Profitable Virtual Events: Getting Consistent Traffic, Lead Flow & Sales
Note: This is the part of our “creating profitable virtual events” 7 part deep-dive series. If you missed the intro please click here to get started >>
In this final section of how to set up your profitable virtual event, I’ll take you through the methods we use for getting consistent traffic, lead flow & sales.
The only focus here is showing you how to keep steady traffic pressure on your registration page. From there, you can let the automations previously set up do all the rest.
Targeted traffic sent to a great virtual event offer translates into registrations (leads).
If you’re featuring a VIP upsell, the more eyes you get on that the more sales you will make. And if your offer is super targeted & solves a major problem for them, you’ll sell even more!
Targeted Traffic To A Well Crafted Offer & Upsell = $$$$
5 Steps To Maximizing Endorsed Partner Traffic:
What is it? Endorsed partner traffic is my clever way of saying “Getting your speakers to promote the event”. Of course it doesn’t need to stop with ONLY your speakers. There are often a lot of other potential partners out there who would love to promote even if they aren’t speaking.
And, of course, there’s paid traffic! We like to use both!
Maximizing Featured Influencer & Speaker Promotion:
In keeping with the “simple” theme of all of this, the two best ways to make sure the your lineup promotes is to do the following:
- Keep in regular communication with all of your featured speakers
- Provide them with everything they need to “hit send & make money”
- Follow up with them
- Bribe them with healthy affiliate commissions
- Whip them into a competitive frenzy with public shaming (sort of 😉
The trick with all of this is making sure everyone knows, up front, promotion is a requirement of participation.
I’m not kidding here. If you don’t lead with “YOU WILL PROMOTE” most of them won’t.
Will this lower the number of “yes, I’ll do it” that you get?
Yes.
However, it will also eliminate a metric butt-load of frustration later on.
With that said, you can be as clear as day and some will simply forget. My recommendation here is to not make a big stink about it. Focus on who is & how to make them do it even more.
However, if you set this up correctly from the start, you’ll give everyone every reason to want to push as hard as possible.
Keeping In Regular Communication With Your Speakers:
I’m not saying you need to message all of them every single day.
That would be annoying.
What you’ll want to do is create a communications calendar and frame it out something like this:
- From “YES” To 30 Days Before Prelaunch
- When they first join, send them a “WELCOME” email & provide a link so they can set up their interview time
- In that same email, give them a schedule of what they can expect from you (in terms of build & communication)
- Each week, as you get closer to the prelaunch, send them personalized updates
- The week before prelaunch, message them each personally & remind them it’s just about “GO” time
- 7 Days Before Prelaunch
- Message each speaker personally.
- Remind them the prelaunch is starting
- Remind them & send again, any links to their promotional materials
- During Prelaunch
- If your prelaunch is over 2 weeks, message 2x during the 1st half
- If your prelaunch is under 2 weeks, message 4x
- Push a “leader board” (see semi-public shaming below)
- Play games with them to see who can send the most traffic
- Day Before Live
- Message everyone personally
- Remind them the event will be live & open tomorrow
- Link them & remind them of their copy/paste live promo graphics & email copy
- Again push the leader board
- Day Before THEIR Interview Goes Live
- Message each speaker directly & personally the day before their individual interview is to go live
- Remind them to post to social & their email about it
- Day Before Final Day To Upgrade
- Remind all speakers the final day is tomorrow is the last day anyone can join the VIP before the price goes up (or the option goes away)
- Again show off the updated leader board
- Closing Down The Event
- Again, make sure to remind all speakers the event is ending & they should send out the “thank you” message to their lists & social followings.
To keep this as easy as possible on you, make sure you’ve prepared at least the basics of each of these messages BEFORE you start going live.
Provide Them With EVERYTHING They Need To “Hit Send & Make Money”:
It should come as no shock that the easier & more “done for you” you make this whole process for your speakers, the more likely it will be they promote hard & more often.
What you DO NOT want to do… ever… at all… is leave them to their own devices.
If you tell everyone to “just send an email about the event” or “hey, make sure you post something on social about the event” here are 2 high probability outcomes:
- Nothing. Nobody will email or post anything because if you didn’t make it a priority why should they?
- They’ll send pure garbage. As most of them won’t be familiar with your event beyond their own interview, they won’t know what to say to their platform. If anyone does send anything it’ll end up being pure crap & highly ineffective.
And keep in mind: this is NOT because anyone is stupid.
It’s because everyone is lazy. I mean that. EVERYONE. (Including me 😉
Everyone wants their money fast, easy and with as little effort as possible.
Your roll in life, as an entrepreneur is to NOT be lazy so everyone else can be. That’s where YOUR money lives.
For that reason what you’ll want to do is provide them with EVERYTHING they need to push your event super hard.
- Prewritten emails for each stage of the event (prelaunch, live, their interview, wrap up)
- Prewritten social posts for each stage of the event (prelaunch, live, their interview, wrap up)
- Preformatted & personalized social graphics for each stage of the event (prelaunch, live, their interview, wrap up)
- Their own, personalized tracking & affiliate link (1 per speaker)
- Instructions of how to customize any of the communications if they wish to do so
The difference between doing this and not doing this can be measured in “wheelbarrows of money”.
Bribing Them With Healthy Commissions:
This one should be pretty obvious. If you have a VIP upgrade you can run a basic “product launch” style sequence.
In many cases just seeing the “you’ve referred a sale” style emails will be motivation enough to keep up the traffic.
The custom link I mentioned above can be their ClickBank or ThriveCart affiliate link wrapped in a PrettyLink plugin (free WordPress plugin).
These links will allow you to see how many clicks each speaker has sent AND to track who sold what to whom & when.
This way you know who to pay when it comes time. (And if you use ClickBank, THEY will make the payments so you don’t have to)
Whipping Them Into A Frenzy With Public Shaming:
Okay, I’m honestly kidding about the shaming part.
Sort of.
You’ll see what I mean in a second.
What I’m talking about here is the HUGE motivator of using a leader board for activating their competitive nature & getting more of them to send more traffic.
The “shaming” part comes in if somebody isn’t doing their job. They end up seeing their name at the bottom of the list and it chaps a bit.
What you’ll often see is that the top 3-5 will fight like crazy for the top spot. It’s a bragging rights thing & hear me when I say it works!
With this method you’ll want to let everyone see where they are on the leaderboard during all of the prelaunch.
Then, when the event is live, you’ll want to maybe only feature the top 5-10.
HUGE MOTIVATION TIP: If you’re feeling adventurous, you can block your speakers into 3 groups & start messaging each group based on if they are in the top, middle or bottom 3rd of the leaderboard.
What this ends up doing is reducing the feeling of “well, I’ll never make it into the top 5 so I might as well not try”.
Video game makers figured how to solve this problem long ago, and that’s why, in huge games where there are thousands of players, they often will only show your ranking in relationship to the others who have scores/rankings closer to yours.
This technique lets your speakers all feel like they still have a shot. With they feel like that they are vastly more likely to promote.
And finally, you can always bribe the leaders with prizes based on leads sent and/or ticket sales generated.
While this will cut into your event sales profits, keep in mind you still plan on selling everyone something once the actual event is over.
Prize Tip: To make sure you limit your expenses, set each prize level in line with a certain level of sales. This way you aren’t giving someone a car if they only sent 200 sales! Have each prize category be attached to a certain level of sales. As they level up, the prizes get that much cooler. If you want to see this in the real world go to a Chuck E. Cheese
Do This Now! You are going to want to start making virtual events part of your business model. No matter what industry you are in or market you serve, VE’s can be a huge source of leads, authority building, engagement & revenue.
And if you would like help with your event, consider letting us do it all for you.
We have fully customizable and totally done for you packages for in every type of market. Click here to set up your free strategy session now >>