesses and for their communities. And so they get in this mindset that, oh, now I have to do this whole other thing, this whole other cyber marketing. It's completely different from everything else that I'm doing, and that can cause stress. And that's the truth, event marketing is not that different.
A lot of people get confused thinking that hosting or organizing events is just part of an existing product or service offering or community offering. And that's one of the key kinds of mindset shifts is thinking about it as a separate entity is a separate product in some respects, but the marketing principles behind it are not that different from what you would typically be doing to grow your community and communicate with them and develop that relationship.
Yeah. I mean, if you already have an audience, you probably have already figured out that stuff, right? Like, how to speak to them, How to communicate with them, whether it's email or social media or whatever you're doing. So if you already have an audience, we're not asking you to have to reinvent the wheel and start all over again. It really is just presenting a new product to the same audience and just doing it natively. When doing everything else, you know, up until now. Don't burn everything down and try to do a whole different thing. that's not necessary.
Transcript
0:00:14
How do you as a leader of a growing community, Truly make a conference or event that has impact, a gathering with purpose and an attendee experience that knocks their socks off. An event that leaves your audience in awe and wondering where you've been their whole life, Make It Kickass is the podcast that explores these questions by uncovering the strategies. Tactics and tools that we use every day to bring our clients' conferences to life. I'm Isaac Watson, executive producer of Kickass Conferences, and we are here to help you make it kickass.
0:00:52
We are back with another episode of Make It Kickass. I am your co host, Isaac Watson, executive producer of Kickass Conferences, and joining me from the faraway location in which she is is the illustrious, iridescent, Nessa Jimenez as our operations manager. Hello, Nessa.
Hi, Isaac.
I can't help myself. It's just it's how it goes.
This is what we're doing live.
That's right. That's how we roll here.
0:01:25
So we've been spending this season of our podcast focusing on those questions that people ask us all the time. And honestly, we love answering them, which is why we're answering them here. Because they are good questions to ask, but usually what happens is that as you start to dig around the question and you go a little deeper, you can identify kind of some underlying, what are they really asking kind of thing, and then we can get into the actual problem that's causing this question to come up.
And from there, we can start to uncover some solutions that can help people who want to organize conferences and host events for their communities more effectively, more intentionally, and with more impact. So without further ado, today's episode is focused on the question that we get asked quite often.
0:02:20
How do I sell conference tickets without being annoying? And I get it as a person who doesn't like selling things generally I also don't wanna be annoying. I don't think anybody wants to be annoying when they're selling. So let's dig into this a little bit more. So first, let's talk a little bit about what they are really asking when they ask us this question, Nessa?
Absolutely. And you kind of already alluded to it.
0:02:48
But number one is, do I have to do marketing? I'm marketing with a capital m and big quotes around it because when they say marketing, they're talking about that stereotypical marketing definition in everybody's mind. They also tend to be asking what I do or what if some people don't like me marketing this event? What if people get mad at me? What if people start unsubscribing from my lists? What do I do if they start unfollowing me? And finally, Is there a way that I can host and market this event without actually being in front of it? And I'll say that one.
0:03:34
Specifically in our case because we work with so many leaders of communities and they are not used to being the face because that's not really what they want to do. Their whole thing is about working for and with communities. So this idea of them now needing to lead the charge and being in front of the pack and getting out there and putting their face out there is pretty scary.
And these are all valid questions. I think that it's like I said, it's worth exploring these. It's not bad to ask these kinds of questions. The same is true of any of the other questions we've covered in our episodes so far. But it's important to dig into why we're asking them in the first place and what's the real cause behind all of this?
So I think that one of the reasons that these questions come up is that maybe an organizer isn't actually confident or feeling like they've created an offer through their conference or event that actually fulfills their audience needs.
0:04:40
We've talked about confidence a bit already this season. And I think that as a community leader, that's something that comes up a lot for you. There's impostor syndrome. There's making sure that you're fulfilling goals, that you are serving your audience, that you are leading them in an effective manner. And it's really easy to get bogged down in this kind of confidence issue where you're just not quite sure that you have something that they want or that would be helpful for them. So that's I think that's probably the first thing that comes to mind is just not feeling confident that you've created something that will actually suit your audience's needs. And related to that, because I have a comment that kind of ties in the first and the second.
0:05:31
So the second one is people's definition of marketing is like, this is what marketing should look like. And ninety nine point nine percent of the time, it's nasty annoying marketing that nobody likes. But that kind of nasty marketing happens when people are trying to sell something that nobody asks for, nobody needs, nobody wants. Right? This kind of infomercial type of marketing where you're trying to convince people that they need this thing and nobody actually needs it. Right?
And that becomes a problem because if that is what your idea of marketing is, of course, you're gonna struggle to market this event. Right. And let's be honest, marketing's gotten a bad rap. Over the years. Between Glen Gary, Glen Ross and Gary V and well, there's two Gary's in the bad marketing examples. That's weird. Don't learn marketing from people named Gary. Right?
0:06:29
Just like all of these typical sales tactics, I mean, we think of sales, we think of door to door. We think of the, you know, used car salesman. Of course, we don't wanna do that. But the thing is marketing and sales, especially within a community, like what most of our clients are leading and within the context of event marketing looks very different than this perception that it's always go buy tickets, go buy tickets, go buy tickets. Because, yes, that's annoying.
If that's all you have to say about your event, please go buy tickets. You're not gonna sell any tickets. I'm sorry. Right. But that's not what marketing is. And if and especially if you're selling the tickets based on, again, what you wanna shove people down people's throats instead of what they actually need. Right? Then yeah, you're gonna have a bad time.
0:07:27
And that leads us to our third of the core problems when people are asking this question, is they think that event marketing is somehow this completely different beast from the marketing that they're already doing in their businesses and for their communities. And so they get in this mindset that, oh, now I have to do this whole other thing, this whole other cyber marketing. It's completely different from everything else that I'm doing, and that can cause stress. And that's the truth, event marketing is not that different.
0:08:03
A lot of people get confused thinking that hosting or organizing events is just part of an existing product or service offering or community offering. And that's one of the key kinds of mindset shifts is thinking about it as a separate entity is a separate product in some respects, but the marketing principles behind it are not that different from what you would typically be doing to grow your community and communicate with them and develop that relationship.
Yeah. I mean, if you already have an audience, you probably have already figured out that stuff, right? Like, how to speak to them, How to communicate with them, whether it's email or social media or whatever you're doing. So if you already have an audience, we're not asking you to have to reinvent the wheel and start all over again. It really is just presenting a new product to the same audience and just doing it natively. When doing everything else, you know, up until now. Don't burn everything down and try to do a whole different thing. that's not necessary.
0:09:15
So let's talk about some of the solutions that we can offer, some of the ways that we work with our clients to work through these problems and answer these questions. If you've been listening for a while, you've probably heard some of these things before because you know, we'll be honest, a lot of this comes down to the same principles.
So first and foremost, you need to understand what you are offering your audience by hosting this event. What value, what worth do you have to offer by doing this? If you don't understand what that is, if you don't have a good concept of how you are delivering value either throughout the experience or education to your audience, then you're not gonna know how to adequately communicate that to them and that will hurt your marketing. And what you're offering should be as a response to what you already know about them. Right? Yes. That relationship that you already have.
0:10:15
The second thing that I think about is really this communication process, knowing where your audience spends their time, knowing what channels they wanna receive communications from you through and how they want to do that. Is it a one-sided kind of announcement based stuff? Is it conversational? Is it content oriented? There are many different ways that you can communicate with an audience. So if you understand how best you can communicate with them and how they want to be communicated with, then you can leverage that to your event marketing success.
0:10:52
And marketing strategy, the big word strategy, we always come back to it. Marketing strategy is the key. Understanding who that audience is, understanding where they're most communicating with you, where they're connecting with you. And getting into consistency, like they've come to expect a certain amount of content from you each week, right, and keeping that consistency in that relationship. And I mean, if you don't, if you really just hate doing the marketing, then you gotta find a marketing expert. Like, that's just how it is. You can't just not market it, but that's why we can't do that. Yeah.
0:11:32
I think that, you know, one of the things that comes up a lot as we work on EventLabs with our clients is understanding the kind of capacity for marketing that an organization has at their disposal. And I say that not just in a staff and bandwidth capacity, but also in a when you're talking about consistency and frequency. Right? How are you currently marketing business, your community, your product, your service. How frequent is that? How much space is there to be filled up.
0:12:08
And we also have to think about if I'm going to be marketing an event in particular how can that complement or how might that hinder or get in the way of standard marketing for the other parts of your business that needs support. And so we think about, you know, we wanna make sure we're not conflicting too many things. One example I can give you is that we were just working with a client a couple weeks ago, they're working on putting on a book.
They've got a book launch that's going to, I wouldn't say, fully overlap with the event that they wanna do, but the timeline around bandwidth around finishing the book and then timeline around promoting and launching that book does have some overlap with their event marketing. And so that marketing strategy that we work with them to develop is going to keep all of that in mind so that we're not hitting too many different things all at once.
0:13:13
Let's do a recap, the question that we've been addressing today is how do I sell conference tickets without being annoying?
0:13:21
And we think that when we get asked that question, what people are really asking is, do I really have to market? What if people get mad at me? I don't wanna be annoying. I don't wanna just keep asking people to buy tickets or even, do I really need to be out here in front trying to sell this all the time. Can this just happen on the back burner? And the answer is no. It can't. It needs to be active.
0:13:53
And so we can help our clients work through that by really diving into that marketing strategy, figuring out what what we have to offer for this event, how we can best communicate with the audience, understanding what their audience's needs are from a communication standpoint and how we can communicate that value to them so that they can make a really easy decision on whether or not they want to attend the event or buy a ticket or whatever the case may be.
0:14:23
So all of that comes down to intelligent marketing, breaking down some of the traditional stereotypes around what marketing and sales are and then going from there.
Thanks for listening to today's episode of Make It Kickass, I hope that after today's discussion, you feel more confident about talking to your audience and marketing your event. So instead of stressing out over social media content, event paid ads and all all of that, like, drama of marketing life. Why don't you build the event so that your audience will happily find tickets for using a tool that we use with our clients all the time. And you can get a free copy of this tool at our website, geteventlab.com, and I hope you check it out. So we'll see you next episode.