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Successes and Failures From Promoting Our Marketing Bootcamp
We’ve been holding events at The Newsletter Pro for a while now, and we’re starting to find our rhythm. But the marketing strategy for the first event didn’t go as planned. Even if you haven’t begun holding your own live events yet, there are a ton of good marketing nuggets in this article, including the almost unbelievable way four people registered for one of our events — but more on that in a minute. Hopefully, you’ve seen some of the marketing we’re putting out for our bootcamps. These bootcamps are small training sessions I hold at my office in Boise, where I spend two days teaching advanced sales, marketing, and operations tactics to help entrepreneurs grow smarter and faster than ever before. This is stuff I’ve learned over the last 20 years of buying, selling, and growing businesses. Our second bootcamp will be finished by the time you get this newsletter, and our third bootcamp, scheduled for May 13 and 14, is already half full.
This is good news, but let’s back up to the story of filling the first bootcamp. Let’s just say it didn’t go as expected. To be honest, since we only have 25 seats in my conference room, I thought filling the first bootcamp would be easy. It wasn’t. We tried to fill it by sending a few emails and dropping a couple of mentions in the newsletter. We did pretty well, but it didn’t look like we’d get the full 25 people, which was fine, but I was frustrated with myself for not creating a better marketing strategy. The only thing left to do was to sit down with my team and figure out how to fill those last few seats. The only things we felt we had time for were phone calls, emails, and inviting people who were at least semilocal via phone and direct mail, so we created a script and started calling. Lo and behold, we filled the event even though we never got to the direct-mail portion of the marketing plan. I was happy the event was full, but it took way longer and took way more work for my team to do than it should have.
For the second bootcamp, I was determined to focus on the marketing strategy more and make sure we reached our goal without having to do extra work. This time, we added multimedia marketing to the campaign.
We added inserts into the newsletters and mentioned the event several times throughout the content.
We looked at our contacts, created a targeted list of people to market to, and used Facebook ads to target as many of those people as possible. The goal was not so much conversion as it was awareness.
We also sent the same number of emails as last time.
Finally, we mailed a direct-mail letter and postcard. Shortly before we sent the sales letters out, we decided to make one change to the letter, and the results of that change surprised me. We decided to add a fax-back form to see if we’d get any response. We got four clients to register via fax-back! With this strategy, we filled the 25 seats we had for February as well as just under half the seats for the bootcamp on May 13 and 14. The campaign was a success, but there is a good lesson in here for everyone. It takes a full-on multimedia campaign these days to have a successful event turnout. You have to hit people up multiple times on multiple platforms. Had we just used emails again, we’d likely have struggled to fill the event, and I doubt we’d have anyone registered for the next event. Even a fax — a method that many would say is old and outdated — yielded four registrations, which tells you it doesn’t matter how you feel about a communication method or media platform. It only matters how your prospect feels and how they respond. –Shaun P.S. Make sure you grab a seat for our bootcamp on May 13 and 14 before they sell out. Go to NewsletterPro.com/scaleup to register today.
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