Live Event Marketing

Vanessa Shaw (http://vanessashaw.com/) is our special guest on today's episode of Traffic and Leads Podcast (http://trafficandleadspodcast.com/best-offline-marketing-strategies/). She is a business coach and creator of the Boutique Business Model (http://vanessashaw.com/the-boutique-business-model/). She gives people a foundation to build on when it comes to working business models, and she helps and encourages all business owners to achieve their ideal goals by working through what it takes to get them in charge.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

* All about who Vanessa Shaw is, and what she does when she works out of Phoenix, AZ. Her focus is primarily on business owners who are typical experts in what they do, but who aren’t experts at growing a profitable and scalable business. Through there, she helps them focus on honing in on what they do best, instead of handling a jack of all trades mentality.

* Vanessa shares with us her number one strategy to get more clients—live events! With her company, Vanessa hosts multiple events throughout the year and has discovered that after the initial engagement, there’s nothing that can take the place of being in a room with someone, and teach them about the expertise. Because of it, she’s been using live events for the past 5 years, mixing it up with bigger events (an annual live event for 200 business owners), and a smaller, more “intimate” style (events with 12 - 30 attendees).

* Vanessa shares with us the ways she uses marketing to get the word out about her events, using her recent “Bold Women In Business” event as an example. Though they do run Facebook ads, use local media print, and use an e-mail list, for certain things Vanessa finds that word of mouth and letting people talk to each other to spread the information is a wildly successful tactic in getting people to sign up for her events.

* With one big three day event a year, Vanessa divulges the multiple strategies she uses in order to get the word out about the event, and how to build the client list to what the goal needs to be. She also warns people to be patient! Big events take longer to sell out than smaller ones, and marketing through the day before the event is the best thing to do in order to achieve success.

* When starting off in the event building world, Vanessa advises us to start small! Anyone that wants to do workshops/events should first attend some and see what people are doing. From there, you can iron out what you need in terms of content, offers, moving people into programs, managing crowds, technology, etc. There’s a lot of moving parts in the marketing, so work out the basic model first, and you’ll find that it’s easier to scale up from there with lessons learned.

* Vanessa walks us through the three main components that go into planning and launching a successful event and tells us the steps and processes necessary to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch. In her own words, Vanessa refers to planning an event as a “game of nerves”, but with practice, she believes anyone can nail it!

* In the end, Vanessa wants people to walk away from her events feeling something positive. In her words, “if you don’t come to work with us, you’ve still got the tremendous value that you can apply to your business”, meaning that people can still learn and take away so much from these events, even if they don’t become clients. Education based marketing is the key, and it’s what Vanessa strives for.