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6/28/09 8:13 AM
Seminar Planning and Marketing: Seven Tips to Increase Attendance By Mike Schultz and John Doerr "I just delivered one of the best seminar presentations of my life," said the professional. "Too bad only 6 people showed up." All too often we hear this very avoidable lament. Firms decide to build and market seminars. That's good. The people who must deliver the seminar in those firms spend days making sure they do a great job. That's good, too. Unfortunately, in too many organizations the efforts for planning and building seminar attendance often miss the mark. Too many dollars and too many hours are wasted on attendance building tactics that just do not work. So what happens? You give up on seminars. Please, don't. One of the most effective ways to build a professional service practice is to produce and deliver short (one-half day or less) seminars, speeches and events. Indeed, you will not find too many people disagreeing that speaking is a great marketing technique. The right reaction to our poor professional, who had only 6 at his seminar, is not to give up the seminar, but give up the marketing tactics she used. If you do plan on taking the time and spending the money to produce, prepare, and deliver a presentation or mini-seminar, here are seven seminar marketing and planning tips that will help you fill your room: 1. Marketing Timing: Usually, professionals market their seminars much too early. A CPA firm we know recently had high business development hopes from a series of six short seminars. They sent very well-written letters to inform clients and prospects of the series. The 'invitations' reached the client base about 12 weeks before the first miniseminar, 14 weeks before the second mini-seminar, 16 before the third, etc. Attendance was decidedly underwhelming. Their mistake was in planning the mail lead time. They were surprised when we told them that announcements for generating attendance for 2 hour seminars is best done about three or four weeks in advance, not 12 or 16 or 20. Rule of thumb: the shorter the seminar the shorter the event announcement lead time. 2. List Targeting: In direct mail the three greatest indicators of success are lists, lists, and lists. Before you send out one piece of mail, make sure you have a reasonable expectation that the people on the list will be interested in your topic. A great seminar title, mailing package, and value proposition will generate zero attendance if you mail it to a list that is not interested in your topic. 3. Seminar Marketing Response Expectations: Easy math: number of names times response rate equals attendance. 2,000 names times 2% response equals 40 attendees. "And why shouldn't we get a 2% response," inexperienced seminar marketers often say to themselves in the planning process. "I've seen the research on direct marketing: 2% response is average for direct mail." Indeed, according to the Direct Marketing Association 2003 response rate study, direct marketing responses are somewhere in the 2% range on average. Consider, however, that most professional seminar marketers don't measure response in percents; they measure it in response per thousand because, by and large, they only get fractions of a percent to attend. So if you're in seminar marketing, forget about wondering, "What percent of our mailing will come to our event," and start thinking about how many per thousand might attend. Some highly successful events marketed by professionals don't even get a 1 per thousand response. Mailings for miniseminars tend to do better than this, but not always by much. What's the point of the story? If you have your direct marketing response expectations set too high, you are in for both disappointment and low attendance. So make sure you have enough good names to mail to, and mail enough pieces to actually fill your room. 4. Marketing Piece: Suffice it to say that sometimes a postcard is perfectly fine for generating attendance for your seminars. Other times email is all you need. It might be that invitations will work better for your event. Sometimes you need an invitation, a letter, a business return envelope, a white paper, and convenient registration on your website.
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